Love Will Tear Us Apart | Divorce Song

‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ and ‘Divorce Song’ both convey a sense of a dead end within a couple; they show how physical closeness combines with emotional isolation to make distance between the man and the woman painfully tangible.

‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ conjures impasse and isolation in a highly evocative image that any couple (except the one we imagined before we were in a couple) will recognize: ‘Why is the bedroom so cold, turned away on your side? Is my timing that flawed, our respect run so dry?’. It occurs against a background of ‘routine’ and ‘resentment’, a situation in which ‘ambitions are low’ and ‘emotions won’t grow’.

How did it come to that? The man avers: ‘We’re changing our ways, taking different roads’. It can’t be helped, he seems to be saying: to live is to change, that’s life. While divergence as an inevitability relieves one of responsibility and so is an attractive proposition to the leaver, the one being left will not be content to blame it all on the stars. And indeed, the woman here ‘cries out in [her] sleep’ as the man’s ‘failings [are] exposed’. Note that, implicitly, he acknowledges his ‘failings’.

But is it not a fact that no man can ever measure up to a woman’s ideal, and therefore ‘failings’ are inevitable? Indeed, if, as Freud argued, the couple is a ‘crowd of two’, then—to reformulate the problem in Lacanian terms—perfect complementarity between the partners’ respective needs, demands and desires is, by definition, impossible. That being the case, the couple, to stay together, need to periodically ‘re-attune’ themselves to each other. And this is where the man and woman each have to arbitrate between faith in the couple to provide fulfilment and the potential to find it elsewhere, between loyalty to oneself and loyalty to the couple. From this perspective, love is the willingness to pursue reciprocal re-attunement.

So why does the man say, ‘Love will tear us apart’? Could it be that the seed of division is always already within the love that drives union? That it germinates in the darkness of the individual and its flowering is contingent, for example, on a new encounter? If desire is sparked by triangulation, the geometry that sustains desire is non-Euclidian. So here, even as the couple ‘take different roads’, love persists: ‘Yet there’s still this appeal that we’ve kept through our lives’ and ‘Is it something so good just can’t function no more?’. And thus the vicissitudes of love give us pause.

In this vision of the couple as unsustainable parallels, is the man simply being realistic, is he rationalizing, or is he refusing responsibility? Is his notion that ‘love will tear [them] apart’—because love is governed by what escapes us—a cop-out? Suspend your knowledge of Ian Curtis’ biography and consider your own couple. If you are fully alive, your couple is not what it was yesterday and is not what it will be tomorrow. How do you, how will you, deal with divergence? In this domain each of us must forge, in our heart of hearts, our own ethics.

In ‘Divorce Song’, the couple are on the road, but they can’t leave their troubles behind; they’re confined in a car, and their problems are expressed in pettiness: ‘And it’s true that I stole your lighter’, says the woman, ‘and it’s also true that I lost the map’. And the man hurts the woman: ‘When you said that I wasn’t worth talking to, I had to take your word on that’ and ‘The license said you had to stick around until I was dead, but if you’re tired of looking at my face I guess I already am’.

Acting in bad faith, the man ‘did the things [he] said were up to [the woman], and then accused [her] of trying to fuck it up’. And yet, somehow, the woman still has faith in him, faith that her love can change him: ‘But you’ve never been a waste of my time, it’s never been a drag, so take a deep breath and count back from ten and maybe you’ll be alright’.

Whereas in ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ the man attributes estrangement to the partners going through changes, in ‘Divorce Song’ the woman’s explanation is more surprising: ‘It’s harder to be friends than lovers and you shouldn’t try to mix the two’. The lyric implies that it’s a question of either/or, but between adults in a couple it’s more a question of one/then (the other). The challenge is to juggle different modes, to maintain differences in tension: to suppress one or the other is to refuse the dynamics of the couple. This is not what the woman here wants.

Yet she can’t do that. ‘And the license said you had to stick around until I was dead, but if you’re tired of looking at my face I guess I already am’. Remember that line? Why is her self-regard so dependent on his gaze? Does it have something to do with what happens between the two of them in bed? It would seem so, since she says, ‘I would have stayed in your bed for the rest of my life’ if she had known how badly he would take it when she ‘asked for a separate room’ because ‘it was late at night and [they’d] been driving since noon’. Overcoming her dependence on his gaze will be more difficult, no doubt, than hopping into his bed against her will in order to maintain his regard. It is this dynamic, more than anything else in the song, that makes ‘Divorce Song’, for me, a sad song. Indeed, the man will end up despising the woman for being insufficiently demanding, for asserting her need more strongly than her desire. Here, too, just as in the Joy Division song, ‘love’ will tear the couple apart, albeit through very different dynamics.