Keep your love
I was struggling to write this one and had decided to put it on hold because I felt incapable of analyzing a song that felt as if it was written from the heart of someone on the other side of active addiction and recovery. This narrator, speaking to or about someone he loves and wants to keep loving, wasn’t in my repertoire of experience, so I wasn’t confident in discussing the emotional weight of the music and lyrics. Shortly after I decided to put this essay aside and write about horror movies instead, I attended and spoke at a Family Restored meeting in Stoneham. Family Restored is an organization that works to help the people whose loved ones struggle with addiction, because there is a lot of hurt involved in loving someone hurting in this way. The greater and closer the love, the greater the hurt. That’s what this song touches on for me.
Every time I listen to the four minutes and thirty-nine seconds of ‘Stubborn Love’, by The Lumineers, I’ve been trying to be present in the seats my family and friends occupied as they took the front row to my life when I wasn't at my best, which is a euphemism of course. Saying I “wasn’t at my best” hardly touches on what I was and wasn’t for everyone who needed me to just be me while I let my disordered mind run the show. In addition to the usual disclaimer that my analysis is my own interpretation, I have to say that I don’t know what it was like to be on the other side, but I’m doing my best to understand so I can be better.
This has always been my favorite Lumineers song for a number of reasons: the music has this melancholic beauty to it that leaves you sad but OK with the sadness; the music video is brilliantly done and deeply relatable for anyone who can remember what it was like to be a kid in the back seat of a car driving somewhere when all you knew for sure was that you loved and trusted the person driving; and one of my favorite lines of lyrics comes from this song.
The opening lines are harsh but don’t sound that way sung by Wesley Schultz, who sounds as though he is recalling a sweet memory with the one he’s talking about rather than condemning her. “She’ll lie and steal and cheat/ And beg you from her knees/ Make you think she means it this time.” Opening with the image of someone promising yet again to be different gives so much with so little. There is a whole history to the kind of relationship these characters have. There’s a desperate need to trust rooted in love and a shared history, and there’s a deep need for each other here. Lying, stealing and cheating in their various forms are hallmark practices of those of us who suffer from addiction, even if we don’t hit on all three. The sad truth is that they’re all rooted in the addiction’s desperate attempts to survive, to protect itself, and to feel some sort of connection in the midst of all the wreckage it has caused with the deepest connections we have in our lives. I’ve done my share of lying, sometimes over seemingly silly things and sometimes concerning bigger things. Looking back, I can see that my lies stemmed from the need to keep the darkest parts of myself hidden or to present myself to others in the only way I thought possible for them to see me without wanting to leave me. I can see that my addiction mindset taught me that lying was the only way to be accepted, even if it wasn’t really me that would be accepted and even if in reality the lies made me more unacceptable in the long run. I didn’t see that element of the big picture or realize how my lies slowly destroyed the connections I had with people closest to me. These practices - lying, stealing and cheating - are so acutely painful to those we love because they aim direct blows at the love and trust that are essential to keeping these connections healthy. They are acts of betrayal and selfishness, and they are so indescribably tortuous that when we promise it’s over, our loved ones desperately need to think we mean it this time, no matter how many this time’s they hear. The devastating thing is we do mean it, even if that promise is broken within the week, day or hour.
The next lines - “She’ll tear a hole in you, the one you can’t repair/ But I still love her, I don’t really care” - continue in this vein. As hard as it is for us and our loved ones to acknowledge, the damage is lasting and can’t be entirely erased even if we do follow through on this promise to change. Any hole, once it’s been ripped into a hole, will always bear the marks of being a hole once. You can fill it back up, sew it together, remold it into something whole, but the original sense of wholeness will never be recovered. Something else can be recovered, but it’s not the same. Accepting that reality is essential to recovery if we and our loved ones ever want to live happy, connected lives with each other.
Love remains, even with the holes. True love remains, though it may not look the same in every case. Love may look like a mother continuing to feed and house her son as he struggles. It may look like a sister establishing boundaries with her sibling who has continued to use despite promises of change. It may look like a spouse who decides to stay in the marriage or a spouse who takes some time away. “I don’t really care” can go a few ways. Maybe he doesn’t really care what others say, or that he’s continued to sacrifice for the sake of her promises. Maybe he doesn’t really care that she keeps messing up because he knows she’s trying. Maybe he does care, and just says he doesn’t because that’s the lie he has to tell himself to be OK. The chorus reflects on the relationship as it was, the shared history and hardship, as well as his stubborn love for this woman. The last part of this chorus emphasizes the title; he refuses to let anyone tell him that recovery is impossible for her because his life is enmeshed in hers.
In our vernacular, stubborn has mostly negative connotations, so the choice is worth looking at since it’s the title they went with rather than taking a standout line as artists most often do. The word choice suggests that this love counters what any rational person would do. I think our understanding of love becomes confused when we’ve been hurt. I know this to be true on my side, because I’ve used lying and manipulation to try to control love when I should have let go of the reins and just put myself out there as myself. Control is not love. That was self loathing and a shadow of myself trying to regain the connection I remembered. I thought love was someone, anyone choosing me to be in his or her life regardless of the fact that my addict self was the one they would be choosing since she was the one dominating my life for a long time.
I think the stubborn love in this song and for many who love those in addiction is rooted in a terrible fear of being powerless to help. That’s why the line between enabling and helping is so hard to determine. No one loves the addict self; they want the real self to come back, and love for that real self often justifies staying with both versions of the person suffering even if that allows the addiction to continue. Here’s the line that justifies this stubborn love: “It’s better to feel pain than nothing at all/ The opposite of love’s indifference.” That’s the line I love. Hearing that lyric the first time I listened to this song made me really think about love and hate in a new way. It makes sense. The opposite of love can’t be hate when both hold such strong emotional attachment to the receiver of those feelings. The opposite is a complete dearth of feeling: indifference.
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and renowned author, delivered a speech on the perils of indifference at the White House in 1999. He calls indifference “a strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil.” Perhaps it’s strange in this way because it’s not cruel in the way that violence is cruel. It’s inhuman in the way in which it withdraws, either unintentionally or deliberately, from a way of being that is human. Wiesel notes that indifference can be “tempting – more than that, seductive. It is so much easier to look away from victims.” But it is just that choice to look away, to disengage, that makes humans inhuman in the face of suffering. Even in comparison to the threat of punishment and criticism from a loved one, indifference is always the more painful experience for the one ignored and the more harmful one for both parties. Why? Because indifference murders connection. Indifference and love cannot coexist.
This is another reason, and perhaps the greatest reason why addiction is so incredibly painful to every party involved. Though we may not intend it in this manner, using a substance to numb pain inevitably deadens all our feelings, thereby making us indifferent to the suffering of our loved ones as well as to our own pain. We become indifferent to all and loving to none, including ourselves, and this is the utmost form of inhumanity. Continuing to love someone in this state of indifference requires superhuman patience, strength and even stubbornness.
The lyrics “So pay attention now/ I’m standing on your porch screaming out/ And I won’t leave until you come downstairs” are a persistent attempt to break through this indifference. These are all the times my family or friends have tried to talk to me in the past about my drinking, going about it in various ways in their attempts to make me come downstairs and face the cutting cold of open air that they were braving on their own because of their love. They didn’t need to be waiting on that porch in front of my locked door in the cold, but they did. As if in further appeal to reach the one inside, the lyrics continue after the refrain: “And I don’t blame ya, dear/ For running like you did all these years/ I would do the same, you best believe.” These lines are important, because this is the simple attempt to understand and empathize with the baffling decision we made to enter and stay in the vicious cycle of addiction. There’s something so connective in having someone acknowledge that there was some sense, some reason in the chaos and brokenness of it all, even if that reason was inherently flawed. This is true for everyone who has ever resorted to something ultimately harmful to cope. In his memoir Recovery, Russell Brand recalls an exchange with a nurse at a rehab center shortly after his arrival there. She said something like “How clever of you to have found drugs” without an ounce of sarcasm or judgment. She wasn’t criticizing his substance abuse. She was recognizing that it was the necessary salve he’d found in a desperate attempt to find some remedy for what he was going through. This is like a parent praising a child’s attempt to fix a broken bike with tape before giving him a more lasting solution for the break. This nurse acknowledged that Brand had found something to fix his broken bike of a self because he hadn’t yet found the proper resources. I’ve been there with the bike by the way; except my fix was sticks rather than hardware. Clever of me, I know. I live down the street from a bike shop though, so I have no excuse for not seeking a real fix in that case.
Yes, it was clever of Brand to find drugs for a time just as it is clever for someone to tape a bike. But it’s only clever if we can see that it does the job of a temporary, place-holding fix. We need to believe the people who tell us that tape is just tape that isn’t strong enough to really fix a bike, will never have the same stickiness it had when we first applied it, and that it is destined for the trash can.
The focus of the music video, a young girl, rides in the car with a woman we can presume is her mother, who looks as if she is leaving her partner for good. The girl appears uninvolved in the decision and yet profoundly affected by T, since her life has been uprooted as easily as the plant the woman sticks in the trunk before hitting the road and she gazes out the window in silence for most of the video. She looks out on the lives of others from behind her closed window, which emphasizes the sense of isolation in her situation, just as her position in the back seat reflects her powerlessness. These are feelings we dread, and they are experienced acutely by those hurt when addiction is present in their lives either directly or via a loved one. When the first refrain “Keep your head up, keep your love” arrives, the video includes the girl’s window view of their vehicle emerging from a tunnel into the light, an obvious symbol of hope. There’s more to go in her journey, just as there is in ours; and perhaps in both the end isn’t clear yet.
One of the final lines touches on this end: “The highway signs say we’re close/ But I don’t read those things anymore/ I never trust in my own eyes.” I used to think this line was a little depressing since it deals with a loss of trust, but now I see that it can be more about a decision to let go. On this highway, signs are attempts at certainty and knowledge, things we crave in our life. Choosing to let go of certainty is having the grace to let go of attempting to have total control in our lives. By the end of the video, the little girl still doesn’t show any sign of reaching a destination or knowing when that’s coming, but she has rolled her window down and finally opened her mouth to scream and laugh into the air in a beautiful vision of freedom and joy. She does this in the final refrain of “keep your head up, keep your love.” Still in the back seat letting herself be taken along with that childlike trust in the person driving.
Throughout the song, the pronouns used have been a little fluid. We’ve got “I” and “you”, which may be one and the same in the way that we talk to ourselves in that way sometimes. Then there’s “she”, who is clearly the one simultaneously suffering in her own way and causing pain to the other one involved. There are plenty of times “you” clearly refers to her, and other times it’s not as clear. The effect is that even though we have a clear idea of what’s happening, we don’t always know who’s speaking or being spoken to, which could be confusing but works well for the subject matter of this song. Addiction and indifference work together to wreak havoc and division among humans. They convince us that keeping our heads down and our love locked up is the only way to survive the pain of the deepest kind of disconnection: the disconnect of our spirit from its truest state of being in harmony with God and all existence. Everyone with this sense of disconnect suffers. The refrain “keep your head up, keep your love” is intended for everyone involved. The pain of addiction and the pain of loving someone with an addiction cannot be compared, and both are traumatic and brutal in their own ways. This is how we get through: we keep our heads up; we keep our love. Even when the horror of all that pain begs us to resort to indifference.
