What Priscilla Presley Teaches Us About Devotion

After seeing Priscilla, I spent the following weeks talking to every woman in my life about this thing — a nuance in the way we love. Each would know what I was talking about but couldn’t find words to describe the sensation. Calling it “suffering for love” felt too banal, and “heartache” wasn’t representative of the truly Sisyphisian task that Simone de Beauvoir describes. She said loving is where “the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day.” Yet, it seems all women are burdened by love, most of all by the people we’ll deem the loves of our lives, if we’re so lucky.

A religious bent in me finds “devotion” the most accurate descriptor — it embodies the extreme ecstasy and suffering one endures in realizing how far we will go to obliterate ourselves for love. What’s uncanny about this suffering is that even the first time we experience it, it feels familiar. Devotion is both primordial and intentional, and as Erich Fromm writes, “to love somebody… is a decision”. Decisions are not instantaneous; they require spiritual sustenance to be carried out. Humans deal with absence consciously, and we invent ways to navigate this thing that moves inside us and tells us to endure, wait, and yearn. For those of us who cannot avert our fidelity, who succumb to what romance ethicists Earp and Savulescu would describe as our “ancient biological machinery,” there’s something hidden in this crucible of suffering.