People live life at the interpersonal level. Eyes light-up, smiles erupt, arms open for hugs; hands reach out to be gripped. Or, eyes are downcast, shyness takes over. Or, heated words spring forth, two people back away from each other in anger and frustration. Or for some, letters burn with “…white heat.”

Being a social psychologist, I look at world through an interpersonal lens. When I stumbled upon “White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson,” my unrelenting, occupational interest in the interpersonal was heated by my personal interest in poetry. Brenda Wineapple, the author, writes that, “Sometimes we see better through a single window after all.” Not a biography of Dickinson or Higginson, she says, but, she says, this book provides a context for Dickinson’s poems by throwing “…a small, considered beam onto the lifework of these two unusual, seeming incomparable friends.” A biography of a relationship was something I could not resist reading.

Higginson was a public figure, public feminist, abolitionist, the white man who led “…the first federally authorized regiment of freed slaves” into Civil War battle. Emily Dickinson was brought up in a home where she was allowed, after a time, to live inside the world of words, to “…gradually, imperceptibly, [absent] herself from all forms of public life.” So how then could there be a friendship? After all, friendship, any relationship, requires contact and interaction.

Turns out, Higginson was something of a renaissance man, with not only political but literary interest which he brought together in writing essays and opinions, many appearing in The Atlantic Monthly. With no previous contact or introduction, Emily Dickinson reached out to Higginson, sending him a few of her poems that she had shown to no one else, and asking, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” Her request was almost mystical. She wrote, “Should you think it breathed—and had you the leisure to tell me—I should feel quick gratitude.” What language—who is this—were Higginson’s thoughts and questions. Emily, in that same first letter, wrote “…I enclose my name—asking you, if you please—Sir—to tell me what is true?” What is true? Could you imagine getting such a letter, with odd but brilliant poems enclosed, and with such other worldly queries directed to you? That’s what Higginson held in his hands and responded to promptly.

So the contact and interaction, the relationship, had begun. Telling the story of the relationship between these two people, Wineapple is true to the task she set for herself. We get Dickinson’s and Higginson’s very different personal histories; stories of their upbringing, families, and adult family trials. Also we get a clear sense of Wineapple’s belief, like Dickinson’s, in the power of poetry:

“Poets unfix the world, banish our habits, dwell in the possibilities of change and daring action. They make the world whole; they allow us to catch what we ordinarily miss.”

That is the sharing point, the realm of interaction in which Dickinson and Higginson developed and maintained the white heat of their relationship. Wineapple takes us into their separate worlds. We get to explore Dickinson’s extraordinary poetry. We go with Higginson into civil war battle. And we get to see how these two found a way to connect with little physical contact, not even very many face to face encounters…

“…for they had begun the rare epistolary communication that seems, somehow, more real than bodily contact, with its averted eyes and fidgety hands, its blushes and shuffling feet.”

Almost all that happened between these two happened through letters— written correspondence— that traveled slowly.

“What a hazard a letter is; quicksilver and irrevocable and frequently misunderstood. Yet somehow these two people, who lived in the intimacies and distances and secrets of words—somehow these two people created out of words a nearness we today do not entirely grasp.”

No greater truth could be uttered on this February 14, 2010, Valentine’s Day, as I finished reading this lyrical biography of a friendship. Today we have so many ways of being in contact, but we seem completely lost when it comes to having the meaningful interactions that lead to lasting relationships. When it comes right down to it, I think we use words with such shallowness that that shallowness becomes the character of our contact and interactions. Yet I am not longing for the time that Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson lived. No, I like living in the 21s century with all the complexities of our time.

Still, I do long for something. That longing shows up in the ferocity of my teaching about interpersonal relationships. No irony then that this Valentine’s day I am quoted in the Raleigh News & Observer:

Rupert W. Nacoste, a professor of social psychology at N.C. State University, acknowledges that there has been a major shift in the way society manages interpersonal relationships. He points to the work of Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, who theorizes that we’ve moved from a marriage system to a relationship system.

“The marriage system was meant to bring singles together for marriage. The relationship system is meant to move people toward relationships,” Nacoste says. “That’s the end of the sentence. It’s lifted the veil of intimacy, taken off the protective cover because there’s nothing to protect.”

Each year Nacoste gives a Valentine’s Day lecture to his students, who he believes have to navigate love in a new social environment. The idea for the lectures came one Valentine’s Day a few years ago as he shopped for groceries at Whole Foods. He noticed that the store was unusually crowded for midday. When Nacoste got inside, a long line of anguished men crowded the floral area.

The line wasn’t just about last-minute holiday shopping, but a sign, he thinks, of the lack of context within the relationship system.

“Things are so loose now, that what were normal expectations are now extreme,” he says. “Acts of love have to be overblown. If they aren’t, they are a deal breaker.”

In response to seeing that article this Valentines’ day, a student emailed me. She wrote, “After reading the front page article and your take on this day… [I wanted to say that] I hope you realize what an impact you have made on so many students like me, who have taken one of your courses and been so inspired by your passion and enthusiasm.” You see, when I teach about relationships I teach with a white heat. By the example of the Dickinson & Higginson friendship, the way it was lived and cherished by the two, I am reminded why my teaching burns from me. I know the fundamental importance of interpersonal relationships to our life energy. What motivates me when I teach is the hope that I can help my students learn to speak to each other in their authentic voices and help them trust that doing so will lead to a relationship in which they find “…what is true.”

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