Although Clarissa is in love with Joe, she’s “also in love with another man”. She is an English academic studying the last letters of Keats and is passionate about her work. McEwan informs the reader of her great love for Keats through her trip to Harvard, USA; as much as she loves Joe, she sacrificed his company for six weeks to search for “hypothetical letters” and her most prized possession is the “first edition of his first collection, Poems of 1817”. Joe on the other hand is a freelance scientific journalist who reads science narratives by Darwin and the like and has himself written thirty-five science based articles and seven books. The narrative throughout the novel clearly exhibits Joe’s great scientific and psychological knowledge on a wide range of topics; “Vertiginous theories of chaos and turbulence”, “complex set of genes controlling for groundless conviction”, “infinities in the renormalisable theories”. McEwan uses this complicated language and otherwise useless information to prove Joe’s intelligence, whilst distancing us from him. Another method McEwan uses to express Joe’s love for science is shown in chapter eight where Joe displays one of his “manic bouts of dissatisfaction” with his career. The fact that he is depressed about being an “outsider” to his profession reveals his desperation to get “back to original research”; to have a closer relationship with science.
The form of love in the novel which disrupts the “equilibrium” is Jed Parry’s for Joe. This “homo-erotic obsession” (also known as “de Clérambault’s syndrome”) Parry has is not deterred by Joe’s continuous insistence that it is unrequited. Parry’s belief in Joe’s love is fuelled by fantasy, religion and misinterpreted signals all combined to create an imaginary relationship although his own feelings are genuine. When Parry writes about “The unspoken love” between them it proves he is aware that Joe has not confessed any love for him but those words are unnecessary and therefore Joe’s resistance in the form of words is useless. When Parry admits “I’m going round in circles!” it is meant as a simple turn of phrase but can also be read as symbolic of Parry and his sanity which is proved doubtful towards the end of the book. Requited or not, Parry’s obsessive love for Joe must have been of extreme size to make him feel desperate enough when Joe “wouldn’t return his love” that he would “rather have Joe dead”. This is surely a love which is out of control. By attempting suicide as a form of apology to the object of his love, Parry exposes the insanity his love has caused.
Another form of love that can be identified in the novel is the maternal kind shared by both Clarissa and Jean Logan. While Clarissa has no children of her own due to an operation which left her “unable to bear children”, she ensured they “remained a part of” her life. She is the godmother of seven and “Nephews, nieces, godchildren, the children of neighbours and old friends all adored her”. As happy as her life is, “occasionally something happened to stir the old sense of loss” which parallels with Joe’s “bouts of dissatisfaction”. Joe’s angst is formed because his “possibilities in science closed down” and in a way Clarissa’s possibilities in having a family have also closed down causing equal pain. When an old friend had a child, Clarissa created herself a “phantom child, willed into half-being by frustrated love”. Only desperation and sorrow could have caused her to make up an object to focus her maternal love towards, almost like Parry’s creation of a absent relationship between himself and Joe.
Jean Logan’s love is very different from any other mentioned in the novel in that she is mourning a lost love. The fact that she starts crying in front of Joe in chapter thirteen shows that her grief is uncontrollable, Joe realises that what he is witnessing is “love, and the slow agony of its destruction”. Jean is “bitter” when she believes that Logan betrayed her by cheating on her, then she is ridden with guilt when she finds out that her accusations are false; that her husband and father of her children really was “a terribly brave man” and she had doubted his loyalty and therefore his love. The amount of “bereavement”, “suffering”, “sorrow” and, above all, regret shows how much she loved her husband.
The last form of love is of the ‘forbidden fruit’ variety shared between James Reid, Euler Professor of Logic and his student, Bonnie Deedes and between Clarissa’s brother Luke and the actress he is moving in with. The difference between the two couples being that although the Professor and his student “are in love”, they would rather have “kept it secret” unlike Luke who is “leaving his kindly beautiful wife and bonny twin daughters” to live with the actress, presumably causing pain and chaos for his family. With an age gap of thirty years and the original relationship being student-teacher, Bonnie and Professor Reid’s love is unconventional to say the least. Both the Professor and Luke are throwing away their successful professional lives for the love of women.
The meaning of the title Enduring Love could mean a love that has to be endured or one that can endure. By the end of the novel Joe and Clarissa’s love endured and for Joe, Parry’s love had to be endured. The title’s significance is that it is neither one nor the other; it is both as it is relevant to each form of love explored in the novel.