The Need to Make Believe
by Casey N. Cep
The last thing I made was my bed. Soon I will make some toast, and later today I will make plans for this weekend. We all make things, abstract and actual, every day. Some people just make do and others make deals, but we all make believe. That capacity for fiction serves us well, though sometimes too well.
One of my favorite songs from the fifties is about that beautiful but beguiling ability to pretend things are other than the way they are. Why accept the end of a relationship when you can pretend it never happened? I’ve listened to many covers of “Making Believe,” one of those songs that artists just can’t stop covering, but it’s the shaky sincerity in Kitty Wells’s voice that makes me love her version most. Her sadness is so, so sweet that it’s never enough to listen once; you want to hear the song over and over again, even though you know every time that it’s sad to make believe for so long — tragic to refuse to accept that someone has stopped loving you.
Kitty Wells was born Ellen Deaso, but used a stage name suggested by her husband. She was in her thirties before she got her first real break, recording a song called “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” a feisty rebuttal of Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.” It might have been written by a man, but it stood up for women: Instead of accepting that fiancés and wives were to blame for failed engagements and marriages, Wells sang, “Every heart that’s ever been broken was because there always was a man to blame.”
The top song on the country charts for fifteen weeks in 1952, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” included the lyric: “It’s a shame that all the blame is on us women.” Three years later, Wells covered “Making Believe,” a song in which there’s no blame, really, just regret. The singer is “making believe that you still love me,” but “it’s leaving [her] alone and so blue.” What to do when the one you love leaves? The song is so plaintive that we postpone our usual advice: Move on we’d say or get over her. But, hearing “Making Believe,” all we do is listen, believing she’ll never move on, instead living the rest of her life “making believe that I never lost you.”
But there’s a kind of longing that not even daydreams can satisfy; a kind of loss that not even make-believe can lessen. It’s usually death that separates us so definitively, but “Making Believe” is about a separation that’s even worse because the possibility of reconciliation, however small, remains: The one you love hasn’t died, just found someone else. And no matter how many times I hear the song, even though I know it has no happy ending, I always hope that the fifth time’s the charm, and when Wells croons “making believe” five times, the person who loved her once will love her again.
The reunion never comes. The ending is never happy. There’s such so much now (“my happy hours I find are so few”) and so much always (“my plans for the future will never come true”) that we resign ourselves to the singer making believe forever, refusing to find someone new. Like an anti-wedding vow, she commits herself not to partnership but pining: “I’ll spend my lifetime loving you, making believe.”
I have lots of friends who thought they would never move on — who went weeks, months, and sometimes even years after a breakup convinced that they couldn’t. Eventually, they all did; the kind of lifelong pretending, unending “making believe” because “what else can I do” is a rare thing indeed. One of the reasons I love Kitty Wells’s “Making Believe” is that she doesn’t just make herself believe, she makes all of us believe, too, in a love so fierce that even when it fails, it’s never abandoned.
Country Time is an occasional column about country music.
Casey N. Cep is a writer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland.