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Modern Romance

Depending on who you ask, you will get a characterization of modern love as a time of great decline, a time of exciting possibility, or something halfway between. This chapter offers my perspective. I want to unearth and organize some of the norms and constraints which structure our romantic interactions and ideals. With a good grasp of our romantic situation, we are better able to understand how it can impact us and why we might seek to live differently.

Selves

Our romantic lives are doubly constrained. We are creatures of a particular kind, but we are also receptive to the norms and structures of our society. To understand our romantic situation, we must appreciate both sources of constraint.

So, what are we like? Here are some dimensions of an answer that will prove important as this book develops.

We are vulnerable. Irrespective of our self-image, we are creatures who depend on others. This dependency marks our lives from the beginning and is visible in our attachment bonds. In infancy, we form attachments to caregivers. An attachment bond is an orientation to a specific person who serves as a source of security and an anchor around which we strike out and explore the world.2 This bond takes different forms, depending how we are treated, with ‘secure’ attachment being prized in connection to later development and even virtue.3 We form attachments throughout our lives, including in our romantic relationships.4 These bonds are not easily moulded by our conscious thought. As Monique Wonderly describes attachment, to be attached to someone is to experience them ‘as felt needs, such that without them we are not quite alright, but we feel as though we are in some sense unwell, less together, and unable to navigate the world quite as competently’.5 Our ability to act well, and feel grounded in our abilities, depends on the behaviour of our attachment figures.

Our relationships with attachment figures also illustrate the many ways we are porous. We are open to, and absorb, the presence of other people by internalizing their presence. Family, friends, and lovers become figures in our interior conversations; they are perspectives from which we view the world.6 Our patterns of thinking, storytelling, and even how we move our bodies are marked by the idiolects we form with these people. Sadly, the way a specific person shapes our interior life often only comes into view when things change suddenly, such as after a break-up or bereavement.7

Internalization enables us to be historical and shaped by our past. New relationships are often seen through the eyes of old relationships, which can be confusing. Specific traumas can reignite in a present moment and shake our sense of place or identity.8 Past abuse, assault, and betrayal can colour a relationship with someone new. Further back, our character is shaped by our time as children in the home or the classroom. Deeper still is the social impact of poverty or oppression, which shapes our life chances. Significantly, the past does not just impact what we want or think, but also how our bodies behave and what we are prone to feel. Insecurity or jealousy, for example, can overwhelm an open mind.

Conflict and ambivalence, which are common features of romantic life, are exacerbated by our opacity. We are not easily known to ourselves, and our peculiarities can evade easy understanding. This is a structural feature of creatures like us – our attention is not broad enough to capture our complex habits and interior lives.9 Our defensiveness makes this lack of self-knowledge harder to overcome. It can be easier to seek refuge in fantasy, rather than confront unpleasant aspects of ourselves or those around us.

Opacity would not be as challenging as it is if we did not change. But we are mutable. We change in ways which can outrun our ability to make sense. Our bodies age and undergo significant shifts through puberty, midlife, parenthood, the menopause, and into later life. Our surfaces and textures change. Sexual desire and even orientation may alter unpredictably.10 We might transition gender. Illness or injury may require chemical response. Sustained exercise can mould our muscles and mindset. These physical shifts sometimes have psychological shadows which together alter intimacy. Social changes also shape us. When we take on new roles or identities, like becoming a parent or starting a new job, we are acquainted with new values and patterns of action.11 Even moving to a different built environment can change how we are prone to act around other people.12

Finally, we are fiercely comparative creatures. We understand ourselves in reference to many standards: social ideals and role models, traits of character, conceptions of what is normal. Our sense of success and failure also relates to social standards of excellence, to the ‘regulative ideals’ of being a friend, lover, or spouse.13 Similar forms of comparative evaluation shape our judgements about gender, ability, race, and appearance. This ranking is ongoing, and inflects every aspect of our lives, including our emotional responses. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev goes so far as to say that ‘emotional meaning is mainly comparative’.14 Emotions, such as envy or hope, make sense of our world relative to a baseline. This baseline includes both our sense of how things are for us, or others, and our sense of how things ought to be. In turn, our sense of how things ought to be is informed by our social context, and enlarged by our imagination. Our emotional lives will suffer if the grip of either is too dominant, or inflexible. This will prove important when thinking about contentment, in chapter 8.

I have described some dimensions of our nature. As should be clear, we are vulnerable to being shaped by forces which either predate us or seem external to us. People working within the existential tradition of philosophy would say we are sedimented into our context. Jesse Prinz, for example, describes sedimentation as ‘the phenomenon of experiencing the world and acting in it through the filter of the past, without necessarily realizing it’.15 The geological metaphor captures the sense in which the influence of history and our social context norms, ideals, and significant projects is not some ‘benign residue that we can bring into the light and then wipe away’ but rather ‘a pervasive lattice of forces that make deviation difficult or even impossible’.16 One reason why sedimentation is hard to notice is because it appears natural. Our experiences, the meanings associated with them, and the norms structuring them, can seem ‘just how things are’. Actively understanding, let alone freeing ourselves from, this sticky sediment is not easy.17

This is not to suppose that sedimentation takes one form or is experienced the same way by everyone. Nor must we think that our actions are rigidly determined by our social world. But recognition of the ways we are open to influence, the ways our social context provides that influence, and the stickiness of that influence, should make us inquire more into the content of our social world. In particular, we can ask: which norms shape our romantic context?

Society

Three norms lie at the heart of our romantic culture: amatonormativity, mononormativity, and sex negativity. They can be given simple definitions, but their reach can be hard to recognize until they are threatened.

Amatonormativity is a term coined by Elizabeth Brake to capture ‘the disproportionate focus on marital and amorous love relationships as special sites of value, and the assumption that romantic love is a universal goal’.18 Amatonormative societies such as my own, the contemporary United Kingdom, privilege romantic love over friendships or other kinds of caring or intimate relationship; they hold that love is more significant than sex; and they are hostile to people who are intentionally single. Amatonormativity can be seen in every restless question about when we will find love, secure a partner, and marry.

Mononormativity expresses the idea that our romantic relationships should be dyadic and exclusive, which means they should involve one and only one person at a time.19 This exclusivity should ideally be sexual and emotional, and we should also be ‘partisan’ – that is, closed off to the idea of meeting new people or interacting with them romantically.20 Talk of ‘the one’ is evidence of mononormativity, and ‘supermonogamy’ is the even more extreme idea that we have literally only one soulmate.21

Sex negativity, or what Michael Warner calles ‘erotophobia’, expresses the idea that sexuality, attraction, desire, and sex are fraught, potentially dangerous, and need hiding away or controlling.22 In sex-negative societies, free expression of sexual desire and delight in sexual pleasure is suppressed, or tightly managed, or is only available to some people.

These three norms form part of the fundamental romantic ideal of our time, where someone is meant to have a life oriented towards one partner, who is the sole focus of their romantic desires and feelings, which deepen over time, and with whom they share a...