I just took the MCAT. I think it went well. There were definitely some questions that threw me, but overall, it felt good.
During these last couple weeks, in order to dilute the intensity of studying for the MCAT, I’ve been reading about romantic love in psychology/philosophy literature. I’m doing this mostly because I find the topic of love interesting, but also because I think I can learn from a more academic and analytic approach to the discussion of love. We have never been formally taught about love; we learn from experiences on our own part, from media, from friends, and most of all, from our parents. But I think it goes without saying there’s a lot more to learn about love relations than one can glean from just our parents, no matter how successful or unsuccessful their relationship is or has been. Love is often dismissed as fantasy, short lived, or not worth the pain that necessarily accompanies it. These works on love argue that these criticisms are untrue and that denying oneself the experience of love leads to a less significant and fulfilling life. I’m inclined to wholeheartedly agree.
The two works I’ll be referencing are Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (in particular, chapter 8: Exchanging Love for Romance) and Psychiatrist Dr. Ethel S. Person’s Dreams of Love and Romantic Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion.
Preface: I feel a bit weird about this entry. Before you read any further, I want to admit that I have no idea what I’m talking about. I’m simply interested in the sensations that come with what we apparently call “love”, and as such, I’ve been reading psychoanalytic and philosophical books on love. Don’t be quick to dismiss psychoanalysis or my pursuit in general—there are interesting things to be learned from these works, if not just interesting things to think about. Because a lot of my ideas on love are underdeveloped, most of what you’ll read are my favorite excerpts from these books and my interpretation of them. This is not a research paper!
Two common themes I’ve noticed in these academic works on love is that 1) authentic love is a vehicle for profound psychological growth and 2) love is necessarily disruptive and “traumatic,” even when it endures.
As far as keywords go—
Lover: the subject in love with the love object.
Beloved: the object receiving love from the subject, sometimes referred to as the Other.
Of course, the lover and the beloved can be any gender or sexual orientation; the terms simply help with clarity and establishing perspective when talking about a love relationship. We typically look at love through the eyes of the lover.
Part 1: Exchanging Love for Romance – Chapter 8 of of Capitalism and Desire
I’ve never formally read a book on capitalism, probably because I thought doing so was reserved for discontented liberal arts students who wear funny clothes, but I’m clearly mistaken (or maybe that’s exactly who I am), because what I’ve read has been quite interesting. Todd McGowan’s thesis is not focused on his discontents with capitalism, it is focused on finding the satisfaction that exists in the current system.
While most of McGowan’s book focuses on capitalism and its broader psychological effects, there is one chapter that specifically discusses love in a capitalist society. It doesn’t offer a pessimistic view of love as one might expect—it simply points out problems that occur when capitalist ideology permeates into the realm of love. McGowan makes clear that “dismissing the reality of love—seeing it as just a capitalist plot—is a way of avoiding the transformation that it demands, but it also leaves one’s existence bereft of significance” (189).
McGowan argues that under capitalism, love is transformed into romance—the distinction being that romance is “cheap” love. Romance is shallow; romance can enhance one’s image whereas love has nothing to do with image; romance is an “investment” with promise of future returns whereas love is unequivocally a bad investment; and romance is purported to bring the happiness of love without its complications, which McGowan argues is impossible and is therefore not authentic love.
“Romance enables us to touch love’s disruptiveness while avoiding its full traumatic ramifications” (McGowan, 180)—and the “traumatic ramifications” of love, according to McGowan, are in the end, what make love real and what make life worth living. I’ll get to what actually constitutes McGowan’s “trauma of love” later on, but in essence, to only want the easy, safe, or fun parts of love—i.e., romance and passion—denies oneself of the profound growth that comes with authentic love. Love requires recklessness, no calculation, and most important, surrender of the self. Because the task of surrendering the self and holding another person in the highest possible regard proves incredibly difficult and distressing, we often avoid love.
One of the ways many of us avoid love is by accumulating romantic partners. Even if the lover “avoids the capitalist fantasy and doesn’t believe that any one object will have the final secret, it is often the equally compelling fantasy of quantity that drives this activity. One believes that accumulating a vast quantity of romantic objects will unlock the secret of the ultimate satisfaction, which is exactly the fantasy capitalism proffers. But love, in contrast to romance, doesn’t provide anything for the subject to accumulate. Instead of contributing to the subject’s wealth, it takes away from it” (186). It is fantasy to believe in either “the one” or “the hundred.” In love, there is nothing to accumulate or to fully depend on for meaning. We seek unending validation via accumulation of romantic partners or for one romantic partner to provide us with fantastical, perfect love. Neither will happen. Capitalist thought leads lovers to be perpetually dissatisfied.
Although both love and romance start with desire, romance never leaves the terrain of desire. “By transforming love into romance, capitalist society allows us to continue desiring. We can treat the love object like any other commodity and thereby escape its exceptional danger” (186). This is an important concept. While it is healthy to believe that there are plenty of fish in the sea (or plenty of commodities in the market) in unrequited love, this belief proves inhibitory of authentic love if maintained in a relationship. Love is built on a belief of uniqueness in the beloved; if the beloved is just as special as another love object, there is no love. It’s a self-protective mechanism to treat love objects as all alike, because if a love object is replaceable, then there is no fear of losing the love object. The beloved holds less power over the lover if they aren’t special. When we hold the beloved in such high regard (perhaps equal in status to oneself) while simultaneously knowing that they are outside of our control, we are particularly vulnerable to the beloved’s transgressions. This vulnerability causes us “trauma”, and this trauma is inherent in authentic love.
According to McGowan, the traumatic nature of love is also caused by the fact that the subject loves what the love object doesn’t itself have. Even in reciprocated, long-lasting love, something in the beloved will always remain outside the lover’s control. “To subdue fully the otherness of the other and master it would effectively eliminate the other as a lovable entity. Thus, a successful love would destroy its object at the exact moment it achieved total success. Love always leaves the subject with a sense of its failure or incompletion, but this incompletion must be experienced as the indication of love’s authenticity rather than its absence” (184).
I love this conclusion. The disruption, the incompletion, the uncertainty is love. There is never a full achievement of love—in fact, full achievement of love would result in its disintegration. If love is perceived to be “fully accomplished,” then there is no reason to keep loving. The sense that something is missing in a love relationship enables it to endure.
The lover is never quite sure the beloved loves them in return, causing the lover to experience regular distress. McGowan argues that “the lover experiences the trauma of love with each unrequited phone call” (191)—and perhaps more pertinent to our generation—the lover experiences the trauma of love with each hour that goes by with no response after sending a text to the beloved. However, it is only in accepting this trauma and in maintaining high regard for the beloved that we can transcend the self, and grow. McGowan concludes, “without the traumatic satisfaction that love provides, life often ceases to seem worth living” (180).
In McGowan’s main argument against capitalism, he believes that we must not overcome dissatisfaction with our status quo through a (Marxist) revolution because this would buy into the exact fantasy that capitalism offers: dissatisfaction with the present can be eliminated through investment in an imagined future. Through revolution, through action, and through hard work, we can procure the more satisfying future that capitalism promises. This parallels the misconception that love, once fully consummated, will make us finally, truly happy. But it is in this fantasy—in this capitalist paradigm—that we are indefinitely dissatisfied. “To take solace in the promise of tomorrow is to accept the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalism sells more vehemently than it sells any commodity. As long as one remains invested in the promise as such, one has already succumbed to the fundamental logic of capitalism […] No revolution can transform dissatisfaction into satisfaction. The revolutionary act is simply the recognition that capitalism already produces the satisfaction that it promises” (13).
This is exactly what McGowan suggests in the realm of love: one must abandon the false hope that we can “invest” in our present relationship in order to some day achieve satisfying, unending, exalted love. The “revolutionary act” in love is the acceptance that the anxiety and disruption inherent in love comprise the satisfaction that love produces. One doesn’t get through the anxious, difficult parts of love in order to experience calm and secure love. The tough parts are love, and they don’t end. This idea really interests me—that the uncertainty in love and the incompleteness of love are actually indications of love’s realization rather than its failure.
“The dissymmetry of love leaves the loving subject in a permanent condition of disruption, and yet this disruption is the source of the satisfaction that love provides. The subject in love enjoys its inability to stabilize its relation with the love object…” (183)
We enjoy the instability—of course! This is related to a passage from Ethel S. Person’s book where she discusses the coexistence of seemingly incompatible wants in a lover: the love of “the chase” and the longing for a stable, secure relationship.
Part 2: Dreams of Love and Romantic Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion
“Initially passion draws on the excitement and anxiety generated by the uncertainty of the amorous quest. And here is the sorrow: for many lovers the pleasures of realization cannot match the thrills of the quest. But it is only human to want both; the lover craves the calm and peace of mutuality, intimacy, and commitment—love in pastel colors in a pastoral setting—at the same time that he hungers for the danger of life on the edge—electric love in a torrential landscape. He simultaneously longs for the safe haven and the bright lights, quiet conversation and peak experience, serenity and the exhilaration of the chase, peace and strife, familiarity and mystery” (Person, 185).
I see myself in this quote. I love the thrills of chasing and uncertainty. Knowing that I can have someone leads me to be uninterested. It is when a beloved treads the line of attainable and unattainable that I am energized to pursue that person. And what follows, if the pursuit is initially successful, is intense attraction. It’s funny that I never want to know that I’ve “won”—I want a hint of insecurity to always remain, because what’s exciting about certainty? However, I still want a sense of stability and the security of knowing love is there and reciprocated when I don’t feel up for the “amorous quest.” I think that trust in an ever-present foundation of love in a relationship is only built by time and well, trust—trust in the Other and trust in the love you have for one another. It seems complicated to successfully balance security and insecurity—passion and calm—in a relationship, and I can only imagine it gets harder as a relationship endures. As a relationship endures, less is a mystery and more is familiar.
Unlike McGowan’s analysis of love under capitalism, Person gives us a more general examination of love. If there is a main argument to Person’s book, it is that longing for perfect love is human, and that many of the difficulties that arise in love are natural.
One of her first assertions is that the length of romantic love says nothing of its significance. To assume that only long-lasting love is significant “bespeaks a miserly and reductive way of thinking, as though love were a thing to be acquired and retained if it is to be of value” (15). I really agree with this—as a 22 year old who hasn’t experienced much long term love, I feel validated by this quote. I can say with certainty that the instances of love I have experienced, although relatively short, have been far from insignificant.
Like McGowan, Dr. Person believes that love is what makes life worth living. She writes that, “it is the knowledge of our insignificance in the universe and ultimately, awareness of our own death that causes us to seek transcendence in a soulful merger with a beloved” (86). For Person, love seems to be the antidote to the fact that we ultimately mean nothing in the universe; it provides warmth against the coldness and loneliness that is eternity.
Person doesn’t make the same love-romance distinction posited by McGowan; for Person, romance and love are connected, perhaps interchangeable. She often uses “romantic” as a qualifier for love (romantic love). In any case, the powerful love Person examines, although not explicitly distinct from romance, is just as transformative and disruptive as the love discussed by McGowan.
A section I found particularly interesting in Person’s book is entitled Disillusionment in Love. Dr. Person writes that all love starts with idealization of the beloved. Because idealization, by definition, is not based on reality, a degree of de-idealization of the beloved invariably follows.
“Even in the most successful relationships, idealization is not static. The lover feels waves of hostility towards the beloved, sometimes entirely irrational, sometimes in response to the most insignificant of transgressions. These usually take the form of fleeting de-idealizations, flashes of negative, possibly even degrading feelings and thoughts about the beloved. In happy love, these thoughts, though momentarily unsettling, are usually quickly dismissed. But what causes such fluctuations in perception and feeling? In part, de-idealization seems implicit in idealization, awaiting only the first outbreak of anger at the beloved or the introduction of some new piece of knowledge about her. In part it has to do with the latent anger existing in all love, which can perhaps be explained as the lover’s defense against the threat to autonomy which is invariably posed by love’s thralldom. Or resentment may be the expression of the lover’s envy of the beloved’s good qualities, those very virtues which drew him to her” (187-188).
This concept of idealization is connected to what we colloquially call the “honeymoon phase” of a relationship. In the beginning of a relationship, the beloved is idealized, and according to Person, this idealization is a prerequisite for the genesis of passionate love. But because idealization is based on abstracts, it is weak. While it seems necessary to idealize the beloved to some extent, being able to temper idealization with reality may provide a softer fall for the inevitable discovery that the beloved isn’t as good as originally thought. Idealization should be built on attributes that are accurately perceived and truly valued in the beloved, thus minimizing likelihood of sharp de-idealization. It is interesting, however, how ubiquitous this process of idealization and de-idealization is—that the beloved goes from perfect to less than perfect in almost all love relationships fascinates me. I also find it interesting that love invariably threatens the autonomy of both the lover and the beloved. Perhaps one way to mitigate this threat to autonomy is to keep in mind the paradox of love: though we may feel stifled by love, we are actually enhanced by it. It is through connections with other human beings that the self is developed; the self cannot be developed in a vacuum. Love happens to be the most intense form connection, thus pushing us toward self-realization, rather than resulting in a loss of self. The remark about envy seems to be more psychoanalytic: we can subconsciously resent those who are good—those who are perhaps better than ourselves. As a consequence of the threat to autonomy posed by love and of the resentment we may feel toward our beloved, we can push our beloved away or remove ourselves from a love relationship.
“Sometimes rapid de-idealization is clearly neurotic. We all know of individuals who are prone to repeated intense infatuations accompanied by exaggerated idealizations. These are subject to radical de-idealization and subsequent withdrawal of love, so sudden that the love has ended long before the lover can have come by any real knowledge of his beloved” (190).
This type of behavior is characteristic of Borderline Personality Disorder.
“There are several problems, most often interrelated, that make some lovers vulnerable to sharp devaluations of their love objects. The lover may be impelled by the reactivation of anger connected to former love objects (a chronic ambivalence) or by a lack of self-esteem which is projected onto the beloved with whom he [or she] identifies. Projection of the lover’s own self-devaluation onto the beloved is one of the most common of all factors in the disequilibration of a love relationship. Perhaps the easiest of all mechanisms to understand, it is best summed up in Groucho Marx’s famous dictum: ‘I wouldn’t join any club that would have me as a member.’ Translated into the realm of love, this simply means that if the lover has sufficiently low self-esteem, he regards anyone who truly loves him as by definition deficient, wanting in taste.” (191).
The idea that self-hate often manifests as not wanting anyone who loves you is interesting and perhaps obvious. If you don’t like yourself, how can you believe anyone likes you? You know yourself the best after all, and the idea that someone might like you is only evidence that they don’t know the real, revolting you quite yet. Though I don’t hate myself, I do see the appeal in the aloof, narcissistic, and perhaps even mean love object. There’s something so alluring about the club that wouldn’t have you as a member and something so unappealing about the club that would immediately take you. As I mentioned earlier, the idea of wanting what I’m not certain I can have is a fundamental component in my development of attraction for someone. According to Person, this experience is entirely natural—being aware of it and mitigating its inhibitory effects is all we can ask ourselves to do.
In the section of her book entitled The Aftermath of Unhappy Love, Person quotes poet W. H. Auden: “Weeping Eros is the builder of cities” (315).
There’s a lot to extract from this quote. Eros, in Greek mythology, is the God of Love, and Eros literally means sexual love. What Auden suggests is that sexual, passionate relationships that end in sadness tend to fuel growth—literal and metaphysical growth. In heartbreak, we build—perhaps not cities, but we build. Auden seems to agree with McGowan’s hypothesis; we grow immeasurably from the trauma of love. In my own life, whenever I encounter “Weeping Eros”, I do tend to build. Whether that growth is a focus on academics, athletics, or some other pursuit, I tend to do something with that sorrowful energy. And if the unhappiness is too debilitating to “build”, I still grow from the experience of dejection. Simply living through heartbreak is enough to demonstrate that love is a transformative experience, as one never emerges from heartbreak unchanged. The pain and the loss implicit in love are just as important to love as the fun, ecstatic parts. In fact, as discussed earlier, it is perhaps the misery of love—the trauma of love—that justifies the pursuit of love in the first place. If it weren’t for Weeping Eros, I may not be who I am today, and that would suck.
In Person’s final chapter, she discusses how love is an agent of change:
“Romantic Love enacts its role as change-agent in part by giving us a chance to remake the past. It is not possible to be in love without re-invoking old conflicts, and as they are enacted once gain, in a new context, we are provided with another opportunity to resolve them.” (350).
This quote is overtly psychoanalytic and I’m tempted to be skeptical of it. It’s hard to identify what these “old conflicts” exactly are—if they are of the unconscious, it is, of course, difficult to access them. But I do think there is truth to the idea that our relationships tend to follow patterns, as we act certain ways under certain conditions. The conditions of romantic love likely elicit a relatively consistent response in us even when interacting with different lovers. The psychoanalytic perspective proposes that how we respond to love has to do with how we first came to understand love, which was through our parents and how we developed attachment to them, but I won’t get into that. Nonetheless, I think it’s interesting and healthily optimistic to treat each new romantic encounter as a chance to resolve old conflicts and become a better lover.
“For most of us today more than ever, love is the primary mode of risk-taking, of venture without which there can be no sense of self-realization. The danger of suffering in love is nothing compared to the danger of feeling that one has never lived, that one has never taken the risk of feeling wholly vulnerable and alive.” (352)
“In our personal evolution, we each must go out into the world and choose from what—and whom—we find there. The man who seeks sustenance from himself alone will starve” (353).
These last two quotes can perhaps be summarized by Alfred Lord Tennyson’s famous line, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Being afraid of relationship difficulties or of heartbreak causes some people to avoid love, and consequently, they miss out on some of life’s most beautiful moments. Going beyond the narrow experience of the self and seeking merger with another leads to self-realization. If one avoids love (and other risks), the self remains underdeveloped. In avoidance, one denies oneself both the bliss and misery of life and settles for mediocrity.
And finally: “For, perhaps the most important of all for the survival of love, we must not ask it to bear the weight of all meaning” (321).
The “survival of love” Person mentions in this last quote is not just the survival of love between partners in a relationship but also the survival of a belief in love in or out of a relationship. If love does not bear the weight of all meaning, it becomes okay for it to fail or for it to simply fizzle out, and thus it becomes okay to maintain belief in its existence.
I think we tend to experience love more frequently than we’d like to admit. Our culture has an obsession with withholding the words “I love you” until you’re certain you’re experiencing it, but as discussed earlier, there is little certainty in love (to be clear I am not suggesting you confess your undying love to the person you just met).
I want to end by saying one probably shouldn’t start relationships with the premise that one will love the Other. Plenty of romantic encounters are fun and rewarding sans amour. Love often occurs spontaneously and is difficult to put and end to once started. Just be open to love if you think you feel it happening; you’ll experience something enriching as a result of allowing yourself love (and if you’re not sold yet, it makes sex better).
Julian Lang 