Sad Love. Carrie Jenkins
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not seeing something properly. Something is missed because we tell only certain kinds of love stories. Sad love can’t be happy ever after, of course. But it can be something else: something that I’ll call eudaimonic (more on this word a moment). Eudaimonic love has deep connections with creativity and meaningfulness, of a kind that the search for happy ever after doesn’t and could never have.
But who is this “us” I keep talking about? Words like “us” can be sneaky. Unless we’re paying attention, “us” tends tacitly to exclude a “them.” A simple word can mask swathes of assumptions about who one is writing for, who’s included and who’s excluded, who’s normal and who’s “other.”
For the purposes of this book, “us” means me and the people in the same boat as me, as far as romantic ideology goes. It means people who were fed the same cultural soup that I was raised on, who imbibed the same “received wisdom” about what (real) romantic love is. In the broadest terms, it’s those of us who grew up with the dominant (white, patriarchal, capitalistic and colonial) culture of North America and the UK serving as our baseline world-view. That’s a vague and messy way to define an intended audience, but the vagueness is intentional. It’s the only way to capture the group I have in mind, which is itself vague. This book is about – and for – those of us who are still swimming in that soup.
Much of the soup is made of stories. And our love stories are remarkably consistent, almost as if we are just telling one story over and over. Here’s the short-form version of it:
X and Y sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
First comes love, then comes marriage,
then comes baby in a baby carriage.
We teach this story to children. We teach them very early, before they are equipped with adult critical thinking, bullshit detectors, defensive armour of the mind. We feed kids this story, this bit of cultural soup, in simple rhyming packages, and that makes it easy for them to swallow and repeat to others. They receive it over and over again in fairy tales and stories and in snatches of adult culture – romcoms, romance novels, Valentine’s Day greetings cards. And, of course, children watch grown-ups, and grown-ups model the story. We are supposed to start living out the story when we come of age, or at least do our darnedest to conform. For the children. If we cannot or will not conform, we aren’t supposed to let the children see that.
It reminds me of something Wittgenstein said about rules: we just keep going. We call that “following” the rule. But, however it might feel from the inside, we’re not really “following” anything. The way we go on is not determined by pre-existing constraints: it’s up to us. We are creating the rule by going on the way we do.
I don’t think all rules work this way, but a lot of them do.1 In particular, most of our “rules” for romantic love are created by our own choices about how to go on, individually and in social groups. By practicing love in a particular way, by representing it as being that way, we are constructing the rules and norms and expectations for what a loving relationship should look like. We teach all of this to children. We keep going, and call that “on.” It’s not only about creating the rule, it’s also about creating the “us.”
It doesn’t stop when we grow up, of course. The cultural messaging comes blaring at us all the time. It comes in at us from every direction and can occupy any and every available medium: magazines, news, music, friends, colleagues, family members. Anything can become an avatar, a conveyance of cultural soup. (Have you ever noticed how much text is on display in your bathroom while you are brushing your teeth?)
We cannot exactly tune all this out, but we can stop paying conscious attention. Indeed we have to stop paying conscious attention, because we have to use our attention – that limited and precious resource – for other things. So most of the time we just let the messaging wash over us, and it seeps into our subconscious unchecked. This makes it even more powerful: the less attention we pay to all these messages hiding in plain sight, the more easily they reach into the most intimate parts of our lives. (These days, I wear underpants only from the company that advertises on all my favourite podcasts.)
But let’s tune in for a moment: let’s pay some conscious attention. There’s more than just stories in the soup. There’s also received wisdom. For now, I’m not going to analyze or critique this. I just want to lay it out, as cleanly and simply as possible.
1 A good life is one full of love and happiness. A bad life is one with neither.
2 Love and happiness (the best things in life) are “free.”
3 In order to live a good life, one should pursue love and happiness (as opposed to crass things such as wealth, power or fame).
These three messages may sound very familiar and homey. Perhaps they seem “obvious.” But my hope, in writing them out so starkly here, is that I can begin to defamiliarize them a little bit. What might we think of these messages if they were entirely new to us? If we were strangers to the social world they define?
When you listen in to that third message, the one about what one should do in order to live a good life, you might hear some moralistic overtones. Something like: it is unethical to pursue money, power and fame. That’s what evil people do. But in this context I am calling attention to message number three, not as an ethical proposition, but as a piece of strategic advice. A “good life” in this context is not necessarily an ethical life but the kind of life that is good for the person living it. The kind of life we would wish on our friends, or that a loving parent wants for their child. That’s what I’m homing in on here. And, in the context of the first two messages, we can see how the third message makes sense as strategic advice. If you want a good life, you’ve got to pursue the things that constitute a good life, right?
The messages might strike us at first as simply discouraging avarice. We are advised to replace the pursuit of worldly goods with that of immaterial, abstract things. But it’s not that simple. There may be ways to live a good life that do not involve the pursuit of any of these things. Indeed, that’s where I think eudaimonia comes in. But, before we go there, let’s take a look at where sad love fits into this cultural soup.
Sad love is all over the lyrics of popular music. Think of U2, for instance: “I can’t live with or without you.” Or Nine Inch Nails: “I hurt myself today, / To see if I still feel. / I focus on the pain, / The only thing that’s real.” Or Amy Winehouse: “We only said goodbye with words. / I died a hundred times. / You go back to her, / And I go back to / Black, black, black, black, black, black, black.” Sociologist Thomas Scheff makes a case, in his 2011 book What’s Love Got to Do with It, that pop music’s image of love has been trending negative since at least the 1930s, with more and more songs depicting it as overwhelming and intensely painful (as well as self-centered and alienating). I largely agree with him that love as depicted in popular music is an extreme of feeling: either intense, ecstatic happiness or excruciating longing, loss and desperation. And that it’s more usually the latter.
It’s not just pop music that’s obsessed with tragically sad love, though. The same thing occurs all over so-called high culture as well. Doomed, disastrous love drives the entire plot of classic novels such as Anna Karenina or Wuthering Heights and operas such as La Bohème and La Traviata. Juliet immediately wants to die when she finds out she can’t be with Romeo, and vice versa.
This, then, is sad love as we collectively imagine it through our songs and stories: a failure condition. Never mediocre or boring, but spectacular and devastating and explosive. Not the daily grind of greyscale depression, but a melodramatic tragedy in gloriously (if horribly) intense technicolor, or …, well, black. We aren’t presented with a subtle range of experiences. It’s as if there are only two love stories: one a blissful fairy tale and the other a total, utter tragedy.
Notice, too, that these two stories have a lot in common: tragic love and happy ever after love are all about intense feelings, whether those feelings are positive or negative. Sadness and happiness are positioned