Sad Love. Carrie Jenkins
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and life are not so very separate from each other. Popular songs and classic novels wouldn’t be popular and classic unless they resonated with millions of people. In fact, there is a tight circle of mutual influence between the two. The fact that life influences art is somewhat obvious: these songs are intentionally written to speak to as many people as possible and connect to their real (if extreme) emotional experiences.
The less obvious – but equally important – fact is that art influences life too. I argued in What Love Is that the socially constructed aspect of romantic love can be thought of as akin to a composite image. If you compile thousands of depictions of a face, the features they share in common emerge in the composite image as clearly defined contours. In just the same way, as we keep piling up our cultural representations of love, the features they share in common emerge from the composite image as clear features of love. These features can (and do) go on to shape a stereotype of what love looks like and a kind of script that we are expected to follow.
As a consequence, the ways we represent love as “happy” or “sad” can exert a powerful influence, not just on what we expect (from ourselves and others), in the sense of what we anticipate, but also on what we expect in a more normative sense: which kinds of love are socially acceptable and which are stigmatized or disfavoured. For instance, consider the power of representing queer love in movies or on TV. If we never see such love represented at all, we may have no conception of its being so much as possible. If we see queer love represented, but only between ridiculous or stereotyped characters, we are encouraged to distance ourselves from it and to laugh at it. What happens if we see queer love represented but only as sad?
Think of it this way: these composite images – stereotypes – generated by our cultural representations of love serve as a kind of roadmap for life. If the only road we can see that leads to “happy ever after” is the one labelled “Normal Relationship,” we are discouraged from taking any other road. And not only that, but we are also subtly manipulated into dissuading our friends or family members from trying a different route. After all, we don’t want the people we care about to be miserable.
While it makes for good art, tragic love is not supposed to be anybody’s idea of a good life. When we say that “a good life is full of love,” we don’t mean a good life is full of Romeo and Juliet style suffering and suicidal despair. We mean that a good life is one full of happy ever after love. It’s OK for real-life love stories to be sad and dramatic for a little while, as the “protagonists” overcome some initial obstacles to their union, but, in a good life, that process should resolve before too long into a happy ever after relationship.
I’m not trying to suggest there is something intrinsically wrong with the fairy-tale romantic story (boy meets girl, etc., etc., and they lived happily ever after). That’s a perfectly fine story, and a life that looks that way can be a perfectly good life. The problem is just that, if we tell the same story over and over, without telling any others, it becomes not just a story but a script, or a norm. And, once it’s reached that status, it can be weaponized. It can be policed. Go off-script, and you are made to suffer. This is one reason why our stories matter so much. Being a social construct, our stereotype of romantic love is in a sense “made up”: it’s grounded in our fictions and fantasies, and these stories play a crucial part in maintaining its cultural dominance. But that doesn’t mean there is nothing real going on here and nothing dangerous about it. The socially constructed norms of romantic love are “made up,” but not in the same way that Sherlock Holmes is made up. It’s more akin to how the law is made up. Sure, we made it up, but now it’s real and you’d better treat it as such.
As I see it, however, romantic love is not simply a social construct. I think it has a dual nature: it’s part social construct, part biology. Romantic love has a biological aspect in the sense that it does things to our brains and to our bodies. Love is in that respect quite a concrete, tangible thing, grounded in our evolutionary origins, susceptible to scientific study. It also has a socially constructed aspect, comprised of scripts and rules and traditions and expectations. These things are powerful2 (just like biology is), but they shift as quickly as our values do, so love’s socially constructed nature is best understood not by reaching back into our evolutionary past but by taking a well-informed look at our contextual present and our relatively recent history.
The relationship between love’s biology and its socially constructed nature, or so I argued in What Love Is, is like that of an actor playing a role. It’s as if we took certain ancient, evolved biological machinery and cast it to play the (heavily scripted) role of “romantic love” in a show called “Modern Society.” We expect our brains and our bodies to perform in certain ways. We don’t, as a rule, question the casting decision.
This book continues to focus attention on romantic love, so perhaps a word is in order about why. It’s not because I think romantic love is the most important kind of love. Far from it. It’s because romantic love is where I see all the most urgent philosophical problems boiling over. The romantic ideal and its accompanying romantic ideology are, in every sense of the word, problematic.
Many of the problems are in fact clustered around the idea that romantic love is the most important kind of love. The word “amatonormativity” was coined by philosopher Elizabeth Brake in 20113 to refer to the idea that it’s normal and desirable for every adult to be in a romantic love relationship (of the “normal” – monogamous, permanent, marriage-like – kind), and that a normal person’s life will be centered around that relationship, that it is the most important kind of relationship. Amatonormativity positions romantic love as special, as naturally taking precedence over all other connections to family, friends or community. The “plus one” you’re expected to bring to an event is a romantic partner – or at least a prospective one, a “date” – not a sibling or a friend. The same goes for who you’re expected to “settle down” and set up a home with. These assumptions are rarely spoken out loud, but they are everywhere, and they form the backdrop to all our decision-making. That’s not to say we can’t contravene them but that, if we do so, we’ll be defying expectations.
Amatonormativity itself didn’t pop into existence in 2011; the phenomenon is much older than its name. But a name is a powerful thing. Once we can name it, we have a handle on it. It’s time we got a grip. Amatonormativity is not just old. It’s a tradition, which is a far more serious matter. Traditions can run deep, to the core of our selves, informing our identities in complex ways.4 The cultural practices with which we identify help to shape our sense of who we are, where we come from, which people are our people, and (of course) how our people do things. As a child, I learned how my people do love, and that, like it or not, became part of how I understood myself.
There is, then, a fourth piece of “received wisdom” that I want to add to the previous three. While amatonormativity is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon, the element of it that I want to focus attention on is simple:
1 Romantic love is the most important kind of love.
Again, for now I just want us to notice it and wonder about how it might strike us if it weren’t already such a well-ensconced baseline expectation.
Let me round out this introduction with a summary guide to the rest of this book. To lay my cards on the table, the book’s primary agenda is to urge that we replace the romantic conception of love with a eudaimonic conception. The romantic conception aims at an ideal (not realistic, but idealized) “happy ever after” – that is to say, a state that is pleasant for the individuals involved and is permanent. This ideal is what our current ideas about marriage are modelled on: monogamous and (mostly) heteronormative, and hence conducive to the creation of nuclear families which are culturally idealized as the locus of the happiest and most permanent kind of love. By contrast, the eudaimonic conception of love ditches the focus on pleasure (or “happiness”) and orients instead towards meaningful, creative co-operation and collaboration. This can occur in a wide range of forms and configurations, not all of which look like the nuclear family structure.
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