Sad Love. Carrie Jenkins
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about, and I can’t simply look away without giving up on it.
What other strategies are there, then, besides silence? One option is talking more. I started admitting to my poor mental health in some of my talks and public appearances. I talked about how depression makes it harder for me to perform in all kinds of ways that once came easily. At first I intended to be making excuses for my impaired performance, but I found my audiences really appreciated these acknowledgements. It meant something to them that I was making the costs of the work visible.
I started admitting, too, where I had made mistakes in my own work rather than hiding them. That was painful. I felt ashamed. Then I started talking more about feeling ashamed, and the same rush of relief and recognition came back to me. In academic circles we are trained to see our mistakes as failures, and admitting them is regarded as a weakness. (Academia can be a heartless place. Ideas and ideologies can get quite stagnant and rotten in there. I don’t think this is a coincidence.)
The other strategy that sometimes works is not doing anything at all. A piece in the American Spectator, about me and a few other authors, said that now we feminists “even hate love.” It was high-visibility coverage, so it sent my way a lot of readers who would never have heard of me otherwise. Contemporary ideas about love are constantly swirling around me, and just by being here I can alter their course. Even (or perhaps especially) when I’m staying still.
A strategy that doesn’t work is retreating into academia. The problem with that strategy is that there is no retreat to be found in academy – or anywhere else, for that matter – from the ideas and culture that shape our lives. Academia is made of people, and people bring that baggage along with them wherever they go.
I’m based in an academic philosophy department, and philosophy is (still) a notoriously male-dominated discipline. Women in philosophy are a challenge to its self-image as hyper-rational, hyper-logical, hyper-scientific – all male-coded qualities. The discipline represents its history as a procession of “great men”: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche. It might be able to accommodate the presence of the occasional woman displaying presumed markers of those male-coded qualities – a loud voice, an aggressive argumentative tone – but she is more tolerated than celebrated. As Samuel Johnson infamously said, “a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
Before I became a philosopher myself, I had pictured philosophy as something more humane. More compassionate and co-operative. Something that belongs everywhere and to everyone, not just to a few experts working within well-defined fiefdoms of prestige. I imagined philosophy as a perpetual conversation, a massive collaboration. But all this is antithetical to the mundane concerns of real academic institutions: concerns about rankings, and grant dollars, and prizes, and esteem indicators. The scholarly dreams of so many would-have-been philosophers are swallowed up by these things. Condemned to death by a thousand administrative paper cuts.
This contemporary model of a university functions like an addiction to video games or social media. Thoughts of “winning” and “status” motivate us to keep playing, keep scrolling, while the life we thought we wanted slips away.6 Constantly comparing oneself with others easily induces anxiety and paranoia, as we are invited to feel that we aren’t measuring up.7 We’re told we cannot step off the treadmill for a moment, or we’ll get left behind. It’s easy to see how all kinds of problems get swept under the rug by academic institutions eager to hang on to their high-prestige “stars,” to keep up appearances, to cling to position.
Looking back, I suppose I was one of Johnson’s dogs. I learned to walk on my hind legs, was promoted early, and had a great track record of publications and lots of international conference invitations. I really felt like a “winner” by all the metrics I’d internalized. It felt good to compare myself with other people and be pleased with the contrast. I’m not proud of this.
But it felt nice when I thought retreating into a small corner academia would be possible, and when I was content to rack up esteem indicators and grant funding. These days, when people say it “must be nice” that my work gets attention, I try to explain. Actually it’s difficult, and often kind of horrible. But I still think it’s worth doing. Trying to do this other kind of work is awkward and uncomfortable. I can’t coast on my achievements (such as they are), because they aren’t going to get me where I’m going. Not even close. As soon as I started working on love, and trying to communicate my ideas beyond the narrow walls of academic philosophy, I realized I needed all kinds of skills that I didn’t get any help with during the course of my ten years of academic training.
Most urgently, I needed to learn other ways of communicating. I had learned to write only for the others in my small corner of academia. Scholarly journal style, it turns out, isn’t the way to most people’s hearts and minds. (Who knew!) So I went back to school. This is not a metaphor. I enrolled in the Creative Writing MFA program at my university. I became a student again, part-time, alongside my day job.
All my academic training had been focused on rigorous argumentation – drawing clear, straight, black and white lines from point to point. Don’t get me wrong here: I am grateful for this skill, and it’s a privilege to have had the many years of education it took to hone it. It’s not only an academic skill that helps me write papers, it’s a life skill that helps me survive. But, as with any tool, it is limited, and there are certain kinds of philosophical work it cannot do. And I feel drawn to some of those kinds of work. So I’ve had to learn more skills, not to replace the skills I learned in my first forty years of life but to supplement them.
I’ve been learning to write and think more like a novelist or a poet or a journalist, or sometimes all three at once. It’s not that it’s wrong to proceed in straight, rigorous argumentative lines. In the same way, there are times when intricate black and white line drawings are the best way to illustrate something: when close technical details are of the essence and anything else would be a distraction. It’s just that, if you are trying to paint a whole scene, a complex landscape with diffuse ambient lighting and confusing shadows, you aren’t going to depict that subject very realistically if straight black and white lines are the only marks you know how to make.
I completed my MFA degree during the COVID pandemic and, along with the rest of the class of 2020, graduated online. But, for the previous few years, I’d been switching out my professor hat for my student hat as I walked between the philosophy corridor and the creative writing corridor.
Doing and being many things at once doesn’t feel weird to me. I prefer it to the kind of intensive focus and specialization I was trained to think was normal and appropriate for an academic. My mind works better (and feels more functional) when it can stabilize itself with a broad base.
In the same way, being in more than one relationship at the same time doesn’t feel weird to me. In fact, when I am struggling with my mental health, having more loving partners on hand is a good thing. The work of supporting me doesn’t all have to fall on one person.
Which brings me back to that sadness I was talking about. It’s easy to imagine how some partners might react to their loved one deciding to pursue a line of work that was evidently making them miserable. Easy to imagine concern, or distress, followed by advice to quit and return to the comfortable old life. It’s easy to imagine, really, a partner simply not wanting to be with me if I insisted on making myself miserable like this. Isn’t love supposed to be all about the happy ever after?
Well, love is “supposed” to be monogamous too, and mine isn’t. When I was at my most depressed, not even the love of my partners could make me feel happy, but it did help to make me, and my work, feel possible.
Their recognition and support for who I chose to be, and what I chose to do, was an expression of love. Advising me to quit would not have been. Reflecting on that difference – between love that makes me feel happy and love that makes me feel possible – is what set me on the course towards the main conclusion of this book, which is a new theory of love. This new theory doesn’t compete with or replace my work in my first