Part IV of IV of a Queer Mini-Series (probably should've been parts 4 and 5)
So after much thought (and a quite enlightening conversation with Connie) I think I’ve worked out a pretty decent understanding of “love”. But before getting into the fun parts, I’ll start with an analysis of the dominant/hegemonic ideal of “love” as represented by non-queer/monogamous relationships.
To understand love one must first examine its relations to sexual attraction and the boundaries that divide these categories. Conventional wisdom is that there’s a significant difference between unilaterally lusting after someone and unilaterally being in love with them. Perhaps lust is the state of desiring someone, but love is the state of desiring someone to desire oneself? This seems fairly plausible to me. Accordingly, love is not an emotion or drive/desire because it is a seemingly permanent state (people ignore the reality of serial monogamy as a condition for this type of love). Thus, love regards all momentary pleasures (sexual or otherwise) as inconsequential, or at best, secondary. Indeed, the true aim of this love is recognition and validation of the self. While, the desire for recognition and validation is fairly widespread and probably universal, this particular form of love provides the most effective means for self-esteem boosting in our current society.
Of course, few will be surprised at my alleging that many people enter into relationships or hook up with people for the sole purpose of feeling better about themselves. However, I want to dispel the myth that this only applies to women. Men do it, too. Of course, current social constructions of masculinity allow men to use sex as a self-esteem booster more indirectly (by allowing them to impress others with the quantity/”quality” of women they’ve hooked up with) but the result and general pattern is the same. Of course, what’s really interesting is the mechanics by which this self-esteem boost is psychologically justified.
To simplify, the hegemonic/monogamous ideal of love helps people feel good about themselves by filling a void in their lives. Of course, this void is socially induced. We’re all constantly bombarded with discourses telling us that we’re somehow incomplete without the constant love and sex of a monogamous partner (of course these discourses also lead to serious contradictions within the monogamous paradigm, and thus lead to serial monogamy). Following the most twisted paths of logic, sex isn’t so much an act of pleasure as a signifier that someone else values you as a person. Thus, many people only truly fall in “love” after a certain sexual act is performed. Once this act occurs, they feel truly valued and whole. Of course, if someone performs this act only once and never again, the self-esteem gains are partially eroded. This is somewhat logical, because our society signifies sex in such a way as to ensure cognitive dissonance for people who seriously regret any sex acts. This functions by instilling a feeling of idiocy in anyone who would perform such a socially sacred act with someone they didn’t value extremely highly. Thus, even in the case of one-night stands people will rarely devalue their erstwhile lover. To do so would devalue themselves, and when they do so the effect is an erosion of the previous self-esteem gains of the other. In addition, if a sex act is performed on a regular basis, one can be more confident that a self-esteem boost wasn’t a mere fluke and at the same time, both people will justify their actions with the idea of love. Thus, monogamy is born. Essentially, monogamy is the guarantee of sexual loyalty, and thus a significant statement regarding one’s value as a person. On the other hand, being single is a horrible, horrible misfortune. If nobody is tied to you, you obviously aren’t valuable enough as a person. The logic runs that if someone will fuck with you, then they obviously value you enough to rescue you from your horrible fate. In fact, this aversion towards singlehood is absolutely intrinsic to this kind of love. Being in love is being in constant and total fear that your lover will leave you. When this fear fades, it’s often perceived as a sign that the power dynamic in a relationship has shifted, or that “love” has left it. These mechanics of “love” have important implications for gender relations when assuming a heterosexual norm (as dominant discourses tend to assume).
If love is merely self-validation through straight sex acts, then people can be quite confused when they find themselves enjoying the company of people of the opposite sex. This confusion can be catastrophic if one/both of the individuals are in monogamous relationships. How does one justify the pleasure one has in the company of another boy/girl if one has already pledged their total gender-specific devotion to someone else? Conversely, how does one regard this pleasure if both individuals are single? What happens if nothing comes of it? If one has a crush on the other, and the other only wants friendship, is this a failure which indicates something about the intrinsic desirability of the desiring individual? Moreover, monogamous love is completely consistent with one-night stands/”dating”; however, these one-night stands/”dates” are often perceived as merely a means to find/enter a monogamous coupling. When both individuals come together, the pleasure of shared company is merely a bonus to the larger goal of inspecting potential “other halves”. This constant search for our “other half” ensures that none of us will ever be whole (incidentally, this concept of finding one’s “other half” was first introduced in Plato’s Symposium (who not so incidentally was a vanguardist/classist/elitist/misogynist wanker)).
At this point, it’s tempting to completely reject the concept of “love” entirely as a modern social construction intended to make the crises of society more bearable and at the same time ensure the maintenance of the status quo (it’s pretty hard to make revolution when you’re “complete” or believe that you can’t accomplish anything until you’re “complete”). Yet, there’s something that I find substantive about the concept. I’ve been in love. In fact, I would never have realized I was polyamorous unless I felt love for a geographically distant (and loving and lovely) girl while quite happily loving a geographically proximal one (and continuing to in the case of the geographically distant girl). Perhaps, equally important, there seem to be some seriously viable and positive aspects of love. But how does one isolate the good parts of love from the bad, the intrinsic from the socially constructed? The tactic I choose is pragmatic perspective.
Is there really anything wrong/”unnatural” with wanting cool and attractive people to want you, or for you to want to hook up with them? For that matter, is there anything wrong with wanting a self-esteem boost? Of course not! (By “cool” and “attractive” I mean people who you actually think are “cool” and/or “attractive” not those who are “universally recognized” as such (although I suppose someone could argue in favor of hooking up with those people as well)). But really, what does it mean to find someone attractive or cool? Does someone automatically find someone cool because they find them attractive, or vice versa? I’d argue that it’s a bi-directional process. Do we think our friends are cool (from our perspective of coolness)? Of course we do. This is a tautology. If we share time with them, obviously we think there’s something special/interesting/fun about them. Sharing time with them is pleasurable. If they fit into our sexual paradigm for attractiveness, isn’t it inevitable that we’d want to hook up with them (at the very least out of curiosity)? If someone fits into our sexual paradigm for attractiveness, isn’t it inevitable that we want to share and enjoy time with them? Is there really that insurmountable a gap between enjoying a good conversation with someone and fucking with them? In both cases, all parties involved are implicitly stating to each other: you are more fun than a good book/enjoying substances alone/masturbating/watching a good movie alone. But wait! Doesn’t this completely problematize the love/lust dichotomy? Of course it does. Wanting someone to share their time/energy with you and wanting to share your time/energy with someone else are two sides of the same coin. The monogamous conceptions of love and lust are truly the only incomplete halves seeking another half to fill their holes and make themselves whole (yeah, I realize that sounded really contrived).
So now I think I can confidently propose a formal poly/queer definition of love. **** Love is the desire to share time/energy with someone else/others through the minimization of space between you and your love(s) (although sexuality determines the exact amount of desired space between one and one's love(s) and the methods through which this space is minimized and the activities enjoyed once minimization occurs). **** There are several implications. 1) I love all of my friends, though my hetness restricts my sexual attraction. 2) One of the standard love clichés, “absence makes the heart grow fonder”, actually holds up because love is simply the desire to share time/energy/space with your love, and absence most vividly demonstrates the lack of this sharing. 3) There are as many different kinds of love as there are types of people/relationships. Some people enjoy some activities more with some people than with others. Moreover, these preferences can change over time, often rapidly (i.e. one hour I’ll want to play videogames with one person/some people, the next I’ll want to drink/smoke a bowl/have a satisfying conversation, or the people that I prefer to perform these activities will change (in fact, these preferences will constantly, continuously, and rapidly change, often on a minutely basis). In the end, what matters is the tacit agreement between individuals to form an actualized community based on the implicit assumption that sharing time/energy/space is more pleasurable (sexual or otherwise) than being alone.
Of course, this conception of love isn’t all roses. Some people (like myself on occasion) may have such a high value of their personal time/space/energy that they often eschew communion with others at certain points. This doesn’t mean they are less capable of love than others, nor does it mean that others are less self-sufficient. It only points to the increasingly obvious fact that love has different levels of significance for different people. This phenomenon added to the multiplicity of love representations/activities/relationships leads to the even more obvious conclusion that there is no single/universal “Love” concept. In contrast, I’ll refer to the hegemonic discourse of only one specific type of “Love” as “monoamory” (for obvious reasons). However, there’s a possible problem with conceiving of love as sharing with others for greater pleasure. If this is the case, couldn’t one conceive of polyamory as the creation of a free market seeking to ideally/optimally/efficiently match desired pleasures to the most effective partners? Following this logic, what happens to those people who are attractive for non-sexual activities, but less sexually attractive (or less sexually skillful)? Like all markets, won’t the love market tend towards specialization? Also, aren’t long-term couples better able to read each other and thus fulfill each other, and won’t this inevitably lead to monogamy? The solution to these issues is that a market conception of love is a false premise.
No individuals can monopolize a particular love market, because people’s desires are never static or fully articulated. People don’t want to perform the same actions in constant repetition, no matter how pleasurable. Inevitably, missionary sex/a videogame/ontological debates become boring. Inevitably, people will be curious about other partners, especially if every activity isn’t merely a method for fulfilling the monogamy fantasy. Moreover, people rarely know exactly what they want, and even if they do, it’s not always possible to perfectly articulate. So if someone wants to have a certain type of conversation, or stimulation of a certain body part, it’s impossible to ever have this desire fulfilled in exactly the way desired. This communication difficulty grows even more acute when one thinks about the highly nonverbal nature of many pleasurable activities. So in the end, my earlier definition needs an addition. Love requires a level of trust that one’s inevitably imperfect communication of desires will not only receive a good faith effort at fulfillment by your love(s) but that in doing so, they might even reveal lovely pleasures you didn’t know you desired. As an example: starting a conversation about the energy crisis and then learning about Helium-3. Of course, consent is very important in sexual situations, so another addition to the definition of love is that one trusts your love(s) to respect your boundaries, and that they’ll seek active consent for certain actions. So love isn’t just the desire to share time/space/energy (as modulated by sexuality), it’s the trust that this sharing will be pleasurably fruitful and that one’s consequently vulnerable position won’t be taken advantage of.
So yeah, I’d love to see a society built around this poly/queer conception of love. Of course, this sort of society wouldn’t preclude monogamy, but it obviously wouldn’t guarantee it. Moreover, a monogamous union isn’t necessarily a monoamorous union (monoamorous in both the “subjective” and “objective” sense (the one I was using earlier)). In addition, it seems fairly self-evident to me that an exclusively monogamist conception of love sustains and reproduces much of our current society’s oppressions and marginalizations, and that our current society’s oppressions and marginalizations sustain and reproduce an exclusively monogamous conception of love. Of course, breaking monoamorous hegemony isn’t going to magically fix all of society’s ills because there is no silver bullet capable of such sorcery. Still, it’d be a definite and substantial step in the right direction.
Note: I recently read a book called The Ethical Slut, by Dossie Easton and Catherine A. Liszt which, despite some problems, I’d highly recommend. It reads like an odd mix of late 90’s self-help fluff, The Nicene Creed (lots of sentences starting with “We believe…”), Queer Theory, and Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. I was planning on reviewing it and relating it to the general topic of love/polyamory, but this entry was way too long already. If you’re curious, we can talk about it, or I could lend it to you.
Also, the ridiculous cut title is a result of my fear that someone else would make the quip in a comment. I wanted to save them the embarrassment.