(no subject)
An online friend of mine mentioned this web-match site to me, eHarmony. Here's part of its blurb: "more eHarmony matches result in marriage because our couples are falling in love for all the right reasons". Bloody fascinating...
I've been having a series of conversations with friends recently, and the conclusion I've come to is that the 'connection' or 'chemistry' between people, the goodness or badness of a relationship, is basically something that is more or less random. In other words, there's no set of rules which can guide you to a good experience in this regard.
Taking this further, which is the 'best relationship'? A week long fling or a 10 year commitment? My series of conversations was also sparked to some extent by this thread on polyamory, about 'NRE addiction'. For the non-initiated, NRE (New Relationship Energy) is the feeling of 'crush' that you get when you're infatuated with someone, typically early on in a relationship. A NRE addict is someone who moves from person to person because they're addicted to that thrill. Obviously this can be quite a painful kind of person to have dealings with, and thus NRE addicts are generally frowned upon. Yet on the other hand, does meaningful always have to equal long? My wife had an intense online 'relationship' (or contact or set of conversations) with someone in another country. For various reasons, he's now gone. Is that experience less important simply because of its brevity?
I know a lot of the 'long term relationship' bias comes from the model of marriage. Foucault comments on the historical development in Greek thought that moved from marriage imagined as a relationship oriented around the economy of the "household" and the maintainance of its proper order to the notion that the marital relationship is one involving every aspect of two individuals' nature, based on personal emotional ties. In this transition, the "economic" model isn't discarded - the function of marriage remains procreation, the policing of sexual boundaries as part of the policing of economic boundaries (the family as an economic unit). In many ways this model strikes me as absurd.
The Greeks (amongst others) also, notoriously, engaged in pederasty, where an older man would have a relationship with a boy. This relationship supposedly combined a sexual aspect with an aspect of mentorship. I'm just mentioning this as an example of a different way in which meaning was seen to flow from (sexual) relationships in cultures other than the modern Western one.
I've got no answers on this one, only questions. I feel a lot of pressure to justify particular modes of action in relationships, and its not that I wish to have no ethics in this sphere... its just that I wonder to what extent our ethics of relationships (and our expectations of the 'right thing to do' and the 'right outcome') are still ghosts of particular power arrangements....
I've been having a series of conversations with friends recently, and the conclusion I've come to is that the 'connection' or 'chemistry' between people, the goodness or badness of a relationship, is basically something that is more or less random. In other words, there's no set of rules which can guide you to a good experience in this regard.
Taking this further, which is the 'best relationship'? A week long fling or a 10 year commitment? My series of conversations was also sparked to some extent by this thread on polyamory, about 'NRE addiction'. For the non-initiated, NRE (New Relationship Energy) is the feeling of 'crush' that you get when you're infatuated with someone, typically early on in a relationship. A NRE addict is someone who moves from person to person because they're addicted to that thrill. Obviously this can be quite a painful kind of person to have dealings with, and thus NRE addicts are generally frowned upon. Yet on the other hand, does meaningful always have to equal long? My wife had an intense online 'relationship' (or contact or set of conversations) with someone in another country. For various reasons, he's now gone. Is that experience less important simply because of its brevity?
I know a lot of the 'long term relationship' bias comes from the model of marriage. Foucault comments on the historical development in Greek thought that moved from marriage imagined as a relationship oriented around the economy of the "household" and the maintainance of its proper order to the notion that the marital relationship is one involving every aspect of two individuals' nature, based on personal emotional ties. In this transition, the "economic" model isn't discarded - the function of marriage remains procreation, the policing of sexual boundaries as part of the policing of economic boundaries (the family as an economic unit). In many ways this model strikes me as absurd.
The Greeks (amongst others) also, notoriously, engaged in pederasty, where an older man would have a relationship with a boy. This relationship supposedly combined a sexual aspect with an aspect of mentorship. I'm just mentioning this as an example of a different way in which meaning was seen to flow from (sexual) relationships in cultures other than the modern Western one.
I've got no answers on this one, only questions. I feel a lot of pressure to justify particular modes of action in relationships, and its not that I wish to have no ethics in this sphere... its just that I wonder to what extent our ethics of relationships (and our expectations of the 'right thing to do' and the 'right outcome') are still ghosts of particular power arrangements....