Tip-Off #118 - Love Against Itself
"To love, it would first be necessary to be able to be unable." - Byung-Chul Han, social critic.
For centuries, marriage was used to ensure survival, continue family lines, and fulfill social expectations. Love and affection could still exist, but personal compatibility was a secondary factor. Marriages were “arranged” with little consideration for the individual desires of the couple. Romance was nice but not necessary.
Today, we view love and desire as finding a partner who reflects our needs. Love is more of a personal feeling than a responsibility. Divorce rates and the number of broken families have never been higher. Social critics, not just fundamentalists, argue that our contemporary drive for choice and control turns relationships into fungible, interchangeable commodities like disposable goods.
It's not that once everything was better, but now they’re not. We're adrift in a sea of possibilities, with so much choice that establishing committed relationships becomes overwhelming, and there's little to rely on. As Carole King sang in her chart-topping hit, "Tonight, you're mine completely. You give your love so sweetly. Tonight, the light of love is in your eyes. Will you still love me tomorrow?"
Online dating apps streamline, optimize, and package the most human of experiences for consumption. In a wellness culture obsessed with various life hacks, morning routines, and tricks for human optimization, even Jesus is on call: there are holograms of him just for you (soon portable).
The critic Byung-Chul Han argues that we live in an "inferno of the same," where everything, even difference and diversity, becomes homogenized and repetitive. We conform to nonconformity; irony is the new earnestness, and anything weird or different wins the prize. "Failure is not an option."
So much for a successful relationship. In Han's view, good relationships express a kind of failure. "If one could possess and thoroughly know someone else, they would not be someone else but copies of ourselves." It resembles buying an exquisite, hand-painted artwork and then deciding to cover it with a single coat of our favorite color—or, as a friend just pointed out while reviewing these remarks, "like going to a fancy restaurant and ordering a gourmet meal, only to request it to be blended and served as a smoothie." We lose the uniqueness, ending up with a familiar but unremarkable experience. Even God is a good buddy.
In this vein, Meister Eckhart, the renowned German mystic and philosopher, wrote ages ago of God: "God is greater than God." The Deity is beyond anything we can name or claim—as far away as the furthest star, as close as our next breath, at once transcendent and immanent. In a similar spirit, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote of love that it consists of "two solitudes that protect, touch, and greet each other."
Intimacy thrives in a paradox: it requires both closeness and distance. Many famous love stories explore this theme. In the classic novel Anna Karenina, the titular character, Anna, is a married woman who embarks on a destructive affair with the dashing Count Vronsky, leading to personal tragedy. The author, Leo Tolstoy, is just as concerned about the contrasting relationship of another lead character, “Levin,” whose own relationship works out — but not without anguish of its own. The narrator tells us: "Levin felt now that he was not simply close to her, but did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division he experienced at the first instance of offense. In the very same second, he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself." Levin’s struggles and eventual contentment highlight the possibility of choices that Anna could have made.
Such is the joy and anguish of love in any close relationship. One way or another, Tolstoy was telling our story, too. "It’s never easy. I'm telling you it is going to be worth it."
Notes
Denis de Rougemont - Love in the Western World (1983). A modern classic contends that romantic love and marriage are fundamentally opposed. Rougemont traces the evolution of romantic love from its origins in the twelfth century to its "mutated condition" in the twentieth century. Cf. Esther Perel - Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence - (2009 - available on Kindle). How does the initial fantasy of love evolve into the reality of an actual relationship, and how does sustaining desire require reckoning with the paradoxes inherent in love? (translated into 24 languages)
Leslie Jamison - Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story—Memoir (2024): "Jamison manages that most difficult of literary and psychological feats—subtlety, nuance, and hard-earned empathy.” (The Boston Globe).
Byung-Chul Han - The Agony of Eros (2017). What is required to discover the Other in a world of fetishized individualism and technologically mediated relationships.
A Holographic Jesus - Search for “religious holograms” or “holographic artists.” Some offer haptic feedback (a variety of sensations). - Imagine a Holographic Jesus. Maybe he would quote the Psalms: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of alternate skin tones, I will fear no evil; for Diversity is my rod and staff, and it comforts me."
Meister Eckhart - Selected Writings, Oliver Davies (Editor, Translator, Introduction) - 1995; "God is above all understanding" - The European Prospect http://ellopos.net/.
Rainer Maria Rilke - Letters to a Young Poet. (1929).
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (1878), Part Five, Chapter 14.