in defense of feeling

I told someone recently I was looking for love who responded “in this economy?" I feel pathetic admitting this, someone else texted me, but I want a boyfriend. When I scroll through TikTok, skinny women wearing sweatbands dole out romantic advice: if he wanted to he would, no sex until the third date, how to get him to commit, red flags, green flags, how to find a rich husband. There is a sense of embattlement that doesn’t seem particularly conducive to love. Everyone is holding their cards close to their chest, trying to play before they get outplayed.

There is apparently an epidemic of loneliness in the United States. Everyone from Kristen Radtke to Hillary Clinton has written about it. Explanations are far-ranging but mostly come down to the same things: our communities have splintered, work has consumed our lives, our social contract has broken down, the internet has destroyed our ability to socialize and to fuck. “Loneliness,” writes Radtke, “is grief, distended […] We hunger for intimacy. We wither without it.” Loneliness, in its more extreme forms, becomes grotesque. It’s a horror plot. In The Shining, Jack loses his mind in the isolation of winter mountains. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, reviled as a monster by society, craves human connection to the point of despair. But loneliness can be also aestheticized. “All the cool girls talk about staying home nowadays,” writes Kaitlyn Tiffany in The Atlantic, remarking “In a different era, the It Girl was someone whose photo was taken by onlookers at all the good parties. The new It Girl is someone who takes photos of herself, at home.”

Staying home, as Tiffany notes, offers a filtering layer and a controlled environment for content creation. But there is also a voyeuristic aspect to it, emphasizing the link between femininity and domesticity. A girl sits passively at home alone, waiting, so the fantasy goes, to be lifted out of her life. Waiting, writes Becca Rothfeld, is particularly associated with women. “Waiting seems central to the experience and practice of masochistic piety’s messianic successor, romantic love.” The more unstable the connection, the lonelier the lover, the more waiting can feel like it overtakes every other romantic experience.

Of course, you always have a choice not to wait. You can speed things up, take initiative, move on. But for Rothfeld, waiting is fundamentally insurmountable, as a linear and physical barrier between people. The only real form of not-waiting is complete dissolution, total convergence. Even sex is a kind of waiting, a build towards climax and, afterwards, a withdrawal towards your own discrete physical boundaries. Trying to prolong the most extreme moments of intimacy is impossible. Worse still, it is clingy, a symptom of immaturity, an inability to differentiate yourself from your lover.

The association between waiting and women seems pervasive. It threads through history and literature. But it is not only women who wait or who suffer. In Etheridge Knight’s poem, “Feeling Fucked Up”, waiting takes on an extreme form of stasis, reforms the universe around him. He can only experience the world through the lens of his longing for his lover.

Terrance Hayes writes that the poem bends time, both repudiating and chasing after it. It relies on what he calls lyric time which is in essence “a crisis of narrative,” both because it distorts the linear and controlled structure of narrative, but also because it foregrounds the id. Waiting may seem like delayed gratification, a stalling of desire, but it also has its own kind of libidinal charge. It turns everyday life, everyday time, into something malleable and gratifying. “Desire can make time stand still,” writes Hayes. “Desire can turn time round. Desire can obliterate time; it can in essence fuck it up.”

Why is it so unfashionable then to love love? Obviously, all this excess desire only exists within the realm of emotional life. It is only real for one person or maybe two (or more if you like). Ingrained in the core of our idea of romantic love is some level of tension between social norms and personal desire. Romantic love has historically been seen as a force to be curbed and restrained and as an antisocial tendency in some ways. Upholding the fabric of our social structure has traditionally required a division between private emotional life and a sense of outward responsibility. Prioritizing pure feeling, so the idea goes, leads to people choosing bad, unsuitable partners, to acts of desperation and violence, to shirking your duties. That love can also be an incredibly redemptive force meshes uneasily with our sense of individualism, with our Protestant ethics. Controlling it requires an entire normative framework.

The idea that romantic love broadly violates the social contract is in contrast to other, familial forms of love (such as maternal love) which are traditionally seen as socially beneficial. Looking for marriage or for someone to have children with, while it may seem conservative depending on your social circle, has a sober implication of responsibility. Looking for love sounds more like chasing the high of an extreme sport, trust falling with someone you don’t really know like that. It demands exacting reciprocity, extreme vulnerability. It brings out people’s basest and most primal instincts and a frightening desire to merge into someone else. When the girlies on TikTok talk about dating, they rarely talk about love. They’re hung up on the basics. Why would I have sex with someone, one creator I follow wondered, who wouldn’t treat me at least as well as they treat their friend or their neighbor?

The question seems so obvious it’s almost startling. And yet, of course, it’s also so commonplace a complaint as to be unremarkable. Ellie Anderson suggests, in a piece on heteropessimism, that an aspect of this dysfunction comes out of gendered expectations for emotional care work. “Dating men often requires women to spend inordinate amounts of time trying to interpret the cues of emotionally inarticulate men and then figuring out whether, when and how to deliver those interpretations back to the men in question without spooking them.” Failing at this task then is not only a disruption of accepted calendar time—traditionally dictated by men—but also of norms around feeling.

I went on a date earlier this year with a man who told me a couple drinks in about being lonely. His parents had separated when he was young and his father had moved to a sleepy suburb of New York, where he lived alone and isolated in a pioneerish kind of way. He apparently was profoundly lonely. My date told me he was increasingly afraid of ending up like his father, that he felt trapped in some liminal space in which he craved deep connection and yet was unwilling or unable to form it. If this sounds like radical vulnerability for a first (and only) date, I found it striking that he was able to share his deepest fears so readily but was so cagey about everything else. When I told him I was looking for love, he seemed at a loss for words.

A lot has been made of how dating apps, the prevalence of casual sex, and the breakdown of traditional marriage have deprived our dating rituals of love. But historically, dating rituals that emphasize love are relatively exceptional. Traditional European (and many non-European) courtship practices were primarily focused on status, money, convenience, practicality, and so on. In many ways, as odd and liberal as our dating practices might appear compared to other eras, they are still grounded in many traditional principles. A recent Guardian article headlined “We could soon see a Jane Austen-style marriage market: how the housing crisis is turning modern dating on its head” offers a bleak vision of a system in which romantic futures seem increasingly subsumed to staggering wealth inequality. Although many people date freely and widely, they still tend to vet potential marriage partners with a specific kind of puritanism. Falling in love seems to happen mostly either by a process of osmosis or simple familiarity (and a lot of waiting) or by setting intentions of seriousness and weeding out partners who don’t share them. Sometimes, it happens randomly. Sparks fly. You’re reminded why there’s so much poetry, so much music, so many stories, so many cautionary tales about love.

Although love is associated with traditional heteronormative relationship structures, it is largely irrelevant to many of them if not even anathema to them. Our current ideal of romantic love, with its tension between inner and outer, private and public, derives largely from the Medieval notion of courtly romance or fin’ amour, a concept that was sharply at odds with the tightly structured, intensely religious society in which it developed. At the heart of fin’ amour there is also a basic contradiction between the primacy of emotion and the demands of social and moral acceptability. To be romantic heroes, the protagonists of these stories must try to balance these demands, to be good and upstanding members of their societies and also to be faithful lovers, entirely devoted to the grave (and beyond). They inevitably fail.

One of the most significant and best-known fin' amour stories is the Tristan and Iseult story, told in various poetic forms in the original French. The lovers fail continually and spectacularly at their social, moral, and familial obligations. They are partially absolved by the magic love potion they drink together at the beginning of the story which sends them basically into a state of erotic mania where they are only aware of their need for each other. Their transgression is much broader than adultery. They lie about Iseult’s virginity to her royal husband, substituting her maid on the wedding night, and violate norms of appropriate conduct towards other characters they come across, including their servants, a community of lepers, and a different Iseult that Tristan will go on to marry in a strange twist (although he never consummates the marriage to remain faithful to the first one). I guess he has a type.

One interpretation of the Tristan story is that it represents a broader shift in feudal values. Traditional feudal society, according to this theory, was essentially a shame culture. The feudal state was upheld by the ability of its ruler to maintain the status quo and he was conditionally supported in this by a complex hierarchy of nobility. That the king in the story decides not to kill Tristan and Iseult despite their transgressions and that they experience a personal sense of psychological guilt afterwards represents a shift towards a guilt culture, motivated by an ethos of personal morality. Their behavior, in this paradigm, is not only wrong because it goes against the legal and feudal structure but also because it violates the ethics of a broader social contract.

To resolve this problem, the mystics turned to God. From there, love takes on its quasi-religious hue, lust becomes devotional. Writing for 4Columns on Prince, Blair McClendon finds this mixture of sacred and sexy running through a canon of Black music and subversive art. Prince “tries to cast sex as a temporary anesthetic for an existential ache. But when you want to say sex is bad, you make it sound bad. [….] But then the great mystery of the church is that the Lord was made flesh. What is holy has to be sought through the body.”

One of my favorite Prince songs, “The Most Beautiful Girl in The World,” is basically a corny romantic ballad, written for his girlfriend Mayte Garcia. But the song also relies on lyric time, offering its own schema of creation that hinges on the singer’s desire. “Could you be the most beautiful girl in the world?” sings Prince. “It's plain to see you're the reason that God made a girl.” Here, the biblical idea of creation, in which Eve exists to serve Adam, in which Adam exists to serve God, is subsumed to a more radical hierarchy of feeling. In the song, the existence of Prince’s lover and her perfection is actually the sole reason for creation.

It’s hard to write about love without falling back on clichés. I’m always thinking about that Raúl Zurita quote that people put on Tumblr: Toda declaración de amor es urgente porque vamos a morir [every declaration of love is urgent because we’re going to die]. In real life, obviously, you cannot declare love to just anyone. You have to go with the flow, wait on other people’s time, accept their ambivalence, their fucked up attachments, their physical and emotional distance from you. All of this can at times feel insurmountable.

Although our social codes and norms around love, sex, and relationships tend to be deeply unfulfilling at best and harmful at worst, it is still challenging to fall in love without a blueprint for it. There’s no real rationality to love. It’s similar to sex in that sense. It’s both incredibly intimate and also in proximity on a scale to violence. You do things that in any other context would be incredibly unnatural or violating. Trying repeatedly to do something so potentially devastating requires being finely attuned to other people, tapped into your own ability for intimacy. And our culture of extreme individualism and extreme alienation, our culture of loneliness, doesn’t exactly make that easy.

I was watching Some Like It Hot for approximately the 50th time the other night, and have been thinking about the scene where Marilyn Monroe explains her weakness for tenor sax players, how she always falls for them over and over again, each time like it’s a brand new start, like she’s never been in love before, and how they invariably abandon her, leaving behind only a pair of old socks and a squeezed out tube of toothpaste. At the end of the film, of course, she will chase starry-eyed after another tenor sax player, this one in drag and on the run from the mafia. Hope springs eternal.

In an essay on Monroe, Sophie Lewis describes the peculiar disgust she has evoked from feminist writers. Gloria Steinem found her embarrassing “because she was a joke, she was vulnerable, she was so eager for approval.” Kate Millett called her career “a gang bang” because of her exploitation by the film industry. Lewis (rightly) is stunned and put off by Millett’s description, its violence, its misogyny. But, she writes, “perhaps she was onto something. Critics are not incorrect to see in Monroe pliability, openness, lust. And we still think of those who are fucked, sexually, as fundamentally fucked, not to say fucked up. But Monroe’s vulnerability is her power.”

It’s also hard to talk about vulnerability without falling back on clichés. It makes me think of that Jenny Holzer image, so ubiquitous as to feel cringe. But also, fundamentally, indisputably, the truth.