Love Life

I’ve always said that although writing about love is interesting and perennial, writing about dating is usually exceptionally boring. A certain recent New Yorker piece made me wonder if that’s even true. I think a lot of writing about love has backslid into the same morass as writing about dating, the gender wars, tropes, clichés, a kind of performance of vulnerability that actually feels like an effort to prove that you’re desirable. It makes me think of the famous Flaubert quote that’s like: “Emma retrouvait dans l’adultère toutes les platitudes du mariage.” Emma (Madame Bovary) found that adultery had all the same banalities as marriage. Bourgeois love is a prison or whatever.

In Black Swans by Eve Babitz, there’s a story I think about all the time called “Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens,” which I read at Rockaway Beach one summer when I got a terrible sunburn on my back. In it, a mismatched actor and writer fall briefly in love in a doomed romance. The actor, Warren, is the kind of man who has never had to develop a personality because he’s so good looking. The writer, Emily, is striking and stylish and smart and extremely, intimidatingly cool. When they meet at a party, Eve, the narrator, is surprised and pleased that Warren rises to the occasion. “At that moment, I realized maybe Warren wasn’t so shallow,” she remarks, “if he could see the point of Emily.”

Every girl’s dream. A man who’s 6’3 and who just gets her. Unfortunately, Warren’s foray into being cool is short-lived. He starts getting cast in parts, develops a personality, Emily makes him more interesting. So then he picks a fight with her, starts dating the wealthy and famous widow of a producer who catapults him into celebrity. Emily languishes, in the vein, Eve notes, of the Henry James heroine Daisy Miller — a free-spirited girl who rejects societal expectations and flirts all over Europe. Daisy is harshly judged by the other characters in the story although she is young and innocent and just trying to harmlessly enjoy herself. On a date with a sleazy Italian suitor, she contracts malaria, wastes away, and dies.

Emily doesn’t die but she loses a lot of weight and shows up to a party in her revenge outfit of a sweater “ecru with pale colors woven through it and little pieces of old ribbon, lace, and fabric” along with a long, off-white pleated skirt. Warren gets drunk and leaves voicemails on her message box. He’ll love her secretly forever because he knows she’s too good for him. When he dyes his hair a horrible, tacky color, Emily insists that it will wash out because she’s still “determined to think he’s wonderful. And through her eyes, it might be true.”

I like “Slumming,” both because it’s very funny and perceptive, but also because it illustrates a particular point about how much relationships can come down to mimetic desire. I keep seeing think pieces trying to puzzle out why everyone’s desires seem to be mismatched, why everyone seems to want what they can’t have. It’s partly about status but it’s also just about seeing yourself through someone else’s eyes and suddenly becoming concrete, knowable, a person who could be desirable, interesting, successful, unusual. In a world that feels deeply out of control and is profoundly violent to difference, it is difficult to demarcate the boundaries of your self. At work you’re at the whims of bewildering and abusive labor practices, personal debt has skyrocketed as wealth inequality has increased by leaps and bounds. Our social system and climate appear to be collapsing. What better way to assert control over your own life than through the potential of someone’s else’s desire for you?

Of course, all of this often leads to cruelty and to a startling decline in physical and emotional intimacy. It makes it harder to see people for who they are, especially wrapped up in the repression of patriarchal norms. To be clear, I think refinding responsibility to other people, to forming a community, to resisting atomization, are all ways to combat this, none of them specific to dating or romantic relationships. To be clear, I think love is beautiful and valuable and gives meaning to life.

But there is a certain way of talking about this problem that feels like an injunction to the duties of relationships. Writing for Dissent, Zoe Hu diagnoses the rising popularity of “trad” living among young women as a form of agoraphobia. She links it in particular to the revelations of the #MeToo movement, suggesting that it feels safer to stay at home dependent on one man than to go out into the world and into workplaces full of covert predators. “In an increasingly expensive and antisocial world,” she writes, “tradwives forsake life with others for the lonely, constrictive spaces of bourgeois ownership.”

Are women giving up on public life because they’re too afraid? Hu acknowledges that the space for self-determination has shrunk. Young women may see themselves as trapped between bad options, but she seems to suggest that they’re giving in to the narrative. Maya Lothian-McLean echoes this idea, writing for The Guardian that women are leaning into “romantic victimhood,” and that labeling men as oppressors or villains perpetuates gender norms.

I think there’s a specific way of talking about “romantic victimhood” that does perpetuate gender norms, but more for women than for men. It can be tempting to lean into a kind of passivity that is deeply traditional at its core. But overall, I think the whole concept of both articles smacks of condescension. The Dissent piece doesn’t even acknowledge the erosion of reproductive rights, the uptick in sexual violence, the relentless propaganda inflicted on young women from all sides. It’s a remarkably individualistic approach, castigating women for complaining, for giving up, for enjoying things, for acknowledging the roles in which they have been cast, for sometimes leaning into them for personal safety or gain.

Ideologies and systems appear here to be vast, immutable forces that have little to do with our troublesome psyches. It’s Freud rearing his ugly head. It’s psychosexual immaturity, hysteria and repression, the weak super-ego. In Freudian analysis, women are less capable of sublimation or of transcending their bodies and desires than men are. They must be exhorted to think of the greater good, to think, invariably, of men, to practice what Hélène Cixous calls “the logic of antilove” in La Rire de la Méduse. Imagination, fantasy, language, writing, Cixous suggests, are the only ways to individuate yourself from this form of self-perception. “More so than men who are coaxed towards social success,” she writes, “towards sublimation, women are body. More body, hence more writing. For a long time it has been in body that women have responded to persecution.”

Maybe the core issue is in being able to figure out how to respond to persecution at all. Very few people are given that vocabulary after all. On an interpersonal level, as petty as much of the frustration around mediocre dates or relationships that tends to devolve into perceived victimhood is, I think it often arises from a need to assert your own interiority, that you are capable of an inner life and a narrative of your own. It seems easy for men to lose sight of a woman’s interiority in light of their desire or disdain.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inner lives because I just read The Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes, which was recently reissued in English in a new translation by Ann Goldstein (the translator of Elena Ferrante). Originally published in the 1950s, the book feels remarkably contemporary. It’s told in the form of a secret diary by a middle-aged woman whose life has been absorbed by working and caring for her husband and children, with no space left over for her thoughts and feelings and fantasies. She feels guilty for keeping the diary and is terrified that it will be discovered. Writing down her thoughts transforms her, then threatens to destroy her. “A woman who isn’t wealthy,” she writes,” never has much time to think. As the years pass, I see that when my mother talked about the life of women, and said things that annoyed me, basically she was always right. She said that a woman should never have time, should never be idle, because otherwise she immediately starts thinking about love.”

This is one hundred percent true in my experience. And I’m increasingly convinced that this is why they invented the 40 hour work week, to keep women from sitting around, with their rich inner lives, and thinking about love.