by Lauren Oyler
RA was conceived in 2006 by a Swede named Andie Nordgren and its adherents believed that because love is not a limited resource, traditional hierarchical relationships that treat it as such are not just unnecessary but harmful, perpetuating toxic retrograde attitudes that equate love with ownership. One should allow space in one’s life for the kind of intimacy that can be cut off when one designates a single person as special and reserved, and therefore owed and owing. Even designating a category of relationship as special and reserved was poison: Romantic relationships are not better than platonic or familial ones. The ingrained belief that romantic love should be life’s organizing principle is inextricably linked to patriarchy and the oppression of minorities, the poor, and immigrants, among other populations. The resulting expectations kill love at the root. When caretaking duties are foisted onto individuals and families rather than supplied and paid for by the state as they should be, the state must make it seem like this is the natural and noble situation. Propaganda. Marriage is obviously propaganda, but so are all conventional relationships, because all conventional relationships cannot help but situate themselves in relation to marriage, whether they are like marriage or on track to marriage or on track to being like marriage or not; marriage is all encompassing and cannot but enforce hierarchy. Thus, ritualized domestic exclusion begets systemic exclusion via our admiration and craving for exclusivity. He cleared his throat, failed, tried again, and took a very small sip of his drink, the ginger sting of which did not seem to help. Relationship Anarchy explodes not just exclusivity but the possibility of exclusivity, he said, almost recovered, by, well, like the name says, applying anarchist principles to interpersonal relationships—by flattening all hierarchies, among all relationships. To an outsider it sounds like polyamory—RA naturally eliminates the expectation of arbitrary sexual and romantic fidelity within an individual relationship, thereby lessening the sense of hierarchy among romantic partners—but it’s really sort of the opposite. For years, polyamorists have been trying to convince the public that theirs is a community with rules and boundaries. Ours is decidedly not. By defining our lives by what we don’t believe in, we can get closer to freedom from pain and oppression; ideally, we envision our world as a constantly (and beautifully) turning kaleidoscope of not-friendships, not-affairs, and not-marriages. There are no commitments, and no guarantee that a sexual and/or romantic relationship will be more “important” than a friendship, because all relationships are free to grow or shrink or change as suits both parties, provided both engage in enthusiastic consent. Saying “no labels” sounds juvenile, he knew, but there were none, only ideals: respect, trust, communication, autonomy.
This was about twenty minutes into the date, when Bergman felt he should make his customary disclosure, making a ninety-degree turn from a lively description of the classes he taught at the John F. Kennedy School, located in the southwest, to “So: before we get any further I have to talk a little bit about how I live,” running a tan hand through the hair. I was surprised; his ideological commitments weren’t at all visible in his personal style. On my way to the bar I’d decided to tell him that my father had written a seminal geography textbook in the eighties and that he’d recently died, leaving me three million dollars, but I never got the chance. He outlined the above as I nodded with a look of strained neutrality on my face, and when he reached the “Any questions?” portion of the talk I knew this was my chance to speak, so I didn’t want to waste it on half-assed fantasies I’d lifted from the lives of people I was jealous of in New York. I began by agreeing that marriage should be abolished. It was a huge and stupid institution that persisted entirely through the various racket industries that needed it, and through sexism and denialism about the human spirit. I was in general in favor of polyamory also, though in practice had found it incompatible with the sort of people I wanted to date, who stereotyped polyamorists as weird, sweaty devotees of certain uncool music festivals. However, I also suspected there was a catch.
I asked him how it worked.
It’s about letting other people flow through you, he said, undulating in his seat to demonstrate. You may or may not flow through them, depending on how porous and willing they are. (His words.) Their porousness and willingness, however, is fundamentally and critically not your problem, he said; your problem is you and your own porousness and willingness. Or at least that’s how he interpreted it; the great thing about Relationship Anarchy was that there was no blueprint you had to follow.
This didn’t really answer my question, but I didn’t know how to respond. How porous and willing was I? It wasn’t something I’d ever considered. Until recently I’d always lived as straightforwardly as I could, finding strategy tedious and likely to backfire, terrible at hiding things, more interested in the possibilities of disclosure than worried about the risks. This was why I’d become so frustrated with Felix: I cared less that he was a fake conspiracy theorist than that he was cagey, that he’d given me no way to determine in his sudden absence why he was a fake conspiracy theorist. The slim chance that maybe he’d kept it all a secret because he actually believed the theories were true did, at times, really bother me. He was not a reciprocal person. He accepted what you offered and then put it in his pocket and winked at you. Yet it could not be denied that lately I’d been, like him, very impermeable and unwilling. Did Bergman know that? Could he somehow tell? Should I have been talking more? Was my lack of contribution revealing a character? Was I, despite my newfound unwillingness and impermeability, actually completely transparent?
While I was reviewing the nuances of my body language and the few sentences I’d spoken that evening to determine whether I was, despite my impermeability and unwillingness, actually completely transparent, I saw that I’d been tricked: I’d forgotten all about the potential charlatan sipping from a straw in front of me and started thinking about myself. It seemed possible he wasn’t being serious—the talking points were too defined and the vocabulary too vague—but it was also possible that he’d given this spiel to many, many people over the two years he said he’d been doing it and had developed a tone based on the pearl-clutching reactions commonly expressed. If it seemed like he was selling something it was because his enjoyment of that thing depended on a diversity of people participating. The number of available sexual partners for the Relationship Anarchist is probably limited, and assuming one of the draws of Relationship Anarchy is weird sex with a variety of people, that limitation may cripple the point. There are social obstacles to doing things differently: People get mad at you. They worry you’re judging them and suspect deep down you might be right; they become stubborn and defensive. You need backup, reassurance, affinity. You’d have to be a real believer to keep going, is what I’m saying, so I thought maybe my rush to characterize him as a charlatan was unfair. Though this is also the rationale of multilevel marketing schemes.
The bar was very smoky. The multiple-partners aspect of it was not so hard for people to get over, he said, especially in Berlin, where people are progressive and understand polyamory. The difficult thing was the refusal of any commitment at all, of any kind of anchor. Though you could have anchors, he corrected himself quickly, that’s not what he meant. A commitment could inevitably result. What he meant was that there was no pretending things would last forever, no asserting certainties over another person’s life. And no essentializing. No understanding another human being through their relationship to you. He didn’t like to say “colleague” at work, though the Germans said it all the time.
I asked what individual porousness and willingness meant in a practical sense, like, OK, say he and I were in . . . not a relationship: What would we do?
We would do whatever we wanted!
I had no idea what that meant.
He said: In RA each not-relationship required the full intention of both parties and could be abandoned or expanded by either at any time. Communication was key, but there was to be no bargaining or convincing or even asking; it was ab
out exchange, not power. You could say you wanted an explanation of another person’s actions, but you couldn’t request or expect one. You could say you wanted to see another person again, but you couldn’t request or expect to. This acknowledged the value of an individual’s attention and prevented people from taking advantage of each other. It was reciprocal empathic agency. It was entirely selfish and entirely egalitarian.
I said, So your philosophy is pro-selfishness. I didn’t mean to sound wry but I suppose it may have come out that way.
He said: Yes. But it’s not really. It’s more that—for the first time during this speech he seemed to genuinely be picking his words from the air, not reciting, which made me feel as if I’d come up with something original—RA, the way he saw it at least, recognizes that everyone is selfish, that selfishness is what motivates us all, and it doesn’t try to fight against that.
Even altruistic acts contain selfish motivations, he added.
Well, yeah, unless it’s, like, you’re dying for someone, I said. The ex-boyfriends give me no credit. Could a sensitive person do this?
He said yes that was true but anyway: In life, most people say they want to fall in love. By that they mean a few things, none of which is actually part of the emotion. What people mean (ticking off on fingers):
1) They want to find someone who solves—or makes otherwise irrelevant through the delirious happiness they inspire—the umbrella problem of life: What is the meaning of it?;
2) They want to find someone who makes them want no one else, someone they feel totally confident that they are in love with, with no doubts;
3) They want to find someone who they feel totally confident is in love with them, so that instead of going through the painful process of looking deep inside themselves for worth they can outsource the task of identifying it;
4) Later, when such things become worrisome, pangs in the night, at the grocery store, while cooking countless sad dinners for one, they want someone who will take care of them when they die.
This vision of love is totally unrealistic, it just doesn’t happen, but there’s always the sense that it could, and that imagined possibility drives the whole system of despair and broken dreams that has everyone settling for that guy from high school, or whatever, he concluded.
As someone who was at that point and for the foreseeable future loveless—I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, just realistically speaking, look at me—I have to say a lot of this made sense.
Did he sleep with people who aren’t Relationship Anarchists?
Yes. After all, it would be a little hypocritical of a Relationship Anarchist not to accept someone else’s prerogative. But he did require that they agree to practice Relationship Anarchy with him.
Did this not put him in a disadvantageous position? They could abandon him at any time and have a stable understudy boyfriend waiting in the wings?
He didn’t think in those terms. In fact, if he was being honest, he mainly spent time with non-RA, because it was just easier. He had a job, things to do—he relished intimacy and didn’t want to wait for people he liked to come around. It was enough to teach them about the philosophy. Usually it was poly people, who were not really a problem—they had a primary partner and would be just messing around with him, or they had a few partners who ended up taking priority. They’re so used to people freaking out on them about jealousy or commitment or whatever that they end up feeling reassured by the whole thing. So accustomed are they to being the baseline for romantic weirdness that suddenly seeing someone who is romantically weirder than they are is liberating. If you find yourself on a date with a normie, though, you can get into a bit of a dicey situation with expectations, which are counter to the cause.
I asked if it was difficult to operate with this mindset, purging expectations, rejecting impulse. I heard myself asking, and really feeling something as I asked, though these were not priorities I’d ever had before: Is there not something to be gained from obligation? He said that when he was feeling most possessive—or, on the flip side, unloved, alone—he had a process for getting rid of the feeling: He loved ice cream, stocking a selection of flavors in his freezer at all times, and when his heart and soul were gripped with negative emotion he was allowed to eat the ice cream—but only after he meditated for thirty minutes. He sat on his little cushion in his living room and thought about not thinking, and after half an hour, successful or not, he was free, and ate ice cream. He always felt a little high after he did this. I asked how often did he need to do the process and he said that when he first learned about RA he knew—the way people describe meeting the person they’ll marry—it was the right thing to do, but it was awful getting started, like withdrawal. After a series of dark horrible days, he decided he had to figure something out and came upon the process when a fellow RA suggested he “put his own spin” on meditation. Now two years later he’s down to once a week. I was about to comment that that seemed a high frequency of turning to extreme measures, but when I began to think about how often I felt desperately sad about whatever situation I was in, once a week seemed on par, if not better. I, too, have a fast metabolism, I said, and he laughed.
I asked how it was different from “no strings attached” relationships. He asked if that was really a thing, and I said I guessed not really, no. He said RA was somewhat similar, though because the philosophy emphasizes the value of the individual, it’s different from a no-strings-attached thing, which renders the other individual meaningless. Also, he added, RA was an oppositional politics. It wasn’t a motto.
We finished our drinks and left. As we stood on the stoop of the bar ready to begin muttering about which directions we were going, he grabbed my hand, looked at me, and asked if I was game.
I was genuinely confused. Game for what? He couldn’t have meant to have sex, which didn’t cross my mind.
“For Relationship Anarchy,” he said. If I wanted to see him again—let’s stop calling this a date—I had to confirm a verbal nonbinding noncontract to agree to agree to nothing.
I wanted to laugh, and if he’d been a true cad, I like to think I would have, though I’ve only laughed at deserving men on rare occasions; I usually freak out when faced with absurd offensiveness instead of looking it in the eye. But out from between the lines of his practiced definitions, a disconcerted loneliness peeked. Here was a person who was, it seemed, serious, who was attempting to structure his life in a way he could stand. It wasn’t as if anyone else had come up with something better. I said I was sorry, but I didn’t think I could be a Relationship Anarchist, but it was really nice to meet him and interesting to learn about it. He shook his head, looked at me, said he wasn’t surprised, and gazed off into the street as if suffering some unknowable inner pain. In his remarkable voice he said, not looking at me, that I wasn’t open enough, and he had known that at the beginning, that he could tell, that he could see, and walked away.
I was a little offended. I had just felt private sympathy for him, and instead of demonstrating the painstaking sensitivity his politics demanded, he insulted my character and moped off into the night. Who’s open on a first date? I wondered, and then I considered that maybe that was part of my problem.
· · ·
THIS NOT-DATE MADE ME COMPETITIVE, ALMOST VENGEFUL—I wanted to prove to Bergman that willful deceit was a surer route to precarious happiness than willful transparency. That a Goldilocks solution was obviously the correct one didn’t matter. Going out with strangers I found on the internet quickly became the only activity I pursued with much regularity or vigor, not only because I lacked the vim for regularity or vigor but also because getting people from the internet to go on dates with you was harder than my initial experience suggested. Because I was dedicated to going on many of them, I ended up using the morning hours I’d previously spent reading social media in bed to message potential dates on OkCupid. People chatted, there was banter, and then when you wrote, “ha that’s great. want to get a drink this week?” t
hey stopped replying to you. Even when they agreed, they often canceled. I’d been under the impression that men were in it for commitment-free sex, not commitment-free instant messaging, but the gender was full of surprises, which I suppose is part of my attraction to it. Still, I was discouraged, almost hurt, as if I were not trying to lure them with a false personality but with my actual one. Aren’t all personalities false?, one of the ex-boyfriends, the most dreamily theoretical and point-missing of them all, the one who once gently debated a friend of ours when she said her dreams never seemed very symbolic, wonders. When I inevitably became disheartened with the men on offer, I tabbed back to social media, where I clicked on articles to open more tabs that remained there to jilt my attention for weeks, developing an even more peripatetic style of reading than I had before. One morning: Marine Le Pen’s niece said France, with its Greco-Roman and Christian roots, was facing a choice between globalism and survival. A man with a koala on his shoulder would love to talk to you about Hannah Arendt. An account with twenty-six followers whose photo was just a bright orange circle liked one of my lazy posts mocking a poorly phrased headline. (“What Is Triple Cleansing?” accompanied by a photo of a woman washing her face: “gosh . . . what could it be?”) One new email, spam. Some huge percentage of Americans couldn’t find Syria on a map; an unfamiliar account I didn’t remember following said, “it’s surprising there aren’t more climate deniers among the Hillary fans, as they’ve all been frigid for the last twenty years”; a familiar account I thought I’d unfollowed said, “stop trying to make Brexit happen”; a review of The Idiot (the one by Elif Batuman) promised “revivifying pointlessness”; two people liked my post, one I knew who had quit his media job to work on a book “about coolness (the social quality, not the temperature)” and the other a politics guy who had been retweeting every post that contained permutations of the refrain “Bernie would have won.” No new emails. “Got any book recs?” a message said. “Would love to talk words over tea or beer :) I’m a huge nerd!” Why “the last twenty years”? Someone I’d met once in New York liked my post; an article from a few weeks before explaining how feelings of social exclusion made people more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. I would have liked to assume serendipity, orchestrated by a force so high and powerful that it had to be magic, but it was merely topicality, a combination of algorithms and forces so unexciting that people could only rampage about their effects rather than their causes: things were discussed because they were blunt and shocking, because they appealed to obvious impulses. Discussion begat more discussion, and that discussion begat imitation. People became exasperated with the same things and produced the same thoughts. People said, “This is the article I’ve been waiting for someone to write!” Others said, “Why is everyone talking about this celebrity’s likely premeditated gaffe when people are dying from that series of cruel events and labyrinthine policies?” A question both entirely reasonable and sweetly quixotic. (A word I learned when it appeared on the drop-down menu of possible moods to assign yourself on LiveJournal, the blogging platform I used in middle school.) No new emails. A Swiss guy said he enjoyed paragliding and cocktails—not at the same time, though. An email from the expat panlist, someone looking for an English-speaking podiatrist. Donald Trump was the dumbest person on earth and there was nothing I could do about it. The dumbness of any one person, regardless of their influence on the world, had nothing to do with me, except that it could maybe make me look good in certain company, but at the same time this fixation, on news, on other people, on gossip, on distillations and opinions, was nothing if not a reminder of how much one could know without actually knowing anything. I could tell you that people I would never meet had just broken up with their boyfriends, explaining why their recent posts seemed unmoored. I could map out social circles and determine whose bitter ripostes were the result of professional jealousies and whose were the result of stress from hardship. No new emails. I clicked on the article about the essential loneliness of conspiracy theorists and stopped reading in the middle of the first paragraph—people who believed in conspiracy theories made sense to me and did not require further investigation. A spam email. Most of what I read or started to read online was aimed not at clawing for some difficult specificity but at reaffirming a widespread but superficial understanding, or highlighting the understanding that could easily be intuited by the highest number of people, if they chose to think about it at all. “overheard a guy explaining that jazz was ‘like the subway’ to his tinder date at the bar last night ?!” A spam email. I perused more profiles. I was getting a twinge in my lower back, never bothering to find a comfortable position because I always assumed I’d be getting out of bed any minute. I went to my Twitter timeline, paused to remember what I was doing there, and then typed in the unfamiliar account’s username, @HelenofTroyWI; her little profile photo, of bathing Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris with red devil horns drawn on, an image that could have been interpreted but was best left not, appeared in the drop-down menu, and I clicked it. Her profile description provided few clues as to her identity: “no ass-play, no exceptions #RESIST.” Her location was listed as “Uranus, not mine.” She posted several times an hour and replied to anyone who talked to her. Her use of “as” in her tweet about Hillary Clinton supporters suggested British or international English, but such things could seep into anyone’s vocabulary, could mean any number of things—it could be part of a voice she’d devised to throw people off. A few days before, I saw, someone had asked her why someone so good at Twitter would want to be anonymous. “I wasn’t always anonymous,” she replied, “but my tweets weren’t good when I was posting as myself.” She had about seven thousand followers, so I could assume that when she used her old avatar and real name, the ones I recognized, she’d had fewer. She was followed by fifty-six people I knew, a mix of well-known media figures and niche literary types. “Time for some game theory” (a memeified catchphrase from some self-styled pundit who’d written a very long thread of tweets about Russian collusion in the presidential election that went viral through who knows what proportion of earnest belief and contemptuous irony): @HelenofTroyWI’s awareness of arty small-press publishers and past-life book bloggers meant she must have had roots in the literary world; these were not people or entities known in the wider media. The relationship between her avatar and her bio seemed to understand something about expression through form that a journalist wouldn’t bother with. While it was hard to imagine that anyone in the publishing industry would want to express the account’s mildly controversial political opinions through reactionary edgy offensiveness, hers was a literary impulse, an attempt to project herself, or her ideas, publicly through a slightly different character. The reactionary edgy offensiveness, and its inaccuracies and perplexities, seemed controlled and considered rather than careening and volatile.