What does it mean to live in a society where excess is seen as a desirable good–enshrined in the lives of our stars, whose insatiable greed often extends beyond multiple partners to drugs, wealth, even an accumulation of babies; or alternatively, into an excess of purity, of the kind that we see in anorexia or religious fundamentalisms? The excess of others, as Adam Phillips has pointed out, can fill us, sometimes simultaneously, with both fascination and amazement as well as envy, disgust and a wish to be punitive. So what is this excess about? Phillips cites examples of so-called commitment-phobes, men who come to the consulting room because ‘they are either more promiscuous than they want to be or more celibate than they want to be’. He also cites the case of Kafka’s Hunger Artist, a man who performs fasting for a living. ‘Asked why he devoted himself to starving himself in public,’ the Hunger Artist answers he couldn’t help doing it ‘“because I couldn’t find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you and everyone else.”’
So excesses of appetite can be ways by which we conceal from ourselves what we actually hunger for. We grow greedy because what we are getting is not what we want, and believe that more might meet the need and satisfy. We grow greedy, too, out of envy, that most insidious of emotions, ‘that pain caused by the good fortune of others’, as Aristotle put it: in our times of relative plenty, trumpeted through the image global-sphere, others’ sexual plenty is always there to entice and propel more want and more hate.
Excess may also be a way of avoiding making choices, since choosing entails giving up some pleasures for others. Excess, Phillips states, is always linked to some kind of core deprivation and is a noisy statement about that hidden lack. Excess may be a shout of despair or a sign of frustration or an underlying fear of scarcity. The excess of others, reminding us as it does of our own lacks and putting envy into motion, also leads us to want to punish them for what we perceive them to have.
Evangelical groups in the US and religious authorities everywhere have for several decades been fulminating against our ‘permissive’ society and its loose sexual mores. They have made attempts to keep the young pure until marriage vows are exchanged by promoting the ‘blessings’ of abstinence through movements such as the ‘Silver Ring Thing’. But now, even amongst the urban young brought up on Sex and the City, there are voiced indications of discontent with excesses of casual sex and its decoupling from love. The young want change. Several of my informants in their early twenties, who had had a string of sexual relations in their teens, told me there were moves afoot towards a new ‘celibacy’. Although they profess themselves too wise for any ‘thunderbolt’ view of love, they have a wish to ‘resacralize’ love and confirm its privileged status. Sex, casually or drunkenly engaged in, has lost its meaning and its moorings. Celibacy has taken on some of its transformative potential: no sexual behaviour has become more transgressive than the defiant avoidance of sex itself.
In her book Chastened: No More Sex in the City, Hephzibah Anderson, a London journalist in her thirties, charts the year of celibacy she decided to undertake because ‘the kind of sex I was supposed to be cool with as a post-feminist, twenty-first-century woman–a casual sort of intimacy without intimacy–was not working for me’. Sex and its pursuit, she notes, had become such ‘blood sports, their rules so confusing and their standards so exacting’, that she had begun to wonder whether it was worth engaging in another round of ‘bedroom tennis’. The decision to spend a celibate year is sparked by a coincidental sighting of her first love in New York, the great passion of her university years, the only man who had said ‘I love you’ to her. The love didn’t survive the move into careers. Though single life at first beckoned with all the glamour of a giddy succession of liaisons, the sighting of her first love buying a ring for someone else precipitated a sense that her chosen life had lost its meaning. A steamy affair in which she felt utterly ‘twinned’ with her lover followed, only to end with him returning to the absent partner he had never lied about having. In the comedown that followed, she decided that she’d ‘had enough sex without love. Maybe it was time to look for love without sex.’
Some of the young, it seems, are rebelling against our oversexualized culture that robs sex of meaning and replaces it with the anxiety of goals and pursuit. More does not necessarily mean better. ‘Others’ are not commodities conferring glamour. The supermarket of sexual dreams may have reached its sell-by date. A rebalancing towards austerity may offer greater satisfactions. It may also provide greater passion.
Finding Mr Right
After the intense and shaping passions of first youth, after the pleasures and pains of serial sexual encounters, most of us, straight or gay, wish for more settled loving unions. But how–in a world of glossy, throw-away consumables and few repair services, a world where women are economically independent and men have been loosened from the traditional masculine bond of protecting and providing for wife and family–are we to establish relations of love that will last beyond the next temptation to instant gratification or the next shopping expedition? And how do we identify Mr or Ms Right while simultaneously ‘falling’ into love?
In 1995 a self-help book appeared on the American market which spoke to our anxieties about the whole process of locating the right mate and also pointed to its underlying contradictions. The Rules: Time-Tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr Right, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, quickly became a New York Times bestseller and made its way across the world–from Japan and Korea to Romania and Iceland and twenty-six languages in between. The book not only sold millions of copies but found its message reproduced in thousands of column inches, websites and television programmes. It had tapped into a malaise at the core of millennial culture.
Part of the book’s success may simply have had to do with the fact that it satisfied a subliminal wish for rules per se at a moment when too few existed, and freedom, let alone its slippery linkage with the pursuit of happiness, was proving hard to handle. But the ‘time-tested’ rules the book offered for capturing hearts also spoke to independent women who woke up in their early thirties to find that marriage, despite the satisfactions of work and a string of affairs, might be as elusive as it was desirable. Indeed, the popularity of The Rules betrays a continuing contemporary bewilderment, a deep anxiety about appropriate modern codes for a mating game which will somehow lead to that ancient, and still desirable, state of marriage or enduring cohabitation.
Immersed as we are in a market turnover culture, most especially so in America, it would seem that we have unconsciously allowed its consumerist diktats to segue into the way we form sentimental attachments, chucking them aside as soon as they lose their gloss. We urgently make use of those ‘mating’ opportunities that parties, singles nights and holidays supply. Thousands of Internet sites display warehouse quantities of potential partners, each more glittering in their attributes than the last, and reduce human connection to a spree in a hypermarket. Speed-dating and ‘eye-gazing parties’–two minutes per gaze, fifteen gazes–diminish that potential special someone to an object, no sooner found than disposable.
There’s more. Mobile, often cast adrift from family and that major social space, the workplace–from which flirtation, ‘eye-gazing’ and certainly sexual contact has in theory, if not in practice, been banished by another set of rules–the contemporary individual is often hooked on virtual networks of friends and fantasy life. Yet this free market in fantasy, with its aura of infinite possibilities, its underlying injunction to get the best and most out of our lives and loves, clashes with what we understand as love. The Mr or Ms Right who ticks all the boxes of our rationalized desires on dating websites only rarely ticks quite enough of them when we meet.
Falling in love has long been an unpredictable and risky business, dauntingly allergic to management codes of risk assessment and risk aversity, never mind health and safety, that we seem to have imported to the task. Romance and instrumentalis
m, loving and using the other as a means to an end, just won’t sit happily side by side. Though, of course, if we take love out of the marriage equation, instrumentalism has long been the name of the marital game. Women have traded their compliance and sexual favours for security and a step up the financial ladder; while men have found either a domestic servant or a cultural or monetary asset in a wife, all the while securing the family line.
In fact, dating agencies bear some relationship to old-fashioned matchmakers. They act as higher authorities taking on the onus of choice for the individual in question. We may consciously spurn ‘arranged marriages’, and yet we turn to the contemporary virtual arrangers. Arranged marriages, from all the evidence even within Western minority cultures, can work, but the kind of love in play is rarely that tumultuous racing of all the senses that we associate with the ‘falling’ of falling in love. Security and the unpredictability that governs passion are ever at odds.
The philosopher, Jacques Derrida provides us with a clue here. When we say we love someone, do we mean that we love him for his absolute singularity or do we love something in him, a set of qualities? People often confuse the ‘who’ and the ‘what’. When we fall in love, we seem to focus on the who, the singularity of the other. Yet, when we fall out of love, we usually name a set of characteristics that irritate. When we search for love through dating agencies, we list qualities, yet the singularity of the person, when met, doesn’t match up: we just don’t fall. This underlying division in love between the who and the what confounds affairs of the heart.
In our cultural emphasis on choice, another obstacle lurks. A single choice of mate, once made, locks out other possibilities. Our time’s pervasive wish for more and future better can cast a pall of dissatisfaction over the here and now. Propelled to carry on the chase of choice, anxiety sets in, a whiff of desperation, particularly for women who have the added worry of the ticking away of the biological clock.
Trapped as we are in this predicament, it is perhaps not surprising that a ‘time-tested’ solution to the mating game might appeal. Perhaps grandmother’s rules were right. She got her man, after all. And the way to get him, the rule book tells us, is to resist. To play hard to get. To play the romantic game. Those feminist fulminations against romance for imprisoning women in a masquerade of femininity deserve a backlash.
‘The Rules isn’t just a book. It’s a movement, honey,’ Oprah declared, evoking an AA for troubled women daters. More rules speedily followed–The Rules 2: More Rules to Live and Love By, The Rules for On-line Dating and The Rules for Marriage. The Rules website, which offers telephone consultations with the authors, courses, success stories, support groups, also offers the top ten rules for capturing Mr Right. The first exhorts the reader to ‘Be a creature unlike any other’:
Being a creature unlike any other is really an attitude, a sense of confidence and radiance that permeates your being from head to toe. It’s the way you smile (you light up the room), pause in between sentences (you don’t babble on out of nervousness), listen (attentively), look (demurely, never stare), breathe (slowly), stand (straight) and walk (briskly, with your shoulders back). When a relationship doesn’t work out, you brush away a tear so that it doesn’t smudge your makeup and you move on!
The Rules goes on to offer the kind of advice my mother, born early in the last century, was prone to: success in the dating game depends on playing hard to get, letting the man chase you until you catch him, never being too forward, listening, and making the poor male (who of course never has an inkling that you’re game-playing) feel superior.
Here are some of those rules.
Don’t talk to a man first (and don’t ask him to dance).
Don’t meet him halfway or go Dutch with him on a date.
Don’t call him and rarely return his phone calls.
Always end phone calls first.
Don’t accept a Saturday night date after Wednesday.
Always end the date first.
Stop dating him if he doesn’t buy you a romantic gift for your birthday or Valentine’s day.
Don’t see him more than once or twice a week.
No more than casual kissing on the first date.
Don’t tell him what to do.
Don’t expect a man to change or try to change him.
Don’t open up too fast.
Don’t date a married man.
Be easy to live with.
Don’t stare at men or talk too much.
Don’t live with a man (or leave your things in his apartment).
Some of this advice adds up to what our grandmothers would have taken as the givens of womanly self-respect, accompanied by the need to ‘charm’. Pleasing those in power has always been the strategy of those who have less. Given centuries of economic dependence, women had long internalized the value of it, learning its ways in the Oedipal hothouse of the family where Daddy’s attention was a good competitively to be sought. Independent working lives brought other characteristics to the fore and threw the ever uneasy balance between the public and the private askew for both sexes. Yet if past witnesses to our inner lives are anything to go by, negotiating intimacy has rarely been simple, whether one is Stendhal, that expert analyst of the process of love whose own most ardent desires were never requited, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose miraculous love affair with Robert Browning lifted her from her sickbed only at the late age of thirty-nine and because, as a poet, she had already accomplished much.
The Rules may mark a wish for dating to revert to a delicate romantic game between a wooing man and a courted woman. Yet the basis of its programmatic exhortations is decidedly modern. These dos and don’ts of male manipulation assume that a show of that feature basic to most modish self-help manuals, ‘confident self-esteem’, will stand in for those characteristics that might genuinely elicit it. Attitude, it seems, is all for material girls made in Madonna’s image, whether it’s a self-invention of supposedly empowered sexiness or traditional submissiveness. The right mix of makeup, clothes and a coy manner will turn everywoman into Cinderella. But if posing as the person you’re not is the way to catch Mr Right, this hardly bodes well for the subsequent marriage.
Comforting as it may be to have time-tested rules to live by, the injunctions for capturing the heart of Mr Right contain a number of decidedly odd underlying assumptions at which our grandmothers would have baulked. They take it as given that there is a single, unique Mr Right, and that he belongs to a wild male tribe, so contemptible as far as intelligence is concerned that he can be captured by a manipulative performance of femininity as ‘bait’.
The linked assumption is that men don’t want to be ‘tamed’–or to change the discourse, that men are in fact the evolutionary psychologists’ fundamental male: a hoary hunter only and ever in search of reproduction, for whom the female of the species is a mere receptacle for sperm. Both presumptions contain a large element of fantasy and an admixture of observed truth. In traditional societies, and before the pill, men of course had the power to roam freely, to seduce and abandon. In our more equal and permissive times, men (but women, too) may indeed change partners more readily than our grandparents would have approved. Like women, all too many have bought into the metaphor of the ‘selfish gene’ and expanded it into a template for serial relationships. However, men marry or live in partnerships as often as women do–more often, if one calculates the current tendency for late divorce and men’s greater access to younger generations. (That, indeed, may be the rub!) Nor are many men the rakish Don Juans women seem both obsessed by and–in fantasy, at least–so attracted to. Even that arch-seducer Valmont, at the end of his liaisons dangereuses, finds himself in love with the virtuous Madame de Tourvel, the woman he had set out merely to seduce. Men are, indeed, as complicated as women–and since we serve as their mothers, we would hope they are as capable of loving.
The year following the publication of The Rules a different kind of dating book appeared, this time in Britain. Br
idget Jones’s Diary, a sparkling satire of everyday singleton life, also rose into worldwide bestsellerdom, spawned a sequel and a series of films. Plump, boozy, chain-smoking, foul-mouthed and accident-prone, Bridget Jones is an endearing working woman in her early thirties. Though she loathes the ‘smug marrieds’ in her entourage, she longs for a romantic attachment that will transport her into the married state: after all, she doesn’t want to die alone, her remains to be eaten by some mangy dog. Meanwhile, her diary chronicles her obsessions, her love life, her countless ever broken resolutions to transform herself into the svelte, non-smoking, perfected self who will win Mr Right. There are two men in her sights: her publishing boss, Daniel Cleaver, the deceitful seducer whose charms are impossible to resist despite his ‘fuckwittage’, the emotional tumult his doings cast Bridget into; and Mark Darcy, the upright and uptight human rights lawyer, at first infinitely resistible.
Bridget Jones’s Diary as everyone knows is a contemporary take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, that other surprise hit of the turn of the century, made into an oft-repeated television series first screened in 1995, and a film in 2005. In 2008 came Lost in Austen, another popular television series which has a contemporary young woman, mad about Pride and Prejudice, travelling back in time to the original site of ‘courteous’ love. Post-feminists, it appears, yearn for the weddings Jane Austen provides to culminate a span of courtship, itself replete with pitfalls and hurdles. Americans, Time Magazine noted in 2007, spend $50 billion a year on weddings. An Irish bridal gown website went so far as to use Simone de Beauvoir’s famous adage about the cultural conditioning that made girls into subordinate creatures–‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman’–as advertising copy. The topsy-turvy suggestion here is that a deliciously cream-puff-white wedding is all any girl needs so as to become that now desirable entity, woman–and married, to boot.
All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion Page 10