limerence

rational loving: serial monogamy and the failure of limerence

(inspired by a heated discussion about doing humanities research, and specifically about the nature of romantic 'love' vs modern 'relationships')

One may neither map nor organize desire: indeed, desire is that which subverts all organization and mapping. The heart bears no compass, love bears no measure. If you want to destroy desire, the quickest and surest way is through interpretation, especially through interpretation that suggests limerence 'results from fluctuations in the levels of various neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine.' Nothing destroys the possibility of humanity's survival, as humane, than the crude literalization and 'enumeration' of human attributes by brain or 'cognitive' science. Cognitive science is little more than glorified, scientifically justified craniology that serves efficient 'quick fixes' for human problems over and against more creative, though inefficient, radical solutions like the 'talking cure.'

Like dreams, desire and the mind are metaphorical in their communications. People, things, and actions in dreams have nothing to do with real, 'literal' things: they are thoughts that have undergone transformation through what we call 'unconscious processes' -- metaphorizations -- like condensation and displacement. When one wakes and tries to remember the dream conscious processes take over and begin to organize and interpret the dream, corrupting it. Yet we are all too ready to literalize the content of dreams, since we believe that literalized information is more useful to us than 'mysterious,' metaphorical information.

Desire dissolves, and in love, mutual desire for the other makes two identities 'melt' into one. Limerence, or infatuation, or, as Freud called it 'the overestimation of the erotic object,' is necessary to desire's disintegration of the individual and her will. If, as is so often the case, there is a 'double standard' and only one partner dissolves, the 'stabile' partner holds the upper hand. (By using the term 'stabile' i am not presuming that the individual who is not in love is a whole, integrated being without radical psychic contradictions -- a splitting that is the basis of psychoanalysis.) The double-standard is usually justified by reference to 'alpha - beta' roles and other totally fabricated domination schemes -- e.g., 'social darwinism.' What results is the master-slave or parasite-host relationship, a perversion of true romantic love. The melder will form an outline of the 'stabile' partner, becoming a mere extension of the stabile's will, but the melded lover doesn't even care ... s/he will happily be 'wrong' to remain with un-melded lover. This situation is culturally specific and corrigible: people could, within the right social conditions (not present conditions, based on individualistic, competitive consumption) even have polygamous meldings, although these might be similar to the Buddhist notion of 'Metta,' whose object is to cultivate loving kindness (love without attachment, non-exclusive love) towards all sentient beings. Perhaps this is also essential to the dyadic meldings I am referring to in romantic love: notions like 'attachment' and 'exclusivity' lose their meaning when one's identity is dissolved. This might explain why, in the double-standard situation I've described, the melder doesn't care whether or not her partner has also melded.

One does not 'build' a love like one builds a relationship. The metaphor doesn't hold for love which, when it is not harnessed to and thus perverted by the practical exigencies of life, doesn't build human relations but contrarily dismantles them. It would be useful to look at the metaphors that other cultures use to communicate about love.

Boredom and novelty are essential to consumer culture because we need to have people desiring new commodities and disposing of old commodities in a process called 'planned obsolescence.' Serial monogamy is not primarily a biological condition: rather, it is an economic one, having to do with housekeeping, budgeting, the oikos. It's is primarily a consumer/product relation. Women are no stranger to the fact that their bodies and their emotions are commodities, to be sold and traded within their culture. Our modern relationships embody that fact.

Human sexuality is not explained by biology, nor can it be illuminated by the 'cookie-cutter' assumptions of certain types of human science (e.g., anthropology, sociology, etc.). Human attributes are culturally determined, and so culturally specific. Biology and mainstream social science project a model upon the reality of radically different societies -- what we call the 'other' -- then they confuse that model with the reality itself. The question about whether we have access to the reality of cultural experience is moot; if we do, neither the scientific method, nor the participant-observer methodologies of social science allow more than only remote, clumsy and woefully incomplete interpretations.

We project our own culture's conceits onto the 'biological real' or onto other cultures through our methods of study, and then we use the results of those studies to tautologically 'explain' or more accurately, to justify our own culture. The largely unquestioned presumption about human reality and experience being 'best understood' through scientific models of the behaviors of other species is simply dead wrong. Further, we can not even, with any degree of certainty, understand our own culture through 'translations' of other cultures. Even more radically: no matter how we try, we will never 'understand,' in the rationalistic sense of the word, humans and human experience. We might make conjectures, we might allude, we might write poetry but none of it, not science nor art, will ever reveal any objective truth about humanity. What our models do is allow us to justify the action of the moment: 'I am promiscuous due to some biological predisposition.' 'I am unethical because I am primarily an animal, a biological or material rather than social, abstract being.' It is all very comforting to us as we make our daily compromises in our pursuit of a comfortable survival.

Romantic love is not, as many seem to believe, a phenomenon restricted to recent history, although we usually map romantic love back to the Middle Ages, where Church officials exerted it as a method of control over 'errant' knights, who were unpredictable and unmanageable. But we can find references to romantic love at least as far back as Egyptian mythology where it has, like its Arthurian version from the Middle Ages, religious overtones. We may go back even further, to the Sumerian myth of Inanna and Dumuzi. From Isis and Osiris, to Psyche and Eros, to Tristan and Iseult, romantic love has been metaphorized. The self-dissolving practice of romantic love is as old as human culture, and indeed, I would say that is the keystone of culture and the humaneness of the human animal.

by Joebess
http://joebess.vox.com/library/post/rational-loving-serial-monogamy-and-the-failure-of-limerence.html