Yesterday I watched Inglorious Basterds – which was awesome – and afterwards I had a beer a local irish pub. Apart from noticing the nice detail that there were two tables with metal people, we also talked about polyamory and love. First off, I was told “polyamory” is wrong. It should be either “multiamory” or “polyphilia”. That thought never occurred to me, but it does make some sense. Anyhow lingual purity, especially given two dead languages, is an unrealistic and silly demand anyhow.
But I do have a serious point to make. It has to do with the question what love is how we recognize something as love. There are, I think, two plausible answers to this: A phenomenological answer that focuses on private experience and a sociological answer that focuses on the de facto social structures that two or more people construct by “doing love”. We recognize roles and structures in our society by being engaged in and observing certain repeated, structurally distinct behavioral patterns. These may be as simple as the bank teller by where (s)he usually sits and as complex as recognizing from posture, expression and subtle words that someone is trying to flirt with you.
Love as a love relationship is a socially constructed reality, it consists of nothing else but repeated actions, formed and fulfilled expectations and the understanding that this whole package “yes indeed is a love relationship.” As a society, we aim to structure our common social reality in ways that make it easy for us to navigate it. That means, we strife for recognizability. It’s important that relevant aspects of the social reality – such as who are your betters, who is the doctor and with whom can you safely mate – can be easily spotted and interpreted correctly. As with any social construct, we hand the ability to engage in its construction and to navigate the social world that it generates on to our children in the many ways that children learn from their parents. I would suppose it’s mostly emulation, but I’m no developmental psychologist.
I guess, by now you see where this is going: In my 30 years of life, I have learned and internalized how a love relationship looks, what kind of behavior patterns should recur in it and to find deviations from that form mildly disturbing. While my expectations are probably less conservative than those of the majority, I cannot deny – and neither can you, I’m sure – that there are certain taken for granted things that you use as heuristics in spotting who’s got a love relationship with whom and how it’s going.
And in many ways, the relationship I’m in does not conform to that.
On the other side of this divide is what you could call inner experience if you want to. But it’s not just “how I feel” or anything esoterical about soul-mates or what not. This, too is an empirical category, but it is not concerned with a social construct “out there”, but with myself. It is about me and my behavior and emotional experience. What I experience here is in parts emotional: how I feel towards Kitty in various situations – it’s not like there is one feeling throughout, but it’s a fractured multiplicity that only through cognition gets integrated into a whole – love. It is also an observation of my own behavior – how I act towards her in various situations. I think an important marker was sticking with her during the whole affair with the threat. Much more than a sense of why I did, the exprience of doing it makes me see that I love her. You could say that by observing myself acting in accordance with my idea of how a lover acts towards another – and more specificly how I act towards those I love – I find reassurance that this complex of emotional experiences does indeed constitute that I love her.
Thus, while I feel very strongly that I love Kitty, I have problems seeing our relationship as a love relationship as I habitually and unquestioningly “define” it. I think that this mostly due to three things: Polyamory – which was not even in my dictionary before a couple of months ago, the absence of sex and – at times – tenderness and intimacy and finally, going back to our early time together, BDSM. I have spoken about the first two parts extensively and I think it should be obvious why that would be difficult to integrate into any construct that I would want to call a love relationship. The last part is less obvious and I’m not sure how to best explain it. But I’ll try.
Before meeting Kitty, I’ve been in a seven year relationship, where I always wanted BDSM, but it was never part of it. I had acquired certain anticipations regarding “what women want” in a relationship, based on what the nurse wanted. These included “no BDSM”. During the early days of my relationship with Kitty, we would try to have a D/s in our relationship and it was quite difficult for me to get into that, to learn that kind of thing. And before I managed to do that, the problems that lead to the absence of sex started to creep in. Leaving me with half an experience of how it should work and in a difficult situation with a difficult girlfriend in which to complete that learning.
So much for the analysis, now what do I make of it?
For one thing, I do think that coming to terms with how a love can look in a relationship is on the agenda. I’m not sure how it will turn out, but I don’t think that my learned pattern is what I will always be stuck with. On the other hand, there are things that might turn out to be important to me that I’ve never considered before. I do think that I will come to some kind of integration and idea of a love relationship, that will work within the polyamory framework that I seems I will move within. And as far as BDSM goes: “difficult” might be just another word for rewarding.
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