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For the longest time, The Before Series was my gold standard for love. And I suspect it was for many. A connection built on intellectual banter, interim years of longing, the sparks of a delayed reunion. It made for great cinema, and set greater expectations for love. Then came Before Midnight and broke our hearts. It was a courageous script reflecting the difficult reality that comes years into love. Passion wears thin and the predictability of the other is a buzzkill. Repressed resentments begin to surface; each blames the other for not being able to fully realise other possibilities in their lives. A fulfilling career in the case of Celine, and in Jesse’s case, a present father to his son.
But this end had its foreboding in the second of the trilogy. When ten years after the first magical encounter, Jesse still harbours hopes of running into Celine at his Paris book launch, he is hardly chasing love. He is chasing a fantasy that will get him out of a mundane marriage. And ten years after that, when the magic of a fulfilled fantasy has worn off, he is in the same volatile space with Celine. Full of regret about his son, philandering, writing about the one great love of his life even as he hardly lives up to it.
Jesse has the folly of a great many (anti) heroes — he is caught in stubborn devotion to himself. And sadly, as the grandest emotion of all time has fallen prey to consumerism, there is a version of Jesse manifest in many of us.
As we go looking for love — in itself a self-directed, consumerist drive semi-created by apps such as Tinder, OkCupid, Aisle, etc. — we chase someone with a similar intellectual bent. With a shared vocabulary and worldview to connect over, the degree of debate separating us must be minimum. Take, for instance, this tweet:
"yeah he's cute but what are his critical thinking abilities? his political stance? socioeconomic aspirations? i need answers"
— malaylay (@accessforbidden) November 14, 2014
It pointed to the insufficiency of ‘cuteness’ in evaluating a boy. Cute is suggestive of that instantaneous draw we sometimes experience towards another, not just the superficial creamy layer. The author of the tweet implicitly told us to hold our horses (or hormones?) back and examine, with rational self-interest, the suitability of this attractive individual for ourselves. I held a moment's silence for how a tweet had lifted the idea of love from the realm of instinct.
The new romantic hero, according to Polina Aronson , a sociologist at the University of Applied Sciences, Berlin, approaches his emotions in a methodical, rational way. She refers to Rieff , who in Freud: The Mind of the Moralist (1959), describes him as "shrewd, carefully counting his satisfactions and dissatisfactions, studying unprofitable commitments as the sins most to be avoided".The psychological man, for her, is a romantic technocrat who believes that the application of the right tools at the right time can straighten out the tangled nature of our emotions.
This is the Jesse of the future. Overt with his rationalism, unapologetic, anti-hero.
The good news though is that the root of this higher-than-before narcissistic drive, or more honourably, the service of the self has its beginnings outside of the self. According to sociology at least, it grew out of the pulse produced by the mechanics of a re-oriented capitalism. Sometime around the early 20th Century, capitalism shifted from relying on a strong work ethic and sacredness of labour, a relic of early capitalist modus operandi, to consumerism, i.e. capital to be built by pleasing the consumer. The rise of mass media such as advertising supporting this enterprise encouraged self-gratification. It was to be derived from the consumption of a wide array of products.
Concomitantly, the body moved from being an apparatus of service existing to exert hard work to fulfill higher purposes — nation, family, honour — to one that existed to be pleasured. Think free love of the 60s and Don Draper.
The parallels in love are dangerously similar. The idea of self-sacrifice was intrinsic to love, and endurance. The momentariness of feeling was dismissed in the pursuit of larger moral ideas such as promise and commitment, which shaped the course of love. For those who upheld them, there was immense social validation. Until capitalistic impulses took over, and the romantic self constantly sought an object for its sustenance. Nothing was more sacred than the self. Today’s sonnets, hence, no longer speak about the object of love; they speak of the poet.
If we are to continue upholding the ideal of a lasting love, the self that we're fashioning is irreconcilable with the ideal that we want to reach.
In Why Love Hurts , Eva Illouz writes of a Mollie Dorsey Sanford in 1860. Having recently moved to Colorado with her husband, she felt extremely homesick. But, instead of sharing that with him, she writes about it in her diary. Her homesickness could have been interpreted by her husband as an instance of him failing his role to keep her happy. In order not to disappoint him then, she finds sanctuary in writing. "What makes these [thoughts] foreign to our modern sensibility is the fact that they’re motivated not by her authentic self but by her commitment to her role as a wife... In contrast, modern selves expect each other to be emotionally naked and intimate, but independent".
We can only conjecture if Mollie Sanford was happy in her conjugal life. And if she had a modern counterpart with attendant "liberties", would she be happier? Perhaps they derived comfort in different ways — the latter by her freedom, the former by the validation and social sanction she received. But if we are to continue upholding the ideal of a lasting love, the self that we're fashioning is irreconcilable with the ideal that we want to reach. As an antidote to modern miseries then, let me quote this from Atul Gawande: "Humans need loyalty. It does not necessarily produce happiness, and can even be painful, but we all require devotion to something more than ourselves for our lives to be endurable. Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable. They provide, ultimately, only torment."
