I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
As I write a chapter about the reckful strategy of choosing someone who is socially “right” for you compared to the reckless strategy of choosing someone because they might challenge you, or change you, or bring joy to you, I’ve come across the existentialist idea of bad faith.
Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea of bad faith (mauvaise foi) was developed in Being and Nothingness (1943). With it, he describes how you might engage in self-deception and avoid the full weight of your freedom and your decisions.
Bad faith is when someone denies their own freedom and responsibility by identifying too closely with a role, excuse, or external definition of themselves. For Sartre, human beings are “condemned to be free”: you can’t escape the necessity of choosing your actions. No fixed essence tells you who you are. Bad faith is a way of attempting to flee from this unsettling and frightening freedom.
If you choose a partner based on who your parents will approve of, or who you think is socially appropriate for you, without regard for the life you want to lead, you are acting in bad faith.
Why might you choose a partner in bad faith like this?
- Escape from freedom — Choosing safety over risk. Choosing the “good match” can relieve the anxiety of freedom. This can feel like not having to choose, because you just eliminate the non-socially approved from consideration. But you are still choosing even though you are pretending otherwise.
- Fear of judgment — when you weigh the enjoyment and growth you might get from choosing for yourself against what other people will think, you might decide you’d rather not be subject to other people’s potentially poor opinions of you and your choice.
- Desire for a specific identity — you may choose the partner who reflects the identity you wish you had versus one that is more true to you.
- Fear of the unknown — choosing the socially appropriate partner may feel safe compared to choosing the challenge and instability that might come from choosing someone more outside what you and your social group understand.
- Attachment to specifics of yourself (your facticity, in Sartre’s terminology) — you decide who’s approprate for you based on your age, or your financial situation, or your skin color. “Someone like me doesn’t belong with someone like that,” you might think. You reduce your self to circumstance, and ignore the possibility of transcendence.
- Avoidance of anxiety — an approved partner might feel safer and more likely to bring about the comfortable lifestyle you hope for.
- Potential for social rewards — the approved partner might come with external validations: status, wealth, family harmony. These can be tempting substitutes for inner alignment.
It’s not inauthentic in and of itself to pick someone who you would receive social approval for. It’s only choosing them while lying to yourself about why. If you freely acknowledge, “I want safety and approval more than excitement,” that could be authentic. But it’s bad faith when someone says or thinks, “I had no choice, this is what I had to do.”
In authentic love, as defined by Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir:
- Each person sees the other not as an object or role, but as a subject (Buber’s I-Thou relationship).
- Each person has freedom within the relationship.
- There is always a tension between wanting closeness and acknowledging separateness. This tension is permanent and creative.
- Meaning comes from shared projects, without eliminating or erasing individual projects.
- There is lucid honesty. There is no pretending, “I will always feel the same.” Instead, you can only say, “feelings may change, but I choose you now.”
Beauvoir especially believed that love would be authentic when it is a reciprocal recognition of two freedoms. She grounded love in reciprocity and shared projects.
In her Ethics of Ambiguity, she insisted we must accept the ambiguity of being both fact (embodied, situated, limited) and transcendence (free, open, and creative). In love, this means acknowledging at once the desire for union and the inescapable separateness. Authentic love doesn’t seek to resolve or deny this tension but rather lives within it.