I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Saturday Reflections, I take time out to reflect.
From a Reddit post on r/datingoverforty that I came across this morning:
There has not been one man I have met since I’ve been separated who is like “my equivalent” somebody around my age somebody similarly educated, somebody perhaps divorced with a minor children or adult children like I have who wants to work out and be active and cook and travel a little bit and try new things and just sort of live a normal life ….like there is literally nobody out there like that…. it’s all These randoms….
The comment that there is no man who is like “my equivalent” is such a tell of having swallowed the myth that you need someone pretty much exactly like you, and that when you go to date you are looking for just such a match. You are looking for a kind of commodity that you can purchase with your own fine qualities.
And the later “it’s all These randoms” [with a capitalized These] is just so funny to me.
She’s almost got it! Because it’s exactly a random who she should be looking for, or maybe rather in Byung-Chul Han’s language, the Other. That is, if she is looking for love, versus someone to prop up her own view of herself.
She wraps up her rant on dating with “I have no problem being friends with men or working with men. I actually enjoy men’s company quite a bit but the dating piece Does not seem to be a healthy space.” Speak for yourself, woman! Many people do find it healthy, but not when approached in this way.
All in all, the post impressed me as showing the reckful mindset at work. But also I couldn’t believe how incredibly negative this woman was about the whole thing. And narcissistic, centering herself, which, you might argue, seems reasonable.
In The Agony of Eros, Byung-Chul Han writes:
Depression is a narcissistic malady. It derives from overwrought, pathologically distorted self-reference. The narcissistic-depressive subject has exhausted itself and worn itself down. Without a world to inhabit, it has been abandoned by the Other. Eros and depression are opposites. Eros pulls the subject out of itself, toward the Other. Depression, in contrast, plunges the subject into itself. Today’s narcissistic “achievement-subject” seeks out success above all. Finding success validates the One through the Other. Thereby, the Other is robbed of otherness and degrades into a mirror of the One—a mirror affirming the latter’s image. This logic of recognition ensnares the narcissistic achievement-subject more deeply in the ego. The corollary is success-induced depression: the depressive achievement-subject sinks into, and suffocates in, itself. Eros, in contrast, makes possible experience of the Other’s otherness, which leads the One out of a narcissistic infero. It sets into motion freely willed self-renunciation, freely willed self-evacuation. A singular process of weakening lays hold of the subject of love—which, however, is accompanied by a feeling of strength. This feeling is not the achievement of the One, but the gift of the Other.
I’m not here to diagnose a redditor with depression and narcissism, but I do see evidence of both in the post. The thoroughgoing negativity suggests a depressive mindset if not depression itself, and the demand that she find someone just like herself to date if she’s going to participate puts her self at the center of it all: narcissism.
As I’ve been writing lately, love requires you to negate your self and put down your self-referential fantasies so that you can experience another not as you are but as they are.
To do that requires not just a tweak to your dating approach but rather a wholesale revolution. A paradigm change, to use the language of philosopher Thomas Kuhn.
Perhaps one reason I am so harshly judging what this woman said in this post is because I was doing exactly what she was doing for the ten years I spent looking for a partner after my divorce. I wanted to find my equivalent. But I had better success than she did. I found a handful of men who appeared equivalent to me in education, age, and lifestyle. I didn’t put the requirement on that they must be divorced (at least two of them had never been married) or have children or “wanted to work out” — for those for whom this is important, it seems to be a difficult thing to find! I didn’t expect them to want to cook or travel, though I preferred men who preferred road trips to international trips, like me. I did always look for men who skied but some of the men didn’t, and that was alright, we found other things to do together.
So at least I started not by having such strict requirements as she has. I imagine she thinks her requirements are very loose. But there aren’t that many potential “matches” for a person in the world, if a match must be geographically close, similar age and education, and offering mutual attraction and then you add on that they’re active and like to workout, like to cook, want to travel, and are willing to try new things too. That criterion of mutual attraction shouldn’t be eliminated because who wants to get in a romantic relationship with someone they aren’t attracted to, or who isn’t attracted to them? But that narrows your possibilities down so much that adding almost any other restrictions onto it might make it seem like dating is not worth it.
Though I did find a few men to have relationships with who were my equivalent for the most part the relationships didn’t thrill me. The emotional and physical attraction was lacking. And for the one relationship where it wasn’t, I tried to hard to make my partner over into what I wanted without regard to what he wanted or who he was. I tried to get him to commit to the things I wanted him to commit to. I tried to get him to act like I thought he should, like I would act. I didn’t accept him as a true Other. I accepted him only as Same, as my equivalent. And so we couldn’t make it work.
I don’t regret that, because where I ended up is better. I share that only to illustrate how reckful romance — narcissistic romance that seeks equivalence — fails.
I haven’t yet written about or studied the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), a Lithuanian-born Jewish French philosopher who made ethics, rather than epistemology or ontology, the foundation of his philosophy. His work on the Other and alterity prefigured Han’s philosophy of love, so it might be useful to familiarize myself with it.
Levinas studied with Edmund Husserl (the founder of phenomenology) and Martin Heidegger, whose thinking on Being and thrownness (Geworfenheit) — how we are thrown into our existence without any control over our circumstances — influenced his philosophical thought. Levinas broke with Heidegger over Heidegger’s association with the Nazis, and then made his life’s work an ethical response to Heidegger’s moral failure and justification of totalitarianism.
In his 1961 book Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, Levinas proposes that all ethics derive from a confrontation with and an experience of an other. These others, with whom we interact concretely, provide a gateway into the experience of more abstract Otherness.
He thought that by opening yourself to the Otherness of the other to the spiritual world, the infinity:
To approach the other in conversation is to welcome his expression, in which at each instant he overflows the idea a thought would carry away from it. It is therefore to receive from the Other beyond the capacity of the I, which means exactly: to have the idea of infinity.
Levinas proposed that by being interrupted within the world by the presence of another person you can achieve transcendence, moving towards God, the absolute, infinity, some higher plane of being.
The relation with the Other is not ontology, but metaphysics. It is the very event of transcendence.
This, I think, is what most people want to feel when they seek romantic love: transcendence. They want to lose themselves and detach from the mundanity of their life. They want to feel something divine, something universal, something that shatters them into a million tiny pieces.
Levinas also wrote about motherhood, in Otherwise Than Being (1974). In this late work, he uses it as a metaphor for the deepest form of ethical responsibility, substitution (the self in place of the Other):
In maternity, the self is hostage to the other. The self is exposed, without any possibility of retreat, to the other.
For Levinas, the mother’s relation to the child exemplifies the non-reciprocal, asymmetrical structure of ethics. In motherhood, the “I” gives without expecting return.
Beyond that, motherhood and fatherhood provide you with a chance to meet the Other and transcend your reality. Parents who can’t experience their children as Other are doomed to narcissism. Parents who drop their selves and egos so that they may contact their children as Others can touch the infinite that way.
I wrote yesterday about how putting your concepts onto your experience of another flattens them out and leaves you without a true experience of that person. And I’ve mentioned more than once that I’m working on a chapter for my book tentatively titled Reality over Fantasy and Delusion.
That doesn’t mean I think there is an objective truth or some sort of objective reality outside of our experience of the world. I am more a pragmatist or a phenomenologist. What’s real is what we experience, and what it makes sense to believe (what is pragmatic, that is).
Nevertheless, I am finding it useful to propose that when you interact with someone you do so not from your preconceptions and conceptions of them but rather seek to experience them as they are, the reality of them not your fantasy of them.
On Thursday, when Ray had a minor outpatient surgical procedure. In pre-op, the nurse measured his heart rate. It was around 50, and she became alarmed. She said maybe he needed an EKG, and asked about his cardiovascular history.
He said, “oops I was just consciously relaxing and lowering it… take it again.” And then it was around 68.
After surgery he didn’t take any ibuprofen or Tylenol or the oxycodone that they gave him. He didn’t need it or want it. Meanwhile, I was taking 800mg ibuprofen and 1000mg Tylenol every four hours or so for my bruised ribs, sore shoulder, and smashed thumb.
This is an example of how thinking “Ray is a 69-year-old man” could cloud my experience of him and make me think he is not healthy. Instead, I am trying to experience him just as he is, without concepts like his age. I experienced him Thursday as tough, resistant to pain, and healthy. He was also worried and vulnerable about the possible complications of general anesthesia — that was important to observe too, because after you know someone for a time your judgment and perceptions of them can harden. I don’t want to let my experiences of him as tough and capable keep me from seeing other sides to him too.
I am so fortunate that I am building a relationship with an Other at the same time that I’m studying these concepts, and formulating them into a philosophy of romance and love.