79
Romance regimes: how love in the West differs from love in Russia
Love in the West is consumer love – we choose a partner to give us what we think we need. But the Russians are different.
In 1996, I left Russia for the first time to spend one academic year in the United States. It was a prestigious grant; I was 16, and my parents were very excited about my potential to go to Yale or Harvard. The only thing I could think of was finding an American boyfriend.
In my desk, I kept a precious sample of American life sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York the year before - an article about birth control pills ripped from American girl magazine Seventeen. I read it while lying in bed and felt my throat dry. Looking at these glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in another country, I would turn into someone beautiful, whom boys would look at. I wish I would need this kind of pill too.
Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and got a stack of Seventeen magazines that was taller than me. I set out to find out exactly what happens between American boys and girls when they start to like each other, and what exactly I should say and do to get to the stage where I need the pill. Armed with a text editor and pen, I searched for words and expressions related to American courtship behavior and wrote them out on separate cards, as my English teacher taught me to do with words in St. Petersburg.
I soon realized that there were several distinct stages in the relationship life cycle shown in this magazine. First, you get caught up in a guy who's usually a year or two older than you. Then you ask about him to see if he's "pretty" or "ass." If he's "pretty," then Seventeen gives you the go-ahead to "cross" him a couple of times before you ask him out. During this process, check the box against a few points: Did you feel that the young man “respected your needs?” Was it comfortable for you to “defend your rights”—namely, refuse or initiate “physical contact”? Did you like the "communication"? If any of these items are left unmarked, you should “drop” this guy and start looking for a replacement until you get a “better material”. Then you start kissing on the couch and gradually start taking pills.
Sitting in the American school library, I looked at dozens of my handwritten notes and saw a gulf between the ideals of love I grew up with and the exotics I now faced. Where I was from, boys and girls "fall in love" and "meet"; the rest was a mystery. The teenage drama film on which my generation of Russians grew up - the socialist counterpart of Romeo and Juliet, shot in the Moscow region (we are talking about the 1980 film You Never Dreamed) - was charmingly unspecific about the explanations for love. To express his feelings for the heroine, the protagonist recited the multiplication table: "Three times three is nine, three times six is eighteen, and that's amazing, because after eighteen we're getting married!"
What else can I say? Even our 1000-page Russian novels could not compete in complexity with the romantic system of Seventeen magazine. When countesses and officers became involved in love affairs, they were not particularly eloquent; they did things before they said anything, and then, if they did not die as a result of their risky ventures, they would silently look around and scratch their heads for explanations.
Even though I didn't have a degree in sociology yet, it turns out that what I was doing with Seventeen magazines is exactly what sociologists who study emotion do to understand how we shape our view of love. By analyzing the language of popular magazines, television series, books of practical advice and interviewing men and women from different countries, scientists such as Eva Illuz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have clearly shown that our ideas about love are influenced by powerful political, economic and social factors. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we call romantic regimes: emotional behavior systems that influence how we talk about our feelings, determine “normal” behaviors, and establish who is fit for love and who is not.
The clash of romantic regimes is what I experienced that day sitting in the school library. The girl, following the instructions of Seventeen magazine, was trained to choose who she would get close to. She logically based her emotions on “needs” and “rights” and rejected relationships that didn’t fit them. She was raised under Choice Mode. On the contrary, Russian classical literature (which, when I came of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country) described how people succumbed to love, as if it were a supernatural force, even when it was destructive to calmness, sanity and life itself. In other words, I grew up in Destiny Mode.
These regimes are based on opposite principles. Each of them in its own way turns love into a severe test. In most countries of Western culture (including modern Russia) Choice mode dominates all forms of romantic relationships. It seems that the reasons for this lie in the ethical principles of neoliberal democratic societies, which perceive freedom as the highest good. However, there are good reasons to reconsider our beliefs and see how they can actually harm us.
In order to understand the triumph of choice in the romantic realm, we must view it in the context of the broader appeal of the Renaissance to the individual. The consumer is more important than the producer. In religion, the believer is more important than the church. And in love, the object gradually became less important than its subject. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, looking at Laura’s golden curls, called her “divine” and believed that she was the most perfect proof of God’s existence. 600 years later, another man, blinded by the brilliance of another heap of golden curls - the hero of Thomas Mann Gustav von Aschenbach - came to the conclusion that it was he, and not the beautiful Tadzio, was the standard of love: "And here, the crafty courtier, he expressed a sharp thought: the lover is closer to the deity than the beloved, for of these two only lives God - the finest thought that ever came to man's mind, the thought from which came the beginning of all deceitiousness, the secret sweetness of Thomas, of all love." Translated by N. Man.
This observation from Mann's novella Death in Venice (1912) embodies a great cultural leap that occurred sometime in the early twentieth century. Somehow the Lover moved the Lover from the foreground. The divine, unknown, unattainable Other is no longer the subject of our love stories. Instead, we are interested in ourselves, with all the childhood traumas, erotic dreams, and character traits. Exploring and protecting the fragile self by teaching it to choose its attachments carefully is the main goal of the Choice Mode—a goal achieved through a popularized version of psychotherapeutic techniques.
The most important requirement for choosing is not to have many options, but to be able to make practical and independent choices, while being aware of your needs and acting on your own interests. Unlike the lovers of the past, who lost control and behaved like lost children, the new romantic hero approaches his emotions methodically and rationally. He visits a psychoanalyst, reads self-improvement books and participates in couples therapy. What’s more, they can learn love languages, use neurolinguistic programming, or rate their feelings on a scale of one to ten. Philosopher Philip Riff called this type of personality a “psychological person.” In his book Freud: The Moralist Mind (1959), Riff describes him as "an anti-heroic, calculating, careful account of what he is pleased with and what he is not, treating relationships that are not profitable as sins to be avoided." A psychological person is a romantic technocrat who believes that applying the right remedies at the right time can unravel the confused nature of our emotions.
This, of course, applies to both sexes: the psychological woman follows these rules, too, or rather the Time-Tested Secrets to Winning the Heart of a Real Man (1995). Here are some of the time-tested secrets offered by the book’s authors Ellen Fein and Sherry Schneider:
Rule 2. Do not talk to a man first (and do not offer to dance).
Rule 3. Do not look at a man for a long time or talk too much.
Rule 4. Don't meet him halfway and split the bill on a date.
Rule 5. Don't call him and rarely call him back.
Rule 6. Always finish the phone conversation first.
The message of this book is simple: since “hunting” women is written in the genetic code of men, if women show even the slightest share of participation or interest, it disturbs the biological balance, “castrates” the man and reduces the woman to the status of an unhappy abandoned female.
This book has been criticized for its almost idiotic degree of biological determinism. However, new publications continue to come out, and the “hard-to-reach” femininity that they promote has come to be found in many topical advice regarding love relationships. Why is the book still so popular? The reason for this can undoubtedly be found in its main position:
“One of the greatest rewards for following the Rules will be that you learn to love only those who love you. If you follow the advice offered in this book, you will learn to take care of yourself. <...> You will be busy with your interests, hobbies and relationships, not chasing men. <...> You will love with your head, not just your heart.
With Choice Mode, no-man's love territory - a minefield of unanswered calls, ambiguous emails, deleted profiles and embarrassing pauses - should be minimized. No more “what if” and “why” thinking. No more tears. No suicides. No poetry, novels, sonatas, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. Psychological man needs one thing: steady progress toward a healthy relationship between two independent individuals that meet each other’s emotional needs—until a new choice separates them.
The correctness of this triumph of choice is proved by sociobiological arguments. Being a lifelong prisoner of bad relationships is for Neanderthals, we're told. Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and the world’s most famous love researcher, believes that we have grown out of our millennial agricultural past and no longer need monogamous relationships. Evolution itself is now prompting us to look for different partners for different needs, if not simultaneously, then at different stages of life. Fisher praises the current lack of commitment in a relationship: all of us, ideally, should spend at least 18 months with someone to see if they fit us and whether we are a good couple. With the ubiquitous availability of contraceptives, unwanted pregnancies and diseases are a thing of the past, and the birth of offspring is completely separated from romantic courtship, so we can, without haste, arrange a trial period for a potential partner and not fear the consequences.
Compared to other historical views of love, Choice Mode looks like a waterproof jacket next to a wool shirt. His most tempting promise is that love should not hurt. According to the logic that Kipnis demonstrates in Against Love (2003), the only type of suffering that Choice Mode recognizes is the possible productive strain of “working on relationships”: tears shed in a family psychologist’s office, bad wedding nights, daily attention to each other’s needs, frustration from breaking up with someone who is “not right” for you. You can overwork the muscles, but you can't get injured. By turning broken hearts into troublemakers of their own, popular advice gives rise to a new form of social hierarchy: emotional stratification based on the false identification of maturity with self-sufficiency.
And that’s why, Illus says, twenty-first-century love still hurts. First, we are deprived of the authority of romantic duelists and suicides of past centuries. They were at least recognized by a society that based its assessments on the notion of love as a mad, inexplicable force that even the best minds could not resist. Today, longing for specific eyes (and legs) is no longer a worthy occupation, and therefore love anguish is exacerbated by the awareness of their own social and psychological inadequacy. From the point of view of the Mode of Choice, the suffering Emmas, Werthers and Annas of the nineteenth century are not just inept lovers – they are psychologically ignorant, if not outmoded evolutionary material. Relationship consultant Mark Manson, who has two million followers online, writes:
“Our culture idealizes the romantic victim. Show me almost any romantic movie, and I’ll find you there an unhappy and dissatisfied character who treats himself like garbage for the sake of loving someone.
In Choice Mode, loving too much, too early, too clearly is a sign of infantilism. All of this demonstrates a frightening willingness to give up self-interest, so important in our culture.
Second, and more importantly, Choice Mode is blind to structural constraints that make some people unwilling or unable to choose to the same degree as others. This is not just because of the unequal distribution of what British sociologist Katherine Hakeem calls “erotic capital” (simply put, we are not all equally beautiful). In fact, the biggest problem with choice is that entire categories of people can be at a disadvantage because of it.
Illus, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues convincingly that the Mode of Choice in its individualism stigmatizes serious romantic intentions as “excessive love,” that is, love to the detriment of self-interest. Although there are many unhappy men who are despised for their “need for others” and “inability to let go of the past,” women fall into the category of “codependent” and “immature.” Regardless of class and racial factors, all of them are trained to be self-sufficient: not to “love too much”, “live for themselves” (as in the above “Rules”).
The problem is that no pleasant bath can replace a loving look or a long-awaited phone call, much less give you a baby - whatever Cosmo says about it. Of course, you can do in vitro fertilization and become a surprisingly mature, stunningly independent single mother of frisky triplets. But the greatest gift of love, the recognition of one’s worth as a person, is essentially a social thing. You need a significant other for you. It takes a lot of Chardonnay to get around this simple fact.
But perhaps the greatest problem with Choice Mode is its erroneous understanding of maturity as complete self-sufficiency. Attachment is considered infantile. The desire for recognition is called dependence on others. Intimacy should not violate personal boundaries. Although we are constantly required to be responsible for ourselves, responsibility for our loved ones is discouraged: after all, our interference in their lives in the form of unsolicited advice or suggestions for change can hinder their personal growth and self-discovery. In the midst of too many optimization scenarios and failures, we are confronted with the worst manifestation of Choice Mode: self-admiration without self-sacrifice.
In my homeland, however, the problem is the opposite: self-sacrifice is often done without any introspection at all. Julia Lerner, an Israeli sociologist of emotions at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, recently conducted a study on how Russians talk about love. The aim was to find out whether the country’s post-communist neoliberal turn had begun to narrow the gap between Seventeen magazine and Tolstoy’s novel. The answer is, not really.
After analyzing discussions on various television talk shows, the content of the Russian press, and conducting interviews, she found that for Russians, love remains “a destiny, a moral act and a value; it cannot be resisted, it requires sacrifice and involves suffering and pain.” Indeed, while the concept of maturity that underpins Choice Mode sees romantic suffering as an aberration and a sign of bad decisions, Russians see maturity as the ability to endure that very pain to the point of absurdity.
A middle-class American who falls in love with a married woman will be advised to break up with this lady and spend 50 hours on therapy. A Russian in a similar situation will break into the house and pull her by the hand, right from the stove with boiling borscht, past crying children and her husband, frozen with a joystick in his hands. Sometimes things turn out well: I know a couple who have been happily living for 15 years since he took her away from a family New Year celebration. But in most cases, fate mode leads to disorder.
Russia has more marriages, divorces and abortions per capita than any other developed country. This demonstrates an intention to act on emotions against all odds, often at the expense of one’s own comfort. Russian love is often accompanied by alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and abandoned children — side effects of unthought-out lives. It seems that relying on fate every time you fall in love is not such a good alternative to overselectivity.
But in order to heal the ills of our culture, we do not necessarily have to abandon the principle of choice altogether. Instead, we must dare to choose the unknown, take uncalculated risks, and be vulnerable. By vulnerability, I do not mean flirtatious manifestations of weakness in order to test compatibility with a partner—I ask for existential vulnerability, the return of love to its true mysterious appearance: the appearance of an unpredictable force that always takes you by surprise.
If understanding maturity as self-sufficiency is so detrimental to how we love in Choice Mode, then that understanding should be redefined. To be truly adults, we must embrace the unpredictability of loving others. We must dare to cross these personal boundaries and be one step ahead of ourselves; maybe not at Russian speed, but still run a little faster than we used to.
So make loud declarations of love. Live with someone without being absolutely sure you’re ready for it. Grumble at your partner for no reason and let him grumble back for nothing, because we are all human. Have a baby at the wrong time. Finally, we must regain our right to pain. Let us not be afraid to suffer for love. As Brene Brown, a sociologist who studies vulnerability and shame at the University of Houston, suggests, perhaps "our ability to keep the heart whole can never be greater than our willingness to let it break." Instead of worrying about our integrity, we need to learn to share ourselves with others and finally recognize that we all need each other, even if the author of Seventeen magazine calls it “codependency.” published
Credit Pauline Aronson
P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness – together we change the world!
Join us on Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki
Source: vk.com/public80512191?w=page-80512191_49854815
In 1996, I left Russia for the first time to spend one academic year in the United States. It was a prestigious grant; I was 16, and my parents were very excited about my potential to go to Yale or Harvard. The only thing I could think of was finding an American boyfriend.
In my desk, I kept a precious sample of American life sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York the year before - an article about birth control pills ripped from American girl magazine Seventeen. I read it while lying in bed and felt my throat dry. Looking at these glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in another country, I would turn into someone beautiful, whom boys would look at. I wish I would need this kind of pill too.
Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and got a stack of Seventeen magazines that was taller than me. I set out to find out exactly what happens between American boys and girls when they start to like each other, and what exactly I should say and do to get to the stage where I need the pill. Armed with a text editor and pen, I searched for words and expressions related to American courtship behavior and wrote them out on separate cards, as my English teacher taught me to do with words in St. Petersburg.
I soon realized that there were several distinct stages in the relationship life cycle shown in this magazine. First, you get caught up in a guy who's usually a year or two older than you. Then you ask about him to see if he's "pretty" or "ass." If he's "pretty," then Seventeen gives you the go-ahead to "cross" him a couple of times before you ask him out. During this process, check the box against a few points: Did you feel that the young man “respected your needs?” Was it comfortable for you to “defend your rights”—namely, refuse or initiate “physical contact”? Did you like the "communication"? If any of these items are left unmarked, you should “drop” this guy and start looking for a replacement until you get a “better material”. Then you start kissing on the couch and gradually start taking pills.
Sitting in the American school library, I looked at dozens of my handwritten notes and saw a gulf between the ideals of love I grew up with and the exotics I now faced. Where I was from, boys and girls "fall in love" and "meet"; the rest was a mystery. The teenage drama film on which my generation of Russians grew up - the socialist counterpart of Romeo and Juliet, shot in the Moscow region (we are talking about the 1980 film You Never Dreamed) - was charmingly unspecific about the explanations for love. To express his feelings for the heroine, the protagonist recited the multiplication table: "Three times three is nine, three times six is eighteen, and that's amazing, because after eighteen we're getting married!"
What else can I say? Even our 1000-page Russian novels could not compete in complexity with the romantic system of Seventeen magazine. When countesses and officers became involved in love affairs, they were not particularly eloquent; they did things before they said anything, and then, if they did not die as a result of their risky ventures, they would silently look around and scratch their heads for explanations.
Even though I didn't have a degree in sociology yet, it turns out that what I was doing with Seventeen magazines is exactly what sociologists who study emotion do to understand how we shape our view of love. By analyzing the language of popular magazines, television series, books of practical advice and interviewing men and women from different countries, scientists such as Eva Illuz, Laura Kipnis and Frank Furedi have clearly shown that our ideas about love are influenced by powerful political, economic and social factors. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we call romantic regimes: emotional behavior systems that influence how we talk about our feelings, determine “normal” behaviors, and establish who is fit for love and who is not.
The clash of romantic regimes is what I experienced that day sitting in the school library. The girl, following the instructions of Seventeen magazine, was trained to choose who she would get close to. She logically based her emotions on “needs” and “rights” and rejected relationships that didn’t fit them. She was raised under Choice Mode. On the contrary, Russian classical literature (which, when I came of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country) described how people succumbed to love, as if it were a supernatural force, even when it was destructive to calmness, sanity and life itself. In other words, I grew up in Destiny Mode.
These regimes are based on opposite principles. Each of them in its own way turns love into a severe test. In most countries of Western culture (including modern Russia) Choice mode dominates all forms of romantic relationships. It seems that the reasons for this lie in the ethical principles of neoliberal democratic societies, which perceive freedom as the highest good. However, there are good reasons to reconsider our beliefs and see how they can actually harm us.
In order to understand the triumph of choice in the romantic realm, we must view it in the context of the broader appeal of the Renaissance to the individual. The consumer is more important than the producer. In religion, the believer is more important than the church. And in love, the object gradually became less important than its subject. In the fourteenth century, Petrarch, looking at Laura’s golden curls, called her “divine” and believed that she was the most perfect proof of God’s existence. 600 years later, another man, blinded by the brilliance of another heap of golden curls - the hero of Thomas Mann Gustav von Aschenbach - came to the conclusion that it was he, and not the beautiful Tadzio, was the standard of love: "And here, the crafty courtier, he expressed a sharp thought: the lover is closer to the deity than the beloved, for of these two only lives God - the finest thought that ever came to man's mind, the thought from which came the beginning of all deceitiousness, the secret sweetness of Thomas, of all love." Translated by N. Man.
This observation from Mann's novella Death in Venice (1912) embodies a great cultural leap that occurred sometime in the early twentieth century. Somehow the Lover moved the Lover from the foreground. The divine, unknown, unattainable Other is no longer the subject of our love stories. Instead, we are interested in ourselves, with all the childhood traumas, erotic dreams, and character traits. Exploring and protecting the fragile self by teaching it to choose its attachments carefully is the main goal of the Choice Mode—a goal achieved through a popularized version of psychotherapeutic techniques.
The most important requirement for choosing is not to have many options, but to be able to make practical and independent choices, while being aware of your needs and acting on your own interests. Unlike the lovers of the past, who lost control and behaved like lost children, the new romantic hero approaches his emotions methodically and rationally. He visits a psychoanalyst, reads self-improvement books and participates in couples therapy. What’s more, they can learn love languages, use neurolinguistic programming, or rate their feelings on a scale of one to ten. Philosopher Philip Riff called this type of personality a “psychological person.” In his book Freud: The Moralist Mind (1959), Riff describes him as "an anti-heroic, calculating, careful account of what he is pleased with and what he is not, treating relationships that are not profitable as sins to be avoided." A psychological person is a romantic technocrat who believes that applying the right remedies at the right time can unravel the confused nature of our emotions.
This, of course, applies to both sexes: the psychological woman follows these rules, too, or rather the Time-Tested Secrets to Winning the Heart of a Real Man (1995). Here are some of the time-tested secrets offered by the book’s authors Ellen Fein and Sherry Schneider:
Rule 2. Do not talk to a man first (and do not offer to dance).
Rule 3. Do not look at a man for a long time or talk too much.
Rule 4. Don't meet him halfway and split the bill on a date.
Rule 5. Don't call him and rarely call him back.
Rule 6. Always finish the phone conversation first.
The message of this book is simple: since “hunting” women is written in the genetic code of men, if women show even the slightest share of participation or interest, it disturbs the biological balance, “castrates” the man and reduces the woman to the status of an unhappy abandoned female.
This book has been criticized for its almost idiotic degree of biological determinism. However, new publications continue to come out, and the “hard-to-reach” femininity that they promote has come to be found in many topical advice regarding love relationships. Why is the book still so popular? The reason for this can undoubtedly be found in its main position:
“One of the greatest rewards for following the Rules will be that you learn to love only those who love you. If you follow the advice offered in this book, you will learn to take care of yourself. <...> You will be busy with your interests, hobbies and relationships, not chasing men. <...> You will love with your head, not just your heart.
With Choice Mode, no-man's love territory - a minefield of unanswered calls, ambiguous emails, deleted profiles and embarrassing pauses - should be minimized. No more “what if” and “why” thinking. No more tears. No suicides. No poetry, novels, sonatas, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. Psychological man needs one thing: steady progress toward a healthy relationship between two independent individuals that meet each other’s emotional needs—until a new choice separates them.
The correctness of this triumph of choice is proved by sociobiological arguments. Being a lifelong prisoner of bad relationships is for Neanderthals, we're told. Helen Fisher, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and the world’s most famous love researcher, believes that we have grown out of our millennial agricultural past and no longer need monogamous relationships. Evolution itself is now prompting us to look for different partners for different needs, if not simultaneously, then at different stages of life. Fisher praises the current lack of commitment in a relationship: all of us, ideally, should spend at least 18 months with someone to see if they fit us and whether we are a good couple. With the ubiquitous availability of contraceptives, unwanted pregnancies and diseases are a thing of the past, and the birth of offspring is completely separated from romantic courtship, so we can, without haste, arrange a trial period for a potential partner and not fear the consequences.
Compared to other historical views of love, Choice Mode looks like a waterproof jacket next to a wool shirt. His most tempting promise is that love should not hurt. According to the logic that Kipnis demonstrates in Against Love (2003), the only type of suffering that Choice Mode recognizes is the possible productive strain of “working on relationships”: tears shed in a family psychologist’s office, bad wedding nights, daily attention to each other’s needs, frustration from breaking up with someone who is “not right” for you. You can overwork the muscles, but you can't get injured. By turning broken hearts into troublemakers of their own, popular advice gives rise to a new form of social hierarchy: emotional stratification based on the false identification of maturity with self-sufficiency.
And that’s why, Illus says, twenty-first-century love still hurts. First, we are deprived of the authority of romantic duelists and suicides of past centuries. They were at least recognized by a society that based its assessments on the notion of love as a mad, inexplicable force that even the best minds could not resist. Today, longing for specific eyes (and legs) is no longer a worthy occupation, and therefore love anguish is exacerbated by the awareness of their own social and psychological inadequacy. From the point of view of the Mode of Choice, the suffering Emmas, Werthers and Annas of the nineteenth century are not just inept lovers – they are psychologically ignorant, if not outmoded evolutionary material. Relationship consultant Mark Manson, who has two million followers online, writes:
“Our culture idealizes the romantic victim. Show me almost any romantic movie, and I’ll find you there an unhappy and dissatisfied character who treats himself like garbage for the sake of loving someone.
In Choice Mode, loving too much, too early, too clearly is a sign of infantilism. All of this demonstrates a frightening willingness to give up self-interest, so important in our culture.
Second, and more importantly, Choice Mode is blind to structural constraints that make some people unwilling or unable to choose to the same degree as others. This is not just because of the unequal distribution of what British sociologist Katherine Hakeem calls “erotic capital” (simply put, we are not all equally beautiful). In fact, the biggest problem with choice is that entire categories of people can be at a disadvantage because of it.
Illus, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues convincingly that the Mode of Choice in its individualism stigmatizes serious romantic intentions as “excessive love,” that is, love to the detriment of self-interest. Although there are many unhappy men who are despised for their “need for others” and “inability to let go of the past,” women fall into the category of “codependent” and “immature.” Regardless of class and racial factors, all of them are trained to be self-sufficient: not to “love too much”, “live for themselves” (as in the above “Rules”).
The problem is that no pleasant bath can replace a loving look or a long-awaited phone call, much less give you a baby - whatever Cosmo says about it. Of course, you can do in vitro fertilization and become a surprisingly mature, stunningly independent single mother of frisky triplets. But the greatest gift of love, the recognition of one’s worth as a person, is essentially a social thing. You need a significant other for you. It takes a lot of Chardonnay to get around this simple fact.
But perhaps the greatest problem with Choice Mode is its erroneous understanding of maturity as complete self-sufficiency. Attachment is considered infantile. The desire for recognition is called dependence on others. Intimacy should not violate personal boundaries. Although we are constantly required to be responsible for ourselves, responsibility for our loved ones is discouraged: after all, our interference in their lives in the form of unsolicited advice or suggestions for change can hinder their personal growth and self-discovery. In the midst of too many optimization scenarios and failures, we are confronted with the worst manifestation of Choice Mode: self-admiration without self-sacrifice.
In my homeland, however, the problem is the opposite: self-sacrifice is often done without any introspection at all. Julia Lerner, an Israeli sociologist of emotions at Ben-Gurion University in the Negev, recently conducted a study on how Russians talk about love. The aim was to find out whether the country’s post-communist neoliberal turn had begun to narrow the gap between Seventeen magazine and Tolstoy’s novel. The answer is, not really.
After analyzing discussions on various television talk shows, the content of the Russian press, and conducting interviews, she found that for Russians, love remains “a destiny, a moral act and a value; it cannot be resisted, it requires sacrifice and involves suffering and pain.” Indeed, while the concept of maturity that underpins Choice Mode sees romantic suffering as an aberration and a sign of bad decisions, Russians see maturity as the ability to endure that very pain to the point of absurdity.
A middle-class American who falls in love with a married woman will be advised to break up with this lady and spend 50 hours on therapy. A Russian in a similar situation will break into the house and pull her by the hand, right from the stove with boiling borscht, past crying children and her husband, frozen with a joystick in his hands. Sometimes things turn out well: I know a couple who have been happily living for 15 years since he took her away from a family New Year celebration. But in most cases, fate mode leads to disorder.
Russia has more marriages, divorces and abortions per capita than any other developed country. This demonstrates an intention to act on emotions against all odds, often at the expense of one’s own comfort. Russian love is often accompanied by alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and abandoned children — side effects of unthought-out lives. It seems that relying on fate every time you fall in love is not such a good alternative to overselectivity.
But in order to heal the ills of our culture, we do not necessarily have to abandon the principle of choice altogether. Instead, we must dare to choose the unknown, take uncalculated risks, and be vulnerable. By vulnerability, I do not mean flirtatious manifestations of weakness in order to test compatibility with a partner—I ask for existential vulnerability, the return of love to its true mysterious appearance: the appearance of an unpredictable force that always takes you by surprise.
If understanding maturity as self-sufficiency is so detrimental to how we love in Choice Mode, then that understanding should be redefined. To be truly adults, we must embrace the unpredictability of loving others. We must dare to cross these personal boundaries and be one step ahead of ourselves; maybe not at Russian speed, but still run a little faster than we used to.
So make loud declarations of love. Live with someone without being absolutely sure you’re ready for it. Grumble at your partner for no reason and let him grumble back for nothing, because we are all human. Have a baby at the wrong time. Finally, we must regain our right to pain. Let us not be afraid to suffer for love. As Brene Brown, a sociologist who studies vulnerability and shame at the University of Houston, suggests, perhaps "our ability to keep the heart whole can never be greater than our willingness to let it break." Instead of worrying about our integrity, we need to learn to share ourselves with others and finally recognize that we all need each other, even if the author of Seventeen magazine calls it “codependency.” published
Credit Pauline Aronson
P.S. And remember, just by changing your consciousness – together we change the world!
Join us on Facebook, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki
Source: vk.com/public80512191?w=page-80512191_49854815
