How to balance love and family with our freedom

As the Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz demonstrated in a book entitled "La fine dell’amore" (which we discussed a few days ago at the Rimini Meeting), the market and technology have created the conditions for the emergence of what Illouz herself calls ‘negative relationships’ – that is, relationships in which the individual, reduced to a bundle of emotions to be satisfied by the market, now asserts themselves by denying or ignoring others, no longer regarding them as subjects to be ‘recognised’ but merely as means of ‘self-expression’. We are witnessing the triumph of an ‘emotional modernity’, in which the individual is increasingly free to satisfy their emotions as they see fit, but, partly because of this, feels all certainty slipping away; trust becomes an increasingly scarce resource, and romantic relationships grow ever more precarious and casual, with the result that the much-coveted freedom becomes the main cause of a general malaise, consisting predominantly of loneliness and dissatisfaction.

With the rituals, conventions and regulatory frameworks that until recently governed romantic relationships now a thing of the past – a shift that began in the 1960s, thanks above all to the sexual revolution – men and women, at least in the West, have gained a level of freedom never seen before, but they have also lost their bearings, the other person has become increasingly inscrutable, and relationships increasingly uncertain and risky – so uncertain and risky that, in the end, it is far better not to get involved, not to make any commitments. There is bound to be someone who could love me more and understand me better than my current partner does; it is better to limit oneself to casual encounters, to take what there is to be had in relationships governed solely by ‘the equality of give and take’ (Giddens), than to get entangled in relationships that carry the demanding nature of being ‘forever’. At best, we aspire to ‘authenticity’. But this authenticity, having become hypertrophic (think of the excesses of sincerity, of equality, of negotiating everything), seems to render love impossible. The preciousness, the symbolic power, the seductive and liberating aspect of love grow alongside its impossibility. We thus find ourselves in a sort of erotic graveyard, where the phrase ‘I love you’ no longer makes sense and becomes almost unspeakable precisely because of its finality; the finality typical of promises, not of desires or emotions. As one of the characters in Ian McEwan’s latest novel, What We Know, says, those two words are ‘as easy to say as they are almost impossible to take back’. Better not to say them: that is our defence.

Is there a way to escape this melancholy and somehow reconcile love and family with our freedom, without falling back into the rituals of the past?

I believe it exists. We must challenge emotional modernity on its own terms. Not even under torture would I long for the pre-established harmony of families of yesteryear. However, we must view freedom as a duty, not as an invitation to simply do as we please. First and foremost, we should learn that we are not monads but relational beings. At the very beginning of each of us lies a relationship. Otherness defines us from birth. We are ‘individual substances of a rational nature’, according to Boethius’s well-known definition, but what we are cannot be mechanically derived from substance. Our person takes shape through our relationships with others. We might even say that our telos is not realised in solitude; it requires others; it depends on others. To put it in the words of Alasdair MacIntyre, we are ‘dependent rational animals’. For this reason, it is worth our while to nurture our relationships. They are the primary setting in which our subjectivity flourishes. Nurturing our relationships and the reciprocity that characterises them is the best way to remain true to ourselves.

As for love life in particular, we should learn something that, more or less vaguely, accompanies it in all its manifestations: the realisation that in love one does not settle for less, but strives for fulfilment, and that melancholy depends above all on the difficulty we have in taking risks, in giving ourselves completely. The dominant culture does indeed tend to think that a romantic relationship only makes sense as a means of individual self-realisation, as a projection of the self onto another; in short, it does not help us to see the relationship as an autonomous ‘subject’, not reducible to either of the two parties that make it up. Yet, precisely if we care about our own happiness, we must learn to nurture the relationships in which we are involved. What is at stake are not merely our good feelings, nor even our individual virtues, but our ability to accept, without sentimentality, the other’s irreducibility and, at the same time, to give ourselves to them. Those who love give of themselves and, in doing so, find the other and themselves; not just any self, but the most authentic ‘I’ – the one that loves, precisely, the one that has won freedom from itself, the most important victory of all. It is here that the reconciliation of love, freedom and family that we seek lies.