Sad Love. Carrie Jenkins

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Название Sad Love
Автор произведения Carrie Jenkins
Жанр Афоризмы и цитаты
Серия
Издательство Афоризмы и цитаты
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781509539604



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      Romance and the Search for Meaning

      Carrie Jenkins

      polity

      Copyright © Carrie Jenkins 2022

      The right of Carrie Jenkins to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      First published in 2022 by Polity Press

      Polity Press

      65 Bridge Street

      Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

      Polity Press

      101 Station Landing

      Suite 300

      Medford, MA 02155, USA

      All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3960-4

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

      Library of Congress Control Number: 2021951320

      The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

      For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

      When I set out to write a book about love in 2017, I was not happy. I was pretty sad. But I was still in love, or at least so I thought. All the messages from the culture around me were telling me what they had always told me: that being in love was about being happy. Being happy ever after. Happy with someone. Happy together.

      I had some questions. What if I’m not happy? What if I’m sad – or worse, depressed? Does that mean I’m no longer in love? Am I now unloving? Unlovable?

      I desperately hoped the answer to the last two was “no.” And I strongly suspected that was the answer. Even though I wasn’t happy, and didn’t know when, how, or even whether I would become happy in the future, I didn’t seriously doubt that I was in love with my partners. So instead, like any good logician, I questioned the other assumption: the one about how being in love means being happy.

      Being a philosopher by tendency, as well as by academic training, I wanted to think this assumption through, so that I could talk back to it (in my own head, first of all) with some confidence and conviction. Why had I been associating romantic love with happiness? What is the point of that association? Where does it come from? What are its effects?

      The way I think things through is by writing, so in 2017 I started writing this book. But, as I wrote, the world turned, and it is now a very different place compared to how it was when I started. This book goes to press in 2022, in the echo of authoritarian challenges to democracy in the world’s most powerful nation, after years of watching the COVID pandemic hammer away at everything from the global economy to our intimate relationships. It took me a lot longer to write this book than I had originally planned. And it exploded into something bigger than what it was originally supposed to be.

      Sad Love turned out to be more than a theory of romance. It’s become a recipe for living in the world as it is now. To be sad, even heartbroken, does not mean one cannot love – one’s partner, one’s country, or even humanity. But to appreciate what love is under circumstances such as these, I needed a very different understanding of love from the one I had been taught. One that diverges radically from the stories and the stereotypes. Love that comes with no promise, and perhaps even no hope, of a “happy ever after,” but is not lessened or degraded by that. Love whose aim, and whose nature, is something other than happiness.

      That changes everything.

      It’s not the whole story, though. What the interviewers really wanted to talk about was not my theories so much as my personal life. In the book, I mentioned having a husband and a boyfriend at the same time (with everyone’s knowledge and consent). I described some of the challenges of this – the stigma, the awkwardness, the social pressure – canvassing research as well as my own experiences. I talked a little bit about what life can be like as an openly non-monogamous woman with two partners. (The short version: relentless slut-shaming.)

      Still, there are lots of books about the experience of being non-monogamous. What made mine worth an interview? Here’s one guess: it had something to do with who I am. There’s the fact that I’m a woman, of course, which might make me a more