How Modern Love Is Preventing Us from Experiencing Eros (Featuring Anne Carson! Emmanuel Levinas! Byung-Chul Han! Roland Barthes! Sheila Heti! Socrates!)
This was a really interesting post to read, and I completely agree—modern love often feels more like a selfish transaction than ever before.
"What’s in it for me?" has become the foundation of our relationships—the lens through which we try to comprehend another person’s humanity. But this mindset strips away the complexity, the infinite mystery of the other—the human being in front of us, struggling to be a person themselves, looking back through that same transactional lens.
It turns love into a bitter exchange—favor for favor, emotion for emotion. Everything becomes a negotiation, where compromise is impossible unless the “winnings” are split exactly 50/50. And the list goes on.
But recently, I’ve started to realize how that game was rigged against me all along. I’m beginning to see that you can’t mold a person to fit your desires—and if you can, they’re not really a person anymore.
Instead, embracing their otherness is the key to something real. Something sacred. Without that, love is nothing more than just another transaction.
So glad it resonated—thank you for these (spot-on and so true) additional thoughts. Completely agree—living transactionally is a surefire way to deaden and dull just about everything.
I agree up to a point. Do you really support such a sweeping statement as desire is dead? For whom is desire dead? Older humans, tucked away in their sanctuary's may yet feel the faint pull of latent desires and ignore them out of fear of inconvienence and making a fool of oneself. But your fifteen year, caught in the bloom of coursing hormones? Pretty sure they will be feeling desire hot and heavy regardless of the ability of their cell phones to bring knowlege as close as they want it, regardless of limnality. Desire once satiated doesn't disappear but will come around for another crack at you. Your larger point is, or should be, that our culture bombards us with so many analogues for eros, cars and cruises and wines and sleek technologies, that they displace the more visceral human expressions. There's just not enough bandwidth for it all and it is society that selects the objects of our desire not ourselves. After a certain point, we fall to the ground satiated, unable to desire, because we have been overcome by the knowlege that all these representations are not only false, but unattainable.
I agree. Desire is a fundamental quality of the psyche and can’t die per se. The sequestration of desire by consumerist culture is i believe the death of desire the author points towards. And thus the discussion of the politics of desire is opened.
On another note, love has always had a function in social mobility and the distribution of power between the sexes. I ask myself if the developed argument on the essence of love is solely a reflection of the experience of love of a small privileged group.
i agree with you for sure. Love is certainly a societal construct that forms and reforms as social circumstances change but the point is always to pass along the current cultural values into the next generation. in the case of capitalism it is easier to love up, than love down and sexual congress becomes a transaction, i will give you my youth and beauty, for example, in exchange for your power and access to privilege. As the dynamic shifts so does the "love" and often, one or the other of the two participants, looks elsewhere for satisfaction.
I’ve always found it incredibly important to be a whole person separate from my partner, even in a long-term committed relationship. I’ve joked with my husband that “we should know less about each other,” and in some ways, we do! We have separate hobbies, he goes into the office and I work from home. Space is GOOD, and because we have space we can have Eros. It’s more fun when you nurture mystery.
Incredible read. I’m curious if there is any philosophical scholarship on the death of Eros as a consequence of post-colonial, capitalist society—in which complete absorption and cannibalization of the Other is the primary objective of a collective uninterested in holding the tension of diversity AND where an insistance on the immortality of the Self makes the pleasure and beauty of intermittent ego dissolution obsolete as a social exercise … anyway, thank you for this thoughtful take!
Helllll yes. Thanks for this, for humanities sake.
I have this essay on recognizing your spouse/partner as the Other, and I feel it’s as popular as it’s been simply because of this phenomenon. People need guidance back to this truth.
This was a fun read. Also finding out about Byung-Chul Han, Roland Barthes and others writing about Eros have been a gem of a find. More ideas to dig into!
I was exploring the idea of desire through Lacan's ideas of the 'Other', of need-demand-desire (of drive and jouissance), etc. And of course, through the more painful, practical and effective route of actually living, loving, losing, living and loving anyway. Then I fell into the rabbit hole of the libidinal economy by way of Jean Francois Lyotard and Herbert Marcuse.
I felt Marcuse's 'Eros and Civilization' had particularly inspiring ideas - about liberating eros in modern society for human flourishing, liberating it from capitalist greed for genuine artistic, scientific and cultural creation.
Another cool piece of work around eros, or rather 'love', was bell hooks' 'All About Love', that goes down a similar avenue but goes on to define 'love' as an active practice, an almost political action, about caring for the emotional, spiritual well-being and betterment of the 'Other' (so to speak) and acting in accordance. 'All About Love', especially feels like a invaluable work about thinking how to actualize the noble, tragic but ultimately fulfilling human instinct of love.
“I want a man who earns 5000 dollars every month and who does this and this and that”.
I do understand that we can picture a perfect person in our mind and that we'd love to have exactly this version of him. But that's not love !
My husband went though phases I didn't dream about , and I did go through phases he didn't appreciate, but we supported each other because we love each other.
Also, I never appreciated online meeting , like tinder. I used it once and just thought that was soooo unnatural and predicted, it kind of killed all the magic of meeting someone and not knowing what might happen.
Well, your article is absolutely amazing. You have a new subscriber !
> "All in all, desire, romance, eros, pleasure is about following the path of ineffability and unknowingness. Phenomenologically it’s about keeping the Other as not an extension of you—your wants, your desires, your understandings—but their own distinct, distanced essence. They are not you. They are not for you. They are other. And it is because of that that they are desirable. That space between you—Urdistanz—is the erotic. If you allow that space to exist."
Indeed, being-for-me is what I designate the tool, and the tool cannot succeed in defending itself. Otherness is always fending me off, leaving me only to address and solicit it, beg it for itself, and this I think is why Barthes always expresses love as a waiting, a waiting for what cannot be apprehended, only seduced.
The first thing I have read in this website, and I am intrigued since. It really made me think of considering how we should approach the "Other" in our lives or yet to come. Caress their soul in a sense that brings out something in you, not just keeping them to be an extension of what we are but embracing them for who they truly are despite the impending mystery they carry.
This was a really interesting post to read, and I completely agree—modern love often feels more like a selfish transaction than ever before.
"What’s in it for me?" has become the foundation of our relationships—the lens through which we try to comprehend another person’s humanity. But this mindset strips away the complexity, the infinite mystery of the other—the human being in front of us, struggling to be a person themselves, looking back through that same transactional lens.
It turns love into a bitter exchange—favor for favor, emotion for emotion. Everything becomes a negotiation, where compromise is impossible unless the “winnings” are split exactly 50/50. And the list goes on.
But recently, I’ve started to realize how that game was rigged against me all along. I’m beginning to see that you can’t mold a person to fit your desires—and if you can, they’re not really a person anymore.
Instead, embracing their otherness is the key to something real. Something sacred. Without that, love is nothing more than just another transaction.
So glad it resonated—thank you for these (spot-on and so true) additional thoughts. Completely agree—living transactionally is a surefire way to deaden and dull just about everything.
Thank you! I really appreciate you!
I agree up to a point. Do you really support such a sweeping statement as desire is dead? For whom is desire dead? Older humans, tucked away in their sanctuary's may yet feel the faint pull of latent desires and ignore them out of fear of inconvienence and making a fool of oneself. But your fifteen year, caught in the bloom of coursing hormones? Pretty sure they will be feeling desire hot and heavy regardless of the ability of their cell phones to bring knowlege as close as they want it, regardless of limnality. Desire once satiated doesn't disappear but will come around for another crack at you. Your larger point is, or should be, that our culture bombards us with so many analogues for eros, cars and cruises and wines and sleek technologies, that they displace the more visceral human expressions. There's just not enough bandwidth for it all and it is society that selects the objects of our desire not ourselves. After a certain point, we fall to the ground satiated, unable to desire, because we have been overcome by the knowlege that all these representations are not only false, but unattainable.
This is absolutely true ✨
I agree. Desire is a fundamental quality of the psyche and can’t die per se. The sequestration of desire by consumerist culture is i believe the death of desire the author points towards. And thus the discussion of the politics of desire is opened.
On another note, love has always had a function in social mobility and the distribution of power between the sexes. I ask myself if the developed argument on the essence of love is solely a reflection of the experience of love of a small privileged group.
i agree with you for sure. Love is certainly a societal construct that forms and reforms as social circumstances change but the point is always to pass along the current cultural values into the next generation. in the case of capitalism it is easier to love up, than love down and sexual congress becomes a transaction, i will give you my youth and beauty, for example, in exchange for your power and access to privilege. As the dynamic shifts so does the "love" and often, one or the other of the two participants, looks elsewhere for satisfaction.
I’ve always found it incredibly important to be a whole person separate from my partner, even in a long-term committed relationship. I’ve joked with my husband that “we should know less about each other,” and in some ways, we do! We have separate hobbies, he goes into the office and I work from home. Space is GOOD, and because we have space we can have Eros. It’s more fun when you nurture mystery.
Incredible read. I’m curious if there is any philosophical scholarship on the death of Eros as a consequence of post-colonial, capitalist society—in which complete absorption and cannibalization of the Other is the primary objective of a collective uninterested in holding the tension of diversity AND where an insistance on the immortality of the Self makes the pleasure and beauty of intermittent ego dissolution obsolete as a social exercise … anyway, thank you for this thoughtful take!
Helllll yes. Thanks for this, for humanities sake.
I have this essay on recognizing your spouse/partner as the Other, and I feel it’s as popular as it’s been simply because of this phenomenon. People need guidance back to this truth.
Dropping here in case it’s helpful for anyone.
https://contemporarylove.substack.com/p/my-stranger-spouse
Thanks for sharing your essay!
Sneaking in here to say am saving to my inbox, thank you for the extra reading!
Barnaby! Love to hear it! 😘
i loved it! (no pun intended)
This was a fun read. Also finding out about Byung-Chul Han, Roland Barthes and others writing about Eros have been a gem of a find. More ideas to dig into!
I was exploring the idea of desire through Lacan's ideas of the 'Other', of need-demand-desire (of drive and jouissance), etc. And of course, through the more painful, practical and effective route of actually living, loving, losing, living and loving anyway. Then I fell into the rabbit hole of the libidinal economy by way of Jean Francois Lyotard and Herbert Marcuse.
I felt Marcuse's 'Eros and Civilization' had particularly inspiring ideas - about liberating eros in modern society for human flourishing, liberating it from capitalist greed for genuine artistic, scientific and cultural creation.
Another cool piece of work around eros, or rather 'love', was bell hooks' 'All About Love', that goes down a similar avenue but goes on to define 'love' as an active practice, an almost political action, about caring for the emotional, spiritual well-being and betterment of the 'Other' (so to speak) and acting in accordance. 'All About Love', especially feels like a invaluable work about thinking how to actualize the noble, tragic but ultimately fulfilling human instinct of love.
“I want a man who earns 5000 dollars every month and who does this and this and that”.
I do understand that we can picture a perfect person in our mind and that we'd love to have exactly this version of him. But that's not love !
My husband went though phases I didn't dream about , and I did go through phases he didn't appreciate, but we supported each other because we love each other.
Also, I never appreciated online meeting , like tinder. I used it once and just thought that was soooo unnatural and predicted, it kind of killed all the magic of meeting someone and not knowing what might happen.
Well, your article is absolutely amazing. You have a new subscriber !
Thanks so much, Sara! (And sounds like you and your husband have a good thing goin'!)
Perfecto
> "All in all, desire, romance, eros, pleasure is about following the path of ineffability and unknowingness. Phenomenologically it’s about keeping the Other as not an extension of you—your wants, your desires, your understandings—but their own distinct, distanced essence. They are not you. They are not for you. They are other. And it is because of that that they are desirable. That space between you—Urdistanz—is the erotic. If you allow that space to exist."
Indeed, being-for-me is what I designate the tool, and the tool cannot succeed in defending itself. Otherness is always fending me off, leaving me only to address and solicit it, beg it for itself, and this I think is why Barthes always expresses love as a waiting, a waiting for what cannot be apprehended, only seduced.
Wonderful post!
Thank you!!
Just wow !
I just want to let you know that I've been thinking about this essay ever since I read it. So beautifully written.
This is probably one of the most beautiful things I have ever read
The first thing I have read in this website, and I am intrigued since. It really made me think of considering how we should approach the "Other" in our lives or yet to come. Caress their soul in a sense that brings out something in you, not just keeping them to be an extension of what we are but embracing them for who they truly are despite the impending mystery they carry.
This essay shook me in the most gentle and beautiful way. Loved it!
well said. this was a beautiful read