Sad Love

Romance and the Search for Meaning

Carrie Jenkins

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781509539604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

As a woman with a husband and other partners, philosopher Carrie Jenkins knows that love is complicated.

Love is most often associated with happiness, satisfaction and pleasure. But it has a darker side we ignore at our peril. Love is often an uncomfortable and difficult feeling. The people we love can let us down badly. And the ways we love are often quite different to the romantic ideals society foists upon us. Since we are inevitably disappointed by love, wouldn't we be better off without it?

No, says Carrie Jenkins. Instead, we need a new philosophy of love, one that recognizes that the pain and suffering love causes are a natural, even a good part of what makes love worthwhile. What Jenkins calls "sad love" offers no bogus "happy ever afters". Rather, it tries to find a way properly to integrate heartbreak and disappointment into the lived experience of love.

It's time we liberated love. Also available as an audiobook.

1
The Paradox of Happiness

As dreamers do

Like me, my husband Jonathan is a philosophy professor. We sometimes talk shop together. When I was working on this book, I talked with Jonathan about love, and sadness, and the idea of being “happy ever after.”

One day, I mentioned to him in passing that “the pursuit of happiness” struck me as a very American thing. He was surprised to hear that I thought so.

“Isn’t that basically the same everywhere?” he asked.

I was surprised by his surprise. Jonathan is an American citizen, but he isn’t the kind of stereotypical American who imagines the world beyond the contiguous United States to be a vague blur of terrorists and starving children. He reads, he travels, he’s lived in Scotland, and now he lives with me in Canada. He’s a pretty worldly-wise, generally cool human. Why would he assume everywhere is like America?

I had to stop and think about his question. In fact, I haven’t really stopped thinking about it ever since. Gradually, I came to the conclusion that Jonathan was right. The pursuit of happiness is everywhere. But I was right too. I’m going to try and untangle some different strands in this question, and then I think that will make sense.

The phrasing “the pursuit of happiness” has specifically American roots. It appears most famously in the 1776 US Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”¹ These ideals and this specific way of expressing them are built into the USA’s origin story – or, more accurately, the story it tells about its origins. They lie at the core of the nation’s identity – or, more accurately, its self-image. The USA counts its very existence as beginning in 1776 with this declaration, rather than in 1781 with the ratification of Articles of Confederation. There is something about the Declaration of Independence. Somehow it is more existential, more constitutive of the nation’s sense of itself, than even the document that literally constituted the uniting of the United States.

When I see all those tee-shirts insisting on “Good Vibes Only” or carefully curated Instagram feeds telling me to “Find Joy in Every Moment,” it’s interesting to contextualize these things by remembering that American happiness culture got started as soon as America did.

Still, Jonathan was not wrong about its universality. One might encounter ideas like these more or less anywhere nowadays. But I think that to a large extent that is true because American ideas and ideals have been exported to the rest of the world. The increasing homogeneity of global culture is linked to America’s geopolitical dominance.

It certainly feels to me as if happiness ideology has been on the rise over the course of my lifetime. I don’t remember happiness being nearly so prominent when I was growing up in a lower-middle-class British household in the 1980s and 1990s. I recall a cultural focus on underdogs, pessimism, left-wing political satire, and toilet humour.

And I’m not alone in thinking things used to be different. Happiness culture used to be specifically American. In Man’s Search for Meaning,² Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote: “To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to ‘be happy’.”

There have been some significant developments in American happiness culture since 1776. Ideas about happiness being healthy – or perhaps even the same thing as health – arrive on the scene by 1902, when American philosopher William James declares that a “healthy-minded” individual is one who has that “tendency which looks on all things and sees that they are good.” (Those for whom “the world … looks remote, strange, sinister and uncanny,” for whom “its colour is gone and its breath is cold,” are labelled by James as “sick souls.”)³

Even more significantly – for my purposes in this book – there is a strand in this culture that says all you need to do to achieve your goals in life is to think happy thoughts. That everything you most desire will come to you through the power of positive thinking.

Perhaps you’ve heard of a book called The Secret (based on a film of the same name). Oprah Winfrey is a big fan. First published in 2006, it’s sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Even if you haven’t heard of The Secret by name, you might have heard of the “law of attraction” that it popularized.⁴ This “law” says that you can “manifest” things in your life just by having corresponding thoughts.

Proponents of the law of attraction compare people to magnets. You can become a money magnet – manifest money just by thinking about having lots of money. Or you can become a love magnet, or a Rolex magnet, or a CEO job magnet, or whatever. You just need to feel yourself already having the thing you want, and it will come to you. If you feel rich, you’ll be rich. If you feel lucky in love, you’ll be lucky in love. On the other hand, feeling like a loser is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Just as positive thoughts manifest positive results, negative thoughts manifest negative results because “like attracts like.” (This is literally the opposite of how magnets work, but let’s not quibble over details.) The basic metaphysical claim of The Secret is that reality will conform itself to the way you think of it, as opposed to what is commonly assumed: that we should try to conform our beliefs to reality.

The idea that convincing yourself you’re rich and beloved is all it takes for money and love to “manifest” in your life might sound delusional to some. But we should tread carefully here. This seems, for many people, to be a genuinely held belief. And millions are at least sufficiently interested in the idea to shell out the price of a book.

Moreover, it’s not as if the law of attraction just arrived out of the blue in 2006. The American Dream has long sold what is, in many ways, a watered-down version of the same story: that anyone can make it in America. Anyone can be “self-made,” pull themselves up by their bootstraps, start out with nothing and become a millionaire or a president or an astronaut.

A crucial part of both the American Dream and the law of attraction is that it doesn’t matter if you start out with nothing. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you have, and you don’t need to rely on anyone else’s help. You individually can get where you want to be, provided you make the effort. The only difference is that, where the American Dream says you get what you want through certain kinds of hard work, the law of attraction says you get it through certain kinds of positive thinking.

As you might suspect by now, I am not even a little bit sympathetic to either of these claims. Nobody accomplishes anything without support and co-operation. Wealth is dramatically correlated with markers of privilege, especially race,⁵ and so are dating preferences.⁶ Those who start with nothing have little chance of “succeeding” materially in America, while, by the same measure, those who start life as billionaires are hard pressed to do anything that wouldn’t count as “success.”

The way I see it, the American Dream was already so thoroughly disconnected from the realities of how power works and how a society functions that, for people who’d already bought into that mythology, the law of attraction was an easy sell. It might be delusional, but it’s the kind of delusion that’s a natural and continuous next step from where America already was.

Do you remember Jiminy Cricket’s song from the 1940 Disney classic, Pinocchio? It begins “When you wish upon a star …” and promises that absolutely anything can be attained through this method. Sounds a bit like The Secret, don’t you think? When I say there were forerunners to the law of attraction, helping to pry open the chasm between American Dreams and reality, this is the kind of thing I mean.

In “When you wish upon a star,” there are literally no limits to what you can acquire: “anything your heart desires,” it promises, “will come to you.” And perhaps even more importantly, anybody can acquire these things: it “makes no difference who you are,” provided only that “your heart is in your dreams.” As in all versions of the American Dream, it doesn’t matter if you start out with nothing. We don’t have to worry about correcting for any inequalities in people’s starting positions, or redistributing, or levelling the playing field. (To the stereotypical American, all that sort of talk sounds like communism, which is to say it sounds heinous.)

But you might be tempted to think: So what? It’s just a kids’ song performed by a cartoon insect. But it really isn’t just that. It has become an icon. It is now symbolic of the entire Disney brand (a snippet from this song is played when the logo appears at the start of any Disney movie), and Disney, in turn, has become a kind of avatar for American culture writ large. This is a song that matters. It ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Paradox of Happiness
• 2 The Romantic Paradox
• 3 Daimons
• 4 Know Thyself
• 5 Eudaimonic Love
• End User License Agreement