all's unfair in love

kill the cop inside your heart

A still from Éric Rohmer’s 1970 film Le genou de Claire (translated unstylishly as Claire’s Knee). I have not seen it, but Becca Rothfeld praises its depiction of romance in her excellent new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small.

In an interview about intimate partner violence with physician and media commentator Dr. Kevin Pho, psychiatry resident Dr. Chloe Lee recalls a female patient who had reported relationship abuse. This patient was both physically attacked and socially isolated by her partner. In the episode, Lee admits to doing what we fear all physicians do upon being entrusted with the most intimate details of our lives: she cast judgment on her patient. In Lee’s words:

I remember thinking at the time, how can anyone possibly stay with something like that? …Like I kept thinking, you are worth so much more than this…Why are you not fighting for yourself?

Even with all her medical training, years of accumulated knowledge about human psychology, and her own lived experience, Lee still couldn’t resist the initial instinct to judge. (And if even she couldn’t withhold judgment, what does that say about how most people react when we hear a similar story told?) It wasn’t until Lee experienced intimate partner violence herself a year later that she was able to truly understand her former patient. “I would leave immediately. I used to think like that too. And then I went through it, and I thought, it's really not that easy to just leave,” Lee says.

Pho then asks a follow-up question, ostensibly for the benefit of his audience, but I suspect also for himself, too: “Just from after living through this, just for those people who aren't familiar or not in that situation, why isn't it so easy?” Lee’s answer is simple. “Because you love the person.”

Lee’s frank self-awareness throughout the interview makes for compelling listening; her explanation for why she stayed is particularly sharp in its honesty. In theory, she could have chosen to respond by appealing to fear or coercion as the primary explanation for her decision to remain with her partner. Indeed, such responses are typical of how survivors of abuse describe their experiences — Mariah Carey, Kelly Rowland, and Stacey Solomon were held captive, trapped, or manipulated by abusive former partners. Lee, on the other hand, frames her decision as originating from within, rather than from without.

Love, of course, is not in any way representative of the main reasons victims stay with their abusers, which include financial dependence, the threat of violence, and isolation. But Lee’s answer has stuck with me because it resonated with why I myself have often stayed in relationships that harmed me, past the point of any rational assessment that things would eventually get better. It does us no favors to deny that one of love’s essential risks is that the people we love will eventually hurt us. The heartbreak of separation remains a bitter pill to swallow, even for the abused. It strikes me as unusually brave to admit that one’s feelings of love toward someone can and do persist, even after that person does objectively awful things to you and to others. Is this not the interpersonal version of the abolitionist belief that people who inflict harm are not monsters, but themselves victims of larger structures out of their control, and are equally worthy of care? If we rationally know that those who commit crimes are as deserving of love as anyone else, why does the admission that one chose to stay with their abuser out of love seem to carry so much shame?

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If part of what perpetuates the prevalence of abuse is baked into our core cultural assumptions, then we might start to find some answers in everyday discussions about love and romance. In a TikTok with over 3.4 million views, dating influencer Simona Catalano provides a list of four personal qualities that will “solve more than half of ur dating problems without a doubt.” The qualities themselves are not surprising — one commenter helpfully distills the 5-minute video to self-worth, self-respect, self-confidence, and standards — but what fascinates me is that Catalano begins the video by asserting these traits are not merely helpful, but prerequisites to dating. “Once you check these four things off, then you can start dating,” she says as if explaining to a giant toddler. (The infantilization is confirmed when she repeats herself, this time lightly appropriating AAVE to drive the point home: “If you don’t got these four, back to the drawing board, baby!”) The implication, not so much in her words but in her tone and attitude is this: if you end up hurt, it’s your own fault for not loving yourself as much as you could have, for trying to love someone before you were ready.

Catalano’s advice, of course, is delivered with the affected exasperation of an older sister to a naive younger sibling. Though it’s not necessarily funny, it’s light-hearted, probably not meant as a universal solvent for all romantic problems. Still, the relentless didacticism might contribute to the very stigma that keeps Lee, and other victims of abuse, from telling anyone about the abuse she was experiencing:

I had a tough time disclosing this to my family…I was afraid that my family was going to judge me. I was afraid that they would think, you know, [you] got together with this guy and we don't think much of your judgment. I was afraid my friends were going to judge me.”

Love, in these TikToks, is presented as something you can simply choose to consume, not as something that necessarily consumes you. The knowledge that you’re worthy of love is somehow supposed to inoculate you from bad love, which you might experience briefly and then politely decline, confident that something better is out there.

But how do you know in your bones that you are worthy of love until you’ve experienced being loved, along with all of its attendant risks? (During the many years I avoided dating, repeating the mantra that I was worthy of love only left me feeling frustrated. If I’m so worthy of romantic love, then why don’t I seem to fucking have any?) Self-respect and self-confidence sound like qualities one can develop in isolation, but in reality, they’re only truly tested when we are at our most vulnerable: i.e., when we are already entangled in a relational state where we must choose between our own values and the preferences of others.

When we expect ourselves and our prospective mates to enter the dating arena as nothing short of fully realized human beings, the resulting society might actually be less full of love and life, not more. rayne fisher-quann writes:

When we insist that we could only ever effectively love someone who’s been perfectly “healed” … we are reinforcing, and perhaps projecting, our own beliefs that we have to be perfect in order to be loved.

And indeed, Catalano’s video seems to contain a contradiction along these lines, if not in the letter of her advice, then in its spirit. At one point, when discussing self-worth, she says “Remember, you do not have to be perfect in order to be worthy of being loved.” And yet, her video, like many others on TikTok, exemplifies the philosophy that the perfectibility of the self is the key to success in romantic life. This belief system places the bulk of its faith in our ability to scrub away our flaws, precious little in the capacity of others to see our flaws and love us anyway.

Catalano’s videos are likely very useful for her audience. They encourage us to think twice about what we really want from our relationships, looking inward at the same time that we venture out into the world of dating. It is probably true that by following Catalano’s advice to a tee, one can avoid all sorts of negative, unpleasant, and tragic outcomes. But it seems to me symptomatic of a fear that people can and will hurt you, that the only way to truly prevent this is to discipline one’s flaws into permanent remission. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when all dating advice is about avoiding heartbreak, everyone starts to look like a red flag.

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There is a very fine line I have been trying to walk in this essay. I want to make the case for less puritanism around romantic interaction, because I think it would make dating more fun and make people less afraid of social reproach when they find themselves deeply in love with someone who might be less than ideal (by TikTok’s standards, anyway). Lurking in the background, however, is the very real threat that horrible, traumatic things can and do happen to people, mostly women, at shockingly commonplace rates.

Still, I am convinced that the risks of being more open to love, even love that has elements of delusion or lacks prudence, even when we do not yet fully possess Catalano’s four essential traits, are outweighed by what experiencing such love might teach us. The specter of experiencing a traumatically awful relationship, or even just a less-than-perfect one, need not overdetermine our behavior. There are lines that must never be crossed, but there are also people who make us feel that some rules are worth breaking. We understand most viscerally what we kind of love we want by experiencing it, not by watching love enacted on-screen or dissected in dating TikToks.

Consider for a moment the contention that allowing ourselves to love others as they really are might enable us to more easily exit relationships when they become toxic. Accepting that the person we love will inevitably be flawed could be the first step to clear-eyed discernment of what exactly those flaws are. But when we expect both ourselves and our partners to be perfect or, at least, perfectible, we become vulnerable to dangerous traps. A common refrain among survivors of abuse is that they hoped their abusers would get better (Amber Heard and Johnny Depp both said this about each other), or that they could be the one to fix their abuser’s pain (Rihanna). The hope of a better future can be a tragic distraction from the reality of the present. Acceptance of the situation as it exists, warts and all, is a prerequisite, not an obstacle, to leaving the relationships that harm us the most.

What I am really arguing, I think, is that love is least rewarding when we treat it like a sport, in which we can optimize outcomes by holding ourselves to a demanding set of requirements and judging potential partners in the same way. In classic American fashion, we want nothing more than to see romance as a meritocracy, but the fact remains that love, as becca rothfeld describes it, is supremely unfair: “There is nothing more foreign to justice than love; it is more alien than even injustice. Whether we give or withhold what justice obliges us to provide, we implicitly acknowledge that there is a debt. Affection, in contrast, is arbitrary and almost always unearned.” Such insistence on forcing love into a meritocracy-shaped mold doesn’t only do a disservice to everyone who dates, it reinforces the idea that any negative, even traumatic, experiences could and should have been avoided, had we done things differently. It’s not quite victim-blaming, but it sure reeks of it.

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A few months ago, I met someone whose pull on me I haven’t been able to shake. (Finally, we’ve arrived at the true point of this essay: ME ME ME!) A month of being intertwined was rudely interrupted by the demands of reality; physical distance is now a permanent obstacle to any regular contact. Objectively, I should want him less, should make myself move on. Dating advice influencers would shudder at how many times I’ve quadruple-texted him since he left San Francisco. One could point to all the times I’ve felt frustrated by him combined with my unwillingness to let him go as a sign of my immaturity. Go back to the drawing board, baby!

But the fact remains that I prefer to preserve my desire, even without the promise of reciprocity — is that so insane? I am stubbornly attached to my attachment. If I could have done anything differently, it wouldn’t have been to respect myself more, but rather to appreciate him more on his terms rather than mine, to embrace him as the person that he is, not the person that I wanted him to be. That the desire remains despite the passage of time and elongation of space is perhaps indicative of the truth that, contra most dating advice, whether he meets “my needs,” whatever those are, can be secondary to other romantic satisfactions. I’m compelled, even made curious, by how I continue to want him, in spite of what I thought I needed from him. What remains with me is an inquisitiveness about him, a respect for his approach to life and art, an admiration for The Other. We have similar values but different priorities. We care about many of the same issues but make different choices, find ourselves embroiled in different crises, have different vices.

In some ways, then, it was inevitable that he would treat me differently than I treated him. But this inequality, this violation of the Golden Rule, seems not impermissible in the realm of romance. Perhaps, bounded within reason, it is the very core of eros. Of course, it is one thing to know that difference can magnetize, very much another to be forced to ask yourself, in the midst of an entanglement, just how much difference you can tolerate. In this case, I’ve made the patently stupid decision to want more of him at the precise moment when he is least available to me. So be it! There are virtues higher than wisdom, and those whose self-respect is truly unshakable don’t mind appearing foolish every now and then. I’ll follow this desire to whatever aching ends it leads. It was so lovely to taste something that awakened in me an appetite I never knew I had; I now know the supreme disquiet of having been rendered insatiable. Hunger, for all its discomfort, is just a special kind of hope.