Does Love Negate Cynicism?
The surprising social implications of romantic intimacy
The trial of cynics — or of “realists,” as they prefer to be known — won’t come in an afterlife in a court run by winged angels. The skeptics whose eyes are drawn to the worst aspects of anything, to hypocrisy, injustice, and the ugly stains under the rug, won’t face poetic justice, with the curtains parting to reveal that everything was in God’s hands all along.
Still, the contented majority keep a rejoinder in their back pocket, a mantra scrawled in a child’s handwriting, illuminated by crude drawings of daisies and rainbows. The fallback defense of optimism and the mainstream ignorance of philosophy’s doubts is the appeal to romantic love.
“Love conquers all; love is the answer, the force that binds society, the light in the darkness, the song that cuts through the noise” — pick your cliché, since the mantra is a mainstay in romance novels, rom-coms, pop songs, wedding ceremonies, and the like.
Does the existence of romantic love give the lie to cynical doubts about the validity of human enterprise? Are those doubts so many rude, misguided catcalls, interrupting the innocent, merited joy of those who happen to have their act together?
Intimacy and our secret selves
What people want most out of love is intimacy, the sense that at least this one other person knows you through and through and admires your true self. But to admit that this is why love is supposed to be our crowning achievement is to concede much to the doubting Thomases.
Intimacy is spoiled if it’s not kept secret, or to use the euphemism, “private.” If you were to make your true self public and have a heart-to-heart meeting with the true self of someone other than your life partner, your partner would have cause to be jealous, because you’d have trivialized the special connection you were supposed to have shared only with him or her. Love is supposed to be private — not just the sexual act which expresses the emotional bond, but the feelings and secrets shared between lovers.
The signs of intimacy are the knowing glances, the in-jokes that only your partner understands, so that the pair can pretend to assimilate to the cultural script that has to be performed in some public gathering. Meanwhile, the pair smiles and flashes coded gestures, basking in memories of its pillow talk and exclusive knowledge of each partner’s personal hopes and candid opinions.
Such secrecy is needed, in part, because our private thoughts are hazardous to what we understand as social progress. To vent your honest reactions and howl your heartfelt emotions in public at every opportunity would be boorish. You’d be the Larry David character from Curb Your Enthusiasm. The roles we play in public are like the uniforms we wear: when at home, we remove them and discard the masks and personas, too, so we can relax as the flawed souls we really are.
Moreover, the state of our true selves is typically disgraceful, which is why we mistake love for a miracle. The glory of love is that even with nearly eight billion people on the planet, there should be no one credulous or cockeyed enough to be smitten with anyone. We’re vain primates who deem ourselves entitled to run the planet, which is a travesty. No one deserves to be loved, just as no human animal could genuinely earn billions of dollars.
Love as existential co-conspiracy
Romantic love, therefore, is supposed to be the saving grace, the medal pinned to your soul that says you’re worthy and approved. Even though you must keep your inner self a secret beyond the confines of your home, there’s at least one other person whom you’ve permitted entry to the inner sanctum, assuming someone’s in love with you. Your partner comes to know everything about you and miraculously likes what he or she sees, overlooking or coming to adore even your flaws.
You can see, then, the critique of society that’s built into the myth of romantic love. If you’re truthful only in those secret, intimate moments with your partner, that means our public life is a sham. Lying is the hallmark of civility. In public, we lie out of politeness, to save face, to smooth the social transaction, and preserve the importance of what we care about most, namely, the exclusive intimacy we share with our life partner.
That euphemism of the romantic “partner” is innocuous-sounding for a reason. To speak of your intimate relationship as a partnership is to treat love as a business arrangement. If we attend to the existential stakes, though, we might realize that lovers are co-conspirators who mean for their bliss to wrest some charm and magic from an uncaring world, make up for the fraud of their public selves, and vindicate the absurd charades of mass civility.
A romantic pair conspires also against nature’s indifference, since not only is the bulk of the population ignorant of the pair’s hidden flaws and dreams, but the natural forces and elements that generate lovers are blind and dumb. The rituals of intimacy are performed to spite the universe’s impersonality.
Cooptation of the cynic’s doubts
This implicit critique of society and the world at large was the ethical basis of the Christian message. Jesus wanted to replace the exclusivity of romantic love with a moral obligation to love everyone equally in public, including your enemies and the lowest of the low. Éros was to be replaced with agápe, the selfish love of romance with selfless, egalitarian fraternity.
Fueled by his love of a transcendent authority, Jesus condemned not only the idolatry of romantic love but all conventional idols such as money, business, and politics, since these would lead to ruin and hellfire. Thus, the character Jesus was one of the trenchant critics of civilized norms who was indeed tried and executed like the gadfly Socrates, but who was acquitted, as evidenced by his resurrection from the dead, according to the Christian story.
The subsequent irony in Christendom is too familiar to have to be recounted, since that subversive message was mostly buried by lay Christians who would prefer to think that Jesus gave “family values” his blessing. For secular society to proceed with its profane affairs, the outsider’s bitter, sometimes visionary condemnations must be silenced or coopted.
Love’s dreadful meaning
But everyone who longs to be in love or who treasures his or her conspiratorial love already knows the twists and turns of this argument. Those who would die to protect their loved ones and who secretly despise the public enough to lie on a minute-by-minute basis in the performance of their public roles might as well confess their agreement with the cynic’s misgivings.
The difference is only that the cynic isn’t as able an actor or loves knowledge most of all and thus becomes unlovable.
Still, what does the cynic have to fear from love? Love doesn’t redeem society but condemns it. Love reveals us as hypocrites, as cowards who guard our secret selves. Only one person at a time can love us, we assume, because our hidden flaws are shameful. Likewise, we can’t bear to love everyone as the mythic Jesus did, because the more we learn about what people are really like, the more they disappoint us.
By holding as most precious the bond of romantic intimacy, we admit that most relationships are comparatively phony and that we’re secretly at war with all fakery and mindlessness. We hold up our partner’s validation of us as proof that miracles occur, and we acknowledge that the world outside that shelter is a wasteland by comparison.