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In “Random Love: To Hook Up or to Not Hook Up,” I wrote about the disturbing implications of Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape (2016) and Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers (2016). Both authors maintain that hooking up is not conducive to the development of emotional attachment, much less intimacy, and concur that the widespread use of social media inhibits the kinds of relationship that lead to love—a powerful, if not universal, human desire. Sales ends her book with a poignant quote from one of her interview subjects:
“Do we even know how to fall in love anymore?” Eve asked. Do we even know what being in love is? Will we ever get there because we have such a screwed-up notion of what it should be or how you should get there?....Everyone wants love,” she said, “and no one wants to admit it.”
Sherry Turkle, in Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), addresses this question from another angle. She argues that over-reliance on social media forms of communication blunts the capacity for empathy, a prerequisite for any kind of close or loving relationship. “Face-to-face conversation” she says, “is the most human—and humanizing thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood.”
Turkle is making an important point about the role of empathy in the development of loving relationships, which I want to expand on here.
Personal disclaimer: I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, when social trends were more political than technological. We had television, of course, but that was about it. Yet I loved my first computer, using Word Star and then Word Perfect to compose academic articles and books. When email became the norm for communication within my institution and with others around the world, I joyed in this new ease of connection. And how could I live without the Internet, which sends me information about anything I want to know with a single click? But I don’t spend my day texting or checking “likes” on my social media accounts—although I do, of course, as time permits.
Also I’m no longer interested in having sex for the sake of feeling “hot” or desired. I was once, but it was remarkably easy to find sexual partners in the heady days of the 1970s. No need for Match.com, much less Tinder, for that.
What I truly wanted (to the extent that I can fathom the needs of my younger self) was not sex but understanding. I’d had a rough childhood and adolescence and wanted to find someone with whom I could share my angst—someone who could see who I was and love me anyway. I was more needy of being loved at this time than able to love. Many years passed in this mode—wanting someone who could enter my inner life and embrace me whole. It took a lot longer for me to realize that in order to receive love you have to offer it in return. In other words, if you want someone to comprehend the uniqueness and complexity of your experience, you must be ready to reciprocate.
This is what empathy means: the ability to put oneself in another’s shoes and view the world from there. The word empathy derives from the prefix “en,” meaning in, and “pathy” meaning feeling—‘in feeling with,’ you might say. Empathy, at its best, is a two-way street and, I would argue, the necessary first step in the evolution of any long-term intimate relationship, whether it be one of friendship or romantic love.
How do we learn to love? I’m a literature professor, not a psychoanalyst, but I understand from the articles and books I read that it matters how we are cared for and attended to in the first days, months and years of our lives. Those who offer us this care (whether father, mother, grandparent, foster parent, or nanny) convey to us what love means, on the most immediate level.
As adults, we sense when someone is approaching or avoiding us. The same is true for infants. If your first experience in life is being responded to (fed, bathed, and comforted) in sensitive ways, you develop a basic trust in life. Love, I believe, is first and foremost, physical. It follows that if we have been well cared for as infants that we will feel disposed to believe in our own self-worth and ability to seek and provide loving care in return.
Many of us don’t have such a positive experience. And this is what motivates us to seek love in more or less desperate ways. Sex, in this context, may seem like a validation of who we are, when it is really just sex. It might be good, bad or indifferent, but it is not love per se.
As Westerners, we live in a culture that is saturated with images of sexual arousal—through movies, advertising and now in the availability of online pornography, where (if Orenstein and Sales are correct) today’s teenagers receive their basic sex education. Why should we be surprised to learn that neither girls nor boys can learn how to develop close or enduring relationships by way of their smart phones?
Recently, I came across a non-sexual definition of love from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the eminent scholar of GLBT studies. Though not gay, she was a major figure in the development of queer studies as an academic discipline. In A Dialogue on Love, (1999), she reflects on the process of the psychotherapy she sought after her first bout with breast cancer:
"Oh, right, I keep forgetting, for lots and lots of people in the world, the notion of ‘falling in love’ has (of all things) sexual connotations. No, that’s not what I think is happening. For me, what falling in love means is different. It’s a matter of suddenly, globally, ‘knowing’ that another person represents your only access to some vitally
transmissible truth
or radiantly heightened
mode of perception"
Sedgwick is talking about her relationship with her therapist, who takes her in as a person as fully as she could desire, but she is also describing what most of us seek in the experience of love in our lives. We seek radiance, do we not?
Sex, in the context of mutual attraction and empathy can feel not only loving, but also transcendent—a far cry from hooking up.
Let me know what you think in the comments and stay tuned for my next post.
