This is the the seventh of eight articles on love, sex and gender. As with the others, it stands on its own, but you can read through part 1, on man and woman, part 2 on sex and excitement, part 3 on emotion and habit, part 4, on courtship and woo, part 5 on solipsism and sex, part 6 on making love and part 8 on eternal love.
After the Honeymoon
When two people first come together in love, it’s all kinds of wonderful. There’s sweetness and delight, marvelling sex, romantic days out, delightful discoveries… You tell your friends, you make plans, ‘everything’s going to be like this… and like this…’ But that doesn’t last very long. Suffering is on its way.
After the honeymoon, normality returns, bringing an edgy kind of compromise with it. The romance fades and a battle of wills begins, a long wearying campaign, punctuated with pleasant truces, but finishing in defeat for both sides, and much bloodshed. For most people that’s just how ‘love’ is.
The problems usually begin about three months after moving in together. It’s only when you’ve made some kind of commitment, and can drop the ‘date face’ that you maintained to win and woo him or her, that the old painself, the unhappy persona your parents taught you to adopt,1 emerges.
Then we see the hurt, mopey child. Then we see the foot-stamping and the tantrums. Then we see the hot outbursts and the cold sulks. Then we see all the old tricks that baby used to get attention, or to shield itself from emotional hurt. Then we hear the lies, the whining, the begging, or the cruel barbs.
Strange how wrong you were about him! He seemed so nice, funny, capable. She seemed so sweet, giving, attentive. You thought you’d hitched your life to a grown up. But something has changed. The self you fell in love with is not the one you’re living with. Someone, or something, else has taken its place.2
You wonder what to do. Actually, you might think, she is really rather boring and ordinary. Or spoilt. Or clingy. Or cold. Or erratic. All the intriguing mystery has gone. And isn’t he selfish? Cruel? Weak? Just like all the rest? You shouldn’t be expected to live with this. It’s not fair!
One of you now wants to get away from the relationship and the other wants to hang on to it. But there was no great commitment to begin with, to keep you both together, and so it is easy and all-too common to act on your feelings and part. Usually it is he who breaks her heart, but the roles could be reversed.
People don’t stay together for long today. The pill, the washing machine and the ‘career’3 have ‘liberated’ woman from the need for long-term relationships, and a world which forces her out of her body has taken away the heart she so loves to give to a man. So she hops from one lover to another, with a minimum of fuss.
And he is even more ready to move on. The world, being the supreme expression of the male ego, serves his wilful fear of commitment at the expense not just of long-term fidelity, but of even trivial, symbolic expressions of duty, responsibility and obligation, such as making a move or paying for a meal.4
This is why it is so easy to split up, to drift between casual relationships. The modern world is arranged so that men and women never really have to face themselves, or to face each other. This isn’t really her idea, although she takes what advantage from it she can. It serves him, or appears to.
Nevertheless, people still have long-term relationships. But although they may use the word ‘love’ to describe how they feel about each other, and although love occasionally makes an accidental appearance, it is not love — real love — that keeps them together. Indeed, they can hardly be said to be together at all.
The Bond of Fear
It is not love that keeps people together, but fear. Fear of being left alone, fear of pain (the pain of heartbreak), fear of upsetting one’s cosy habits, fear of ruining the lives of one’s children, fear of losing one’s mortgage or one’s business and fear of the opinions of others (parents, priests, neighbours or friends).
Love plays very little part at all. The word ‘love’ might occasionally be used to describe how people feels about their partners, but on closer inspection this ‘love’ turns out to mean a mixture of affection, dependency, loyalty, attachment and like-minded friendliness — all fine, to be sure, but not love.
Love, as we have seen, is something which actually exists, in your actual body, now. If you don’t actually feel love, the lovely warm flowing sensation of it,5 connecting you to your lover, then your love is, ultimately, verbal or mental. You can look inside and find something, but that something is not love.
It’s like an anxious, angry or numbed person saying ‘I am conscious’. If you are emotional you can no more be conscious, than you can be spontaneous, creative or light-hearted, because emotion has suffocated the source of consciousness, or of spontaneity, or of creativity, or of light-heartedness. Or of love.
Indeed, without real love the affection, dependency, loyalty, attachment and like-minded friendliness that people call love also wither and crumble, because they were rooted in a shared truth which has dried up, leaving the outward shell of it. This shell might seem friendly and stable, but it is anything but.
Think of your parents. Think of other long-term relationships you know of. If you cannot perceive miserable suffocating coupledom, characterised by bitter compromise, deepening, deadening misery, frosty indifference and emotional cruelty, then, most likely, you cannot perceive the relationship at all.
Some long-termers are very strange. Some couples don’t speak to each other at all, except to discuss daily practicalities. Some sleep in separate rooms, and never make love. Some know nothing of each other’s thoughts, know nothing even of each other’s fears and desires, know nothing of each other at all.6
And it gets worse. Couples, as we have seen, appear nice and stable and loving, because it is so important for them both to do so, but at night, she turns her face to the wall, he sighs for women he can never possess. This misery leaks out in icy little put-downs that couples publicly prick each other with.
This is not difficult to spot if you’re conscious.7 The lack of physical flow between man and woman, the underfeeling of separation, the sour glances they shoot at each other, the tension in her jaw, the tightness around his lips… all of these outward signs are the tip of a miserable loveless iceberg.
Cyphered and Caricatured Couplings
Actually though there are two species of relationship weirdness. The first is found between degendered cyphers, in whom passion has died. There is a seething pit of frustration and hatred in such pairings, but it is suppressed, pushed under the surface, from whence it periodically erupts in ugly outbursts.
This bloodless cypher-coupling is more commonly found in the modern, professional-class West (including much of the rich, Westernised professional-class in the East), alienated from the gendered reality of the body by the technocratic system which their discarnate minds manage.8
The misery of the cyphered relationship is often hard to detect, because the middle-class are so adapt at putting on the face. A significant body of great narrative art is devoted to exposing or parodying the gulf that separates the clean, ‘adjusted’ professional-class facade with the rot that it conceals.9
Great art that is. The substandard mythoi of the cypher is devoted to justifying the blank, loveless, degendered nothingness at the heart of the institutionalised management-class relationship, which appears in television and literature, over and over again, as entirely normal, albeit wistfully tragic.
Perhaps you happen to know, from the inside, a lovely middle-class couple, in a stable, long-term relationship, a programmer perhaps, and his wife who is a doctor, or two graphic designers, or a successful businessman and his wife who ‘writes’? Lift up the lovely, stable lid of these pairings and worms crawl out.
The other kind of basic relationship pathology, more common in pre-modern, lower-class and non-Western societies, can be found in long-term relationships between hypermale and hyperfemale caricatures, in which ritualised abuse has taken the place of the natural status play of healthy masculinity and femininity.
The caricatured male-female pairing is the historical norm, in that it emerged with civilisation and formed the ideological basis of history, conceived by man as a non-stop war against woman and all that she represents — sensitivity, innocence, nature and unconditional love.
The myths of civilised man reflect the petty ego of the caricatured hyper male, who values weakness in woman (weakness that is, not softness), who seeks to justify and excuse his violent domination of woman (and nature) by blaming her—woman the deceiver, the seductress—for his fears and desires.
Today, the doormat wife, who chooses emotionally reassuring debasement over love, paired with a brutally insensitive apeman, is a classic exemplar of the caricatured long-term couple, still common all over the world, including here in the West, although it has, over the past century, given way to its opposite.
Today one is more likely to find, in the caricatured and cyphered couple, a feeble child-man living with a virago. He, without the courage, confidence and pluck to handle her emotions (or without the violence he once used in place of such manly authority), gives in to them, ‘for a quiet life’ — a quiet life of spiritual pain.
Her power over him (including her mothering, which his babyish self also gives in to) superficially gratifies her emotions, while leaving her sexually frustrated and spiritually unfulfilled, a void she fills with escape fantasies, shopping and manic-obsessive, hyper-interest in her children, which stand in for his love.
Thus, the caricatured self is as alienated as the cyphered self, but not through an excess of mentation, but of emotion; the pathological fears and desires which motivate the lower classes and which, without the power of detached deferment that the management class learn, deform gender into a parody of itself.10
And so, tidy, tasteful left-wing couples torture each other in a different manner to untidy, tasteless right-wing couples, and each looks down on the other as repulsively prissy, fragile and cold or as repulsively crude, insensitive and violent… but the loveless nightmare remains exactly the same.
The same torment, everywhere. The same daily wearing away on each other’s exposed fascia. All couples know, by ingrained instinct, the precise sore spot, the raw nerve that recoils when touched. Or they just ignore each other, and let the love within them wither and sink into a hard, grim, suffocating everydayness.
And nobody cares! The misery of the loveless home, despite being the cause of all the world’s problems, never registers as a cause for real concern. Nobody ever really talks about it. Certainly, people complain about their miserable love-lives, but nobody seriously recognises or addresses the horror of lovelessness on earth.
Think of all the outrage there is in the world about war, think of all the op-eds and blog articles written about man’s horrific treatment of nature, think of all the books written about the nightmare of history. Then compare that with how much attention is placed on the omnipresent, never-ending nightmare of love.
Feminists appear to have taken up the banner, but it is not raised against lack of love, but against objectification, abuse, toxicity, abuse of power and various second-order effects of lovelessness. Feminists do not use the word ‘love’ because they don’t know what it means.
Or rather, they only know what it means. Perhaps you only know what love means too, like you only know that water is clear and wet, that it contains two hydrogen molecules and one oxygen molecule, and that you need it to live? That’s fine; the question is, are you drinking it? Because if not, you’ll die.
Caricatures die by violence and cyphers by indifference, but as relationships age they all tend to get smothered by familiarity, a layer of radioactive dust that kills what it settles on, dividing dying flesh from dying flesh. The lips kiss, but there is nothing there, just flesh, it might as well be someone else’s body.
The source of familiarity, of taking the other for granted is, again, is lack of actual love and, as we have seen, it’s usually his fault. He gets bored and starts to find his work and his private interests more important than actively loving her, and she then starts to become normal, ordinary.
A man who has stopped winning a woman—which means stopped giving her loving attention—settles down into the base state that she then finds ordinary, predictable and ridiculous. He loses his mystery because he has stopped loving her mystery. An affair is just round the corner, or a break-up.
Without love, over time, the psyche, like the body, hardens and coarsens, which makes the excitement of sex more and more difficult and the comfort of familiarity more and more appealing. Eventually only spirit can bring you both together, which means, without spirit, you are forever alone.
Fitting and Suiting
Love is felt through and expressed as the things of the world. All living things are, by dint of their brute existence, lovable, which we recognise as the non-hierarchical wholeness of life, but they also express life in more and more conscious forms, which we recognise as the hierarchical differentiation of life.
This is why it is possible, essentially, to love all things in the universe, and the universe itself and, at the same time, why we love irises more than stones, butterflies more than irises, frogs more than butterflies, mice more than frogs, dogs more than mice and human beings more than dogs.
At the same time. By itself such the hierarchical view of life is monstrous, but by itself so is the non-hierarchical view. Anyone who cannot love all things, as a whole, is broken in some way, defective; but so is someone who loves animals more than humans, or plants more than animals.
The most conscious thing in your experience is your partner. He or she is simultaneously as lovable as the merest breath of dust, floating across an empty room, while, at the same time, he or she is the most lovable thing in the universe; or the most lovable thing you may ever encounter.
Love then, is primarily impersonal and then, secondarily, it is personal. Without a deep, impersonal foundation, rooted in an unconditional acceptance of life itself, love becomes hollow and passionless. Without a wide, personal attachment, love becomes frustrating and contentious.
To put this less abstractly, long-term love for another is founded (and in its absence founders) on the capacity of two people to share the unconditional depths of life, which we can call fitting, and, at the same time, to share the conditional widths of life, or suiting.
Two people who fit have an intensity of union, rooted in the flesh, but passing beyond it, into the unfathomable. Sex between those who fit is intense; communication, magical. Those who suit, understand each other, in the world, and can live together, laughing, in harmony, sharing their tastes and opinions.11
What tends to happen is that men and women find themselves fitting someone they are deeply attracted to, but cannot live with, or suiting someone they can live with but are not deeply attracted to. In the first case there is boredom (having nothing to do), in the second, ennui (having nothing to be).
You may have noticed, reading books from times past, how amazingly quickly men and women seem to fall in love and get engaged. There is a courtship period, but it’s an odd, compressed affair. This is because, prior to modernism, most people (or most people of the same class) suited each other tolerably well.
Or you might have witnessed for yourself how often, in some cultures, arranged marriages seem to work, at least surprisingly well. It shouldn’t be possible, given the unique needs of the human heart, for one’s parents to be able to find a wife or husband with whom one can live with, for decades, and yet often it is.
Again, this is because, distortions of individuality in the hypermodern West do not exist in other, pre-modern, parts of the world. This is not to justify arranged marriages, but to point out that it is easier for rural peasants in Kerala to find someone they are suited to, than it is for university students in Brighton.
In the modern world life has fragmented down every possible fault-line, which makes finding someone with the same outlook and taste maddeningly difficult. An arduous search is necessary to find a partner with whom one can watch films, listen to music and discuss politics without falling into separation.12
But if finding someone who suits you is difficult, finding someone with whom you fit, is, in a world comprising shallower and shallower selves, becoming next to impossible. Relationships rooted in the casual, glancing touch of a trivial heart have as much chance of surviving as a tree planted in sand.
Fitting is a matter of deep compatibility of modalities.13 A female mind seeks a male mind, a male body seeks a female body, a female will seeks a male will, a male heart seeks a female heart and all the innumerable gendered divisions and subdivisions within these aspects of self have similar polarities.
There is and will always be a certain tension between fitting and suiting, because what suits the daytime self turns out to be very different to what fits the underworld of attraction that gendered polarities produce. People often find themselves madly attracted to people whom they would otherwise detest.
You must fit, and you must suit, but it goes without saying that it is neither necessary nor desirable to seek a ‘perfect’ union. Part of the fine pleasure and the noble purpose of being together is to deepen each other towards better fitting and widen each other towards more harmonious suiting; to change each other.14
That said, if you don’t have moments of telepathy, if you can’t share each other’s pleasures,15 if you can’t make superb love, if you do not laugh at the same things and if there is not an electric current flowing between you, you are either heading towards a breakup, or towards a pit of unloving long-term coupledom.
The question is, if it’s not right now, will ever be? Or if it is, will it continue to be? How do you know? How do you know he’s Mr. Right? How do you know she’s the one? Simple. You don’t know. You can never know. It is known for you. If you get out of the way it is clear that he or she is someone to be with.
There is a sense of choicelessness in such unions. As Marcel Proust wrote, ‘it is a mistake to speak of a bad choice in love, since, as soon as a choice exists, it can only be bad.’ If you choose your partner, you’ll regret it. If your parents or your society chooses, you’ll regret it. Harmony comes from absence of choice.
Suddenly she is there. Suddenly he is there. If you are sensitive to life you’ll know it even before he or she is fully there. The back of her head, the way someone has walked into the room, even a signature, even (in my case) a name is enough to awaken the quiet sense of rightness that love brings with it.
Then, there you are together. All is easeful. The sun shines brightly, shop-keepers are unusually friendly, help comes from nowhere. Problems come, horrible ones, but you get through because you want to get through. You have no choice. Something bigger than both of you is at work here. Now, get married.
A Ritual of Commitment
Marriage is no longer common in the West, for much the same reason that formality, smalltalk, courtship, dressing for the public, thanking God for one’s food, taking Mass and celebrating coming-of-age are out of fashion or heading that way; because ritual has died. Rationalism has no need of it.16
Marriage, in truth, is a ritualistic gesture of commitment. It carries meaning, as all rituals do, through an irrational performance of affirmation, of participation in the irrational quality of the moment. In the case of marriage, we affirm our commitment to live together, and to share ‘the moment’ for as long as possible.
Not forever (although love is forever17). Nor even for our whole lives, for marriages can end. But for as long as there is love between us, and for as long as there is the will to make more love. For all that time, stretching as far as we can see, we are committed to participate in ‘the moment’ - in life - together.
Marriage, like all acts of love, is an act of service, from the man to the woman. It is he who must give up his independent need to ejaculate into every vagina on earth, and it is marriage that ritualistically affirms this. This is why wives tend to feel more secure in their love than girlfriends.
Men fear commitment because they fear giving up what they believe makes them men, the power to do as they please. They look upon the stamped-down cuck that marriage has made of weak men, they look upon all the women they will have to give up (at least in their dreams) and they think; no thanks!
Marriage, insofar as it represents man’s complete surrender to the soul of woman, is, for he who is able to rise to the almighty challenge of it, an ordeal by fire that rewards man with the finest expression of his masculinity, a sense of wholeness which only long experience can provide. 18
This is why married men, those who have faced and mastered the dragon of self— as it manifests in the punishing emotions of woman — have a gravitas that homosexuals, celibates and casual lovers (who never take on the dragon) and cowards, cucks and nice-guys (who are defeated by it) do not have.19
It is also why the words ‘wife’ and ‘husband’ feel different to ‘girlfriend’ and ‘boyfriend’. They feel deeper. Naturally, such a feeling is opaque to modern-minded rationalists who see in marriage, as they see in all rituals, little more than an embarrassing, almost childish, expression of outmoded conformity.
Not that the ritual of marriage cannot be, like all rituals, perverted and corrupted, in this case by turning the living sacrament into a manipulable thing — a document — secured not by life itself, but by a mere professional — a religious professional (a priest) or a secular professional (a lawyer).
Getting the marriage into writing serves fearful, unconscious, unloving men and women,20 who, unable to tie the other to them with the sovereign bonds of love, must use external, worldly authority to do so. Wherever the law (religious or secular) binds men and women, you can be sure that love lives not in that place.
A Brief History of Marriage
Marriage, being an irrational commitment, does not, ultimately, conform to any rational calculus. It may well lead to the stability of society and the moral health of children, but it is, ultimately, a personal (yet shared) leap of faith, resistant to the constructed order, or nomos, of society.
This is why tyrannous authority has, throughout history, gone to such strenuous lengths to manage marital relations. In pre-civilised societies managed marriages existed and were often coercive,21 but they were still a human affair, sacralised socially, by the tribe, and dissolved by the individual man or woman.
The fall of man, into civilised time and space, saw the fall of marriage into a stultifying network of social taboos designed to tie men and women to the reproduction of social norms. Founding society on property put a premium on the legitimacy of heirs, and therefore on virginity, guaranteed by marriage.22
Where no property was involved, these concerns faded. Among the poor, marriage was less about lineage and more about survival, weakening man’s obsession with virginity. Civilised morality serves economic interests rather than innate virtue and so, without inheritance at stake, sexual norms relaxed.
Local customs around the world demanded obsessive patriarchal control of women, who were considered male property. The Jewish God, for example — a man23 — commanded his faithful to not covet their neighbour’s wives, servants and oxen — which is to say, their possessions.24
Young women were the source of egregious forms of civilised social control.25 Forced or ‘arranged’ marriages were common, institutionalised rape26 and child marriage27 (another form of rape) were common in ‘civilised’ European, African, Arabic and Asian societies, where they still occur.28
And yet, despite the long, shameful history of man’s oppression of woman, the individual and his or her community still had some power over marriage arrangements. Freedom still existed, even for women, until the medieval church turned the marriage sacrament into a legal commitment.29
This act deracinated love from its ultimate source in the personal, the familial and the communal, and placed it under administration. Henceforth, centralised power — first the Church, later the state — could wield power over marriage; which is to say, over the most intimate relations between men and women.
Love, once woven into the fabric of daily life, became a tool of state control. Desire was pathologised, dissenters excommunicated, families fractured by annulment taxes, peasants trapped in loveless matches, women’s bodies policed and the communal joy of partnership reduced to a legal arrangement.
Nothing comes into existence without its shadow though. In this case the ever more onerous chains placed over a woman’s autonomy were counterbalanced with a new gynocentrism, which idealised woman, and gave her power to command man (where that power did not interfere with the androcentric world).
Gynocentrism was born with the practice of courtly love. This represented a glorious ideal for man to strive for — the love of a good woman — but at the same time it confined the male psyche, which was expected to serve as vassal to the whims of an idealised, and therefore equally confined, female psyche.30
By the nineteenth century marriage had become, particularly for the propertied class, a prison. An excellent source of drama for bourgeois novelists, but a hellish condition of loveless ennui for the inmates, particularly women, who had no escape from the loveless abuse and stifling mores of bourgeois marriage.
The industrial revolution saw the breakdown of this arrangement, a dissolution of traditionally gendered bonds fuelled by the rise of capitalism, which needed men and woman to serve as cogs (physical, working class cogs, and mental, professional-class cogs) in the ungendered machine.
Before this, woman may have been the victim of male social control, but she still had real power — including economic power — over her domain, the hearth. This was intolerable to industrial-capitalist power, which demanded she participate in the economy. She but gained freedom, but at the expense of autonomy.31
It wasn’t difficult to persuade women that marriage was a condition of frustrating confinement, but in the end only middle-class women, the ‘new women’, or feminists, who took up the capitalist cause, were to be liberated. For all the other women of the world, freedom from marriage meant more work.
Feminism is the modern realisation of the gynocentric culture of courtly love. The purpose of society for feminists is, as it was for feudal princesses, to enforce and legitimise rules which benefit women; the critical difference being that today’s princesses are essentially men, and seek power in his domain.
We might say that the shadow of idealised woman’s power has entered the light, where it now rules over man with a pitiless, tyranny that, hitherto, only men employed in the battle of the sexes. Now that women have become men they use the tools of man to defeat him, and he is defeated. He is a broken creature.
The psychological costs of feminism — the erosion of both femininity and masculinity — and the social costs — the dissolution of marriage — were and are32 catastrophic, but they continue to be celebrated by middle class women around the world, who take their miserable bondage to be a form of liberty.
Women are now free to be judges, prime-ministers and boiler fitters (although, as we’ve seen, this last freedom they don’t seem too willing to take advantage of), but they are more imprisoned by their selves than ever before. They have become their own prisoners and warders.
Postmodern Marriage
And so, as marriage and relationship stability stopped being a means of ensuring social order, so elites stopped caring about it. They still recognised the importance of marriage in their own lives, but for the working classes it was neither necessary, nor in many cases possible, for marriage to exist.
Marriage is framed as a personal solution to systemic problems. It would be nice if the working class all tended happy little families at home, but as the demands of the global economy make this impossible — as marriage, like friendship, silence and reality, is now a luxury good — the system concedes no place to it.
The right (including the ‘incel’ male) are much exercised by the idea of marriage. They dream of nineteen-fifties American ‘tradwives’ — which is to say, they dream of the outrageous wealth that nineteen-fifties American men possessed to support obedient women in gilded cages.
Women too, those with sufficient capital to have a chance of getting in on the dream — and by ‘capital’ I mean women with young and beautiful bodies — have similar ambitions, which they sacrifice their youth and beauty, and eventually their lives, in pursuit of. This is the career path of the modern princess.
The physical, spiritual and psychological degradation that such ambitions terminate in for women — the suffocating depression of the caged tradwife and the dead inner life of the hyper-preened elite whore — do not play a part in the capitalist fantasies of women who are ‘too hot to work’.
Right wing glorification of marriage, like the other ‘values’ the owner-class are happy to sacrifice to the technolotrous god that provides their security, is also in part a reaction to the dissolution of border, custom and gender celebrated by the postmodern, socialist left; which worships at the same alter.
In other words there is no hope for socialism either. It is true that in a low-tech environment ‘socialism’ allows women to chose men for their joie-de-vivre or savoir-faire, rather than for their economic power, and so it is also true that ‘women have better sex under socialism’, but at what cost?
The cost — particularly in a high-tech socialist state — is a flattening of desire and an underhand substitution of quality — excellence, nobility, call it what you will — for sexless, democratic mediocrity. Woman becomes free to choose, but from an ever less appetising menu of democratic man-a-likes.
Socialism, under the assumptions of technolotry, does not raise men and women, it flattens them into a human paste in which one man is no different to another. Like capitalism it appears to offer choice, but at the expense of quality, uniqueness, character, which reduces all choice to a massive so-what?
And the high-tech socialist state still subordinates women. The removal of economic pressure doesn’t eliminate patriarchy (or oppressive work33) it just disguises male dominance in new forms: political connections and bureaucratic clout now determine power, rather than marketable merit or value.
Neither the ideological ambitions of socialist cyphers, nor those of capitalist caricatures, can offer peace in the battle of the sexes, for neither one determines sexual relations. It is civilisation itself, manifest as the technological system which runs our lives, even our most intimate relations with our partners.
This is why marriages are falling apart. The modern industrial technological system ran on stable institutions, and so it prioritised good, solid schools, states and marriages. The postmodern digital technological system does not; it subordinates these definite forms to the social mush, or slop we see around us.
Much today is made of digital ‘slop’ — art, film, literature and so on — but these are just the efflorescent expressions of the social, psychic slop which preceded it, the postmodern slop demanded by technology; the slop of our education and health, the slop of our families and marriages, the slop of our bodies and minds.
Young people in the West are verbally taught to resist this grey-soup of postmodernity, while being rewarded for capitulating to it, for indulging their selves, for cutting themselves off from their embodied experience and for living a casual, detached, self-indulgent, half-life on the screen.
The young are no longer required to work hard and provide for a stable family, and so they don’t.34 They sleep around, they choose easy, instantly gratifying homosexual relations, they seek refuge in a boutique of digitally administered identities or they give up on love, sex and the passional reality of gender entirely.
This meets the needs of the postmodern system, and it satisfies the shallow self with which it is fused. The ideal ceases to be the noble nuclear family, staring bravely into a sunrise, and becomes a ‘sexy’ polyamorous superman or woman with a string of affectless faceless hookups at their fingertips.
The solution is not to return to the oppressive pre-modern marriages that horrify feminists, but to the free, sacred ritual (or sacrament) of loving marriage, between a man and woman, living, as far as they can, independently of the civilised system. Here man and woman can live together, in peace.
This is the the seventh of eight articles on love, sex and gender. As with the others, it stands on its own, but you can read through part 1, on man and woman, part 2 on sex and excitement, part 3 on emotion and habit, part 4, on courtship and woo, part 5 on solipsism and sex, part 6 on making love, and part 8 on eternal love.
As touched on in part two, Sex, Love and Excitement. For the difference between character and personality see The Fire Sermon or Self and Unself.
No? Not your experience? Have you never faced all this? Have you never seen a demonic other emerge in your love? Have you never seen it emerge in your self? Well then, you’ve never really been in love. You’re either not conscious enough to know yourself, or you’ve never thrown your whole heart in with another.
Not that anyone really has a ‘career’ any more.
An asexual world has it that men and women should be treated equally in their intimate relations; and men are the winners. The idea that woman enjoys casual sex as much as man, despite the fact she feels used after it—and he, if he has the slightest conscious awareness of his inner state, feels guilty—serves man, quite obviously, as does the belief that he does not need to show her any greater consideration, or display gentlemanliness, decisiveness or make even trivial gestures of commitment, such as paying for a meal, because he wouldn’t do these things for his mates. He can casually chat with her, casually fuck her and then casually push her out the door because that’s what he would do if she were a man. That’s equality, yeah? She buys into it, at least verbally or intellectually—while feeling her heart shrink at every pusillanimous lack of pluck (such as fear of making a move or making a decision), every gesture of capitulation (such as acceding to her emotion without taking a manly stand) and every unfeeling disregard for the honour of being with her.
From Self and Unself
As real as the sensation of delight in a warm shower after a hard days’ physical work.
Even finances are a secret to some, who have no idea how much money their own husband or wife has.
I mean, simply, softly aware, not scrutinising other people for their failings.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species—
Presentable, eminently presentable—
shall I make you a present of him?
Isn’t he handsome? Isn’t he healthy? Isn’t he a fine specimen?
Doesn’t he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn’t it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn’t you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing
Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man’s need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.
How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species—
Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable—
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.
And even so, he’s stale, he’s been there too long.
Touch him, and you’ll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.
Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty—
How beastly the bourgeois is!
Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can’t all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.
D.H. Lawrence, How Beastly the Bourgeois Is
Think of Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road, or Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, or Ira Levin‘s The Stepford Wives, or Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day. Eyes Wide Shut, American Beauty, Blue Velvet, The Servant and The Celebration (Festen) and Dogtooth are all examples from film.
As D.H. Lawrence noted, the middle class are wide, but shallow. The working class are deep but narrow. One might compare the two by noting the different character of addiction that the working class and middle class are prey to. Working class addictions are often crude, noisy, excessive, life-destroying manias, while middle-class addiction are, by contrast, trivial and pathetic. Professional-class apologist Gabor Maté, for example, has a book called In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction in which he compares the heroin addiction of his patients to his own addiction… to buying CDs! This is not to say that one cannot use one’s own weaknesses to reach across to those which are very different, and perhaps much worse, than those of others — one can and one must. It is to note that Maté’s wild compulsion goes no further than the record shop.
Maté, by the way, being middle-class to his low-calorie core, blames addiction on personal or biologically-determined pathologies — on childhood trauma and [consequent] ‘mental illness’ — rather than on personal and social causes, which, mysteriously, do not appear in his work. See Stanton Peele’s critique of Maté, My Traumatic Breakfast with Gabor Maté.
Nietzsche, surprisingly, understood suiting very well;
Marriage as a long conversation. — When entering into a marriage one ought to ask oneself: do you believe you are going to enjoy talking with this woman up into your old age? Everything else in marriage is transitory, but most of the time you are together will be devoted to conversation.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human.
It is often said that difference of opinion in such matters is ‘the spice of life’, that compatibility in such affairs, even if it were possible, is predictable tedium. This idea is advanced by selfish, solipsistic minds, unwilling to give up their tastes to experience a universal quality that can be shared with anyone; above all, one’s partner.
This isn’t to say that selves must be identical, without their own leanings, sensitivities and the centres of gravity with which we meaningfully pull and push upon each other in the harmony of the society, the team, the partnership; each member, playing his or her unique part in the whole.
The integrated suiting of the individual, however, is impossible without a shared selfless quality into which selves can sink. The self, fearing death, prefers compromise, appeasement, violently imposing one’s preferences on the other or submitting to experiences that one does not really enjoy.
If you and your lover share a fundamental difference of opinion, or taste (if you have to explain the joke) it will either drive you apart (in compromise, appeasement, violence or debasement) or you’ll give up your self to find the quality that you can both share. You’ll strive to heighten your opinions and deepen your tastes.
Let’s say one of you likes aggressive modern dance music and the other likes slushy modern pop ballads. The solution is not to argue about which of these is best, or to submit to an aesthetic experience you don’t like. The solution is to look for quality in music that transcends division, which is to say, music that has ‘stood the test of time’.
‘The test of time’ is actually the test of an artform’s immortality, its capacity to transcend time — which means to transcend the time-bound self. If you do not share the same sense of music it means one or both of you are unwilling to overcome the solipsistic self that keeps you from entering into a higher sphere of taste.
It would take us far from our theme to enquire into myth and story, comedy, politics, taste in food, furniture and clothing, the ability to hold a conversation, enjoyment of nature and attitudes to money, but all of these, like taste in music, are ‘forms of suiting’ that demand selflessness to transcend.
The secondary facts of gender discussed in part one, and at length in the entry on gender in The Apocalypedia (second edition).
If you cannot or will not change for the better, and learn to give up your smaller self — give up your personal emotions, your wilful independence, your fears and frustrations, your attachments to familiar comforts and your cravings — you’re incapable of living with another, and are better off alone.
I always feel that a man and a woman who do not like the same films, will eventually divorce.
Jean-Luc Godard
We live in a rational, grown-up world, so it is no surprise to find that rituals everywhere are hollowed out, their shells ridiculed as mere superstition, or as placebo, or entertainment, and either discarded or co-opted. As the solipsism of rootless rationality reaches its postmodern culmination, form dissolves, eventually making it impossible to ritually engage with the other. Unable to commit themselves to common symbolic acts, modern people feel embarrassment at authentic ritual and repulsed by its conformity. It’s just not ‘authentic’, but this ‘authenticity’, in its isolation from the mystery of the other, can only ever represent itself.This is how all the ‘individuals’ of a postmodern world end up looking and sounding exactly the same as each other.
An exhausted civilisation, estranged from fractal limits, terminates in a world without public modes of behaviour, with- out heartfelt participation in communal culture, without collec- tive affirmation of the ineffable, or outer presentation of inner quality, and so without the capacity to play with these forms; the playfulness of irony and courtesy and implication and metaphor. Living without limit does not liberate man, rather it embeds him more deeply into the mere form of life, a rational screen of accu- mulated concepts which drains us all of elegance and humour.
From The Apocalypedia See also Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals.
As we shall see in the final part of this series.
A man can only begin to understand the depths of woman’s nature when he surrenders his soul unequivocally. It is only then that he begins to grow and truly to fecundate her. There are then no limits to what he may expect of her, because in surrendering he has delimited his own powers. In this sort of union, which is really a marriage of spirit with spirit, a man comes face to face with the meaning of creation. He participates in an experiment which he realizes will always be beyond his feeble comprehension. He senses the drama of the earth-bound and the role which woman plays in it. The very possessiveness of woman takes on a new light. It becomes as enchanting and mysterious as the law of gravitation.
Henry Miller, Sexus
Troublesome people have troublesome relationships. Boring people have boring relationships. And people without character either have no relationships at all, or they have a series of trivial — and disgusting — relationships, such those found in male fantasies of polyamory, nymphomania and Don Juanism.
Motivated by biology, as Schopenhauer — himself too jaundiced in matters of love to see beyond this — lamented.
See Menelaos Apostolou, Sexual selection under parental choice: the role of parents in the evolution of human mating.
Marriage was also a system of reciprocal exchange between groups, not merely a tool for economic (and, inevitably, patriarchal) control.
For the story of how and why the Hebrews ditched the goddess they used to worship — Asherah — who resurfaced in post-biblical Judaism (as the Shekhinah and Lilith) and then as the Christian Mother Mary — See Raphael Patai’s The Hebrew Goddess.
Deuteronomy 22:28-29 mandates that a man who rapes an unmarried woman must pay her father and marry her (treating her as damaged property).
Bride kidnapping has also been documented in non-sedentary hunter-gatherer communities like the San people, long before agrarian states emerged.
The ‘droit du seigneur’ — a medieval feudal custom granting a lord the right to sleep with a vassal's bride on her wedding night before her husband — is an infamous example. It is unlikely to have been very common, but it is a conspicuous instance of treating women as commodities, an attitude that existed across Europe, Africa and Asia. Quran 23:5-6 and 70:29-30, for example, permitted sex with ‘what the right hand possesses’ — which is to say slave girls, who were beyond the Muslim prohibition against forced sex. Untouchable women in India were (and still are) also treated as disposable objects, as were African slaves in the Americas. Thomas Jefferson’s listed Sally Hemings, the woman who bore him six children, and who he first slept with when she was 14, as ‘property’. These, like the many cases of mass rape as a weapon of war, are extreme instances, but across post-conquest societies the law has always fallen on the side of the male in matters of sexual violence — the concept of raping one’s wife, for example, did not exist in most of Europe, where marriage implied irrevocable sexual consent, until very recently. Laws, both religious and secular, that have existed to ostensibly protect woman’s right of consent, were and are routinely flouted. The tables have turned now of course, in the middle-class West, although the victors don’t seem to happy about being in control of culture.
Child marriage was globally normative until the 19th century. The prophet of Islam’s marriage to a six year old girl (nine at consummation, according to the Sahih al-Bukhari) is a notorious example but this was uncontroversial in seventh century Arabia and wouldn’t have raised too many eyebrows in medieval Europe or East Asia. In England, for example, Margaret Beaufort gave birth to Henry VII when she was thirteen (the same age, incidentally that Juliet married Romeo), with similar instances common across the world.
According to UNICEF 250 million women alive today were married before the age of fifteen, mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa (Niger, Chad and Mali) and South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal and India). See Ending Child Marriage: Progress and Prospects. According to the International Labour Organization’s 2021 global estimates, approximately 22 million people were living in forced marriages on any given day in 2021, mostly in the Asia-Pacific region.
The medieval Church’s sacramental model centralised authority, but it was the Council of Trent (1545–1563) that marked the true turning point, invalidating clandestine unions and requiring clergy oversight. Until then courtly love traditions and folk practices has persisted, as seen in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Peasant handfasting rituals, were also common, legally valid non-canonical marriages, or, in some regions, betrothals in which couples publicly pledged to marry or engage in a ‘trial marriage’ which lasted for a year before a more formal marriage in church.
Everyone has heard of courtly love, and everyone knows it appeared quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century at Languedoc. The sentiment, of course, is love, but love of a highly specialized sort, whose characteristics may be enumerated as Humility, Courtesy, and the Religion of Love. The lover is always abject. Obedience to his lady’s lightest wish, however whimsical, and silent acquiescence in her rebukes, however unjust, are the only virtues he dares to claim. Here is a service of love closely modelled on the service which a feudal vassal owes to his lord. The lover is the lady’s ‘man’. He addresses her as midons, which etymologically represents not ‘my lady’ but ‘my lord’. The whole attitude has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. This solemn amatory ritual is felt to be part and parcel of the courtly life.
C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love
Which is to say, she found herself subject to man in a far more intrusive manner than previously, when she had autonomy over her domain, the hearth. See Ivan Illich, Gender. The consequence of this was, as Illich writes, the creation of ‘shadow work’:
Shadow work could not have come into existence before the household was turned into an apartment set up for the economic function of upgrading value-deficient commodities. Shadow work could not become unmistakably women’s work before men’s work had moved out of the house to factory or office. Henceforth, the household had to be run on what the paycheck bought – one paycheck for the engineer and almost inevitably several to feed the hod carrier’s family, whose wife took in piecework, while his daughter hired out as a domestic. The unpaid upgrading of what wage labor produced now became women’s work. Women were then defined in terms of the new use to which they were being put. Both kinds of work, wage labor and its shadow, proliferated with industrialization. The two new functions, that of the breadwinner and that of the dependent, began to divide society at large: He was identified with overalls and the factory, she with an apron and the kitchen. For the wage labor she was able to find as a sideline, she received sympathy and low pay.
Feminism created new opportunities, new chances, for a small minority to rise, while not changing anything in the basic distance between the rich and the poor, so that by the end of a twenty-year period of feminist struggle, the distance between the typically underpaid and the typically highly paid woman was as great as that between low-paid men and high-paid men. I think that discrimination on the job ceased for the few who made it and became more intense and more conscious for those who didn’t make it.
Ivan Illich, quoted in David Cayley, Ivan Illich: An Intellectual Journey.
The notion that socialism, even under utopian conditions, shields woman from degrading work or from subordination to demeaning institutional demands, is not just empirically false but a logical absurdity; how is a highly industrialised mass-society supposed to guarantee woman’s autonomy and sexual freedom when its structure depends on the systematic extraction of labour, the bureaucratisation of life, and the suppression of individual defiance?
Socialism may strip the boss of his private capital, but it cannot strip the state of its need to discipline bodies, regulate time, and enforce productive norms. The factory floor under a red flag still demands alienated labour, from men and from women, and the socialist collective must reward compliance and police anarchic social relations.