Friendship is the enjoyment of lives lived in parallel. Romance is the desire to unite your story with someone else’s. We enjoy drama and excitement and a sense of occasion in that unity, we want it to have a sense of occasion. There’s a delight in the ritual and in performing the rites of significance. We each live inside our own story, a narrative of meaning.
We experience life and understand it as a kind of narrative. And one of the great challenges is that we are singular. We are alone. We are small. We are finite. We have a beginning, we have distinct chapters, and we have a coming end. It pleases us to find other stories in parallel and in intersection to our own. Stories that came from a similar origin or drive toward a similar destination please us and comfort us. Family, people from our home town, school or work peers.
Romance is a very unique desire and experience within that story. It is the desire to merge our story with another. It’s not even entirely clear if what we desire is fully possible, but it’s a hunger within us. Physical, emotional, existential. We desire it in the realm of meaning and want to experience it across the levels of our being. And if we can’t get it in unity we’ll take it in part.
Maybe it seems clear to everyone, obvious, what romance is. We seem to know what we mean by the term. We’re quick to describe different things as romantic. It just wasn’t clear to me what the essence is behind all of it it, what unites and explains every different case, every phenomenon, and what separates it from other experiences and desires.
Humans can meet their needs through all sorts of means. We’re tricky, adaptable, flexible. We don’t come armed with many physical traits to help us adapt except our powerful minds. And thanks to those minds, we can manage to meet our needs and succeed in all kinds of environments, in plenty or in dearth. Hot, cold, dry, flat, wet, steep, stable, changeable, we can weather them all.
And that holds true beyond our physical needs. We find ways to meet our psychological and emotional needs too. Everything from drugs to books to pets to pornography can help fill a difficult to meet need, sometimes in a good way and sometimes in a less good way. We can dream up all sorts of ways to get a bit of what we want, even if we can’t get the whole thing.
You can assemble a functional, happy life out of all kinds of materials. And all of them are valuable, though it is not clear that all of them are equivalent. It’s not clear that all substitutes are as healthy a way of fulfilling some needs as others, and come with more missing elements and more negative consequences.
There is both an upside and a downside to idealism. If you get too rigid in your thinking and aren’t adaptable enough, you might miss out on some ways you can effectively assemble a happy, healthy, working life under challenging circumstances. You might miss some shape society could or needs to take to adapt and succeed in these conditions. So we need some flexibility in our concepts, or at least our means to fulfilling those concepts.
And if you get too focused on a particular normative example that’s meant to exemplify the path your society has found that has the best, healthiest, most positive, easiest way of success in the world as it presents itself, if you get too granular and draconian about saying it’s all about following that example and being like that and anything else is wrong, that’s going too far.
There are many different kinds of people and many different kinds of circumstances, so what works has to be flexible enough to figure out how to reach the same goals with different materials and working conditions. And that’s what cultures do all the time, they figure out the same things using different materials. Music, art, architecture, castles, clothing, food, tables, chairs. We all do them a bit differently because of our differences in both environmental and human materials, but we all recognize and appreciate the same principles and purposes and goals in all of them.
And this brings up the opposing problem. Getting too loose with our concept so that we forget what the purpose was. Normative examples do have value. They’re like a cultural shorthand or a basic map for anyone coming from the most common starting points and wanting the best, easiest route to the popular destinations. Their value is limited, they aren’t universal, they’re specific examples tied to specific people and situations and conditions that may not reflect your own. But they’re still broadly useful as informative and inspirational examples. You just need to be careful not to confuse them for the concept, the transcendent purpose, itself.
If we look at the diversity of ways of achieving the goal of making a chair, we might notice that our chair is different from another person’s chair and conclude “there is no chair, there is no better way of making a chair, it’s all arbitrary”. And you cut all ties to rigid concepts and throw open the doors of experimentation and “say let everyone figure out the meaning for themselves,” this also won’t end well.
It took cultures thousands upon thousands of years of trial and error and iteration and failure and success (with failure as the default result) to slowly figure out what worked and what made sense and what confined and defined the necessary elements of different concepts. Our species as a whole spent millions upon millions of lives figuring out what would help us survive and thrive enough to get to this point. Our ancestors literally died to save us from bad ideas and lived and worked to pass on to us good ones. That’s an investment that shouldn’t be flippantly thrown away, lest we have to pay the price again.
Making Nobody Happy 