How is European love inferior to Russian?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Love in the West is consumer love - we choose a partner to give us what we think we need. But the Russians are different.

In 1996 I left Russia for the first time to spend one academic year in the United States. It was a prestigious grant; I was 16, and my parents were very happy about my potential to subsequently go to Yale or Harvard. But I could only think about one thing: how to find myself an American boyfriend.

In my desk I kept a precious piece of American life sent to me by a friend who had moved to New York a year earlier - an article on birth control pills that had been torn from the American girly magazine Seventeen. I was reading it, lying in bed, and felt my throat dry. Looking at these glossy pages, I dreamed that there, in another country, I would turn into someone beautiful, whom the boys would look at. I dreamed that I would also need this kind of pill.

Two months later, on my first day at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, Ohio, I went to the library and picked up a stack of Seventeen magazines that was taller than me. I set out to find out exactly what happens between American boys and girls when they start to like each other, and what exactly I have to say and do to get to the stage where I need the "pill." Armed with a highlighter and a pen, I searched for words and phrases related to American courtship behavior and wrote them down on separate cards, as my English teacher in St. Petersburg had taught me to do with words.

I soon realized that there were several distinct stages in the life cycle of the relationships featured in this magazine. First, you fall for a guy who is usually a year or two older than you. Then you ask about him to understand whether he is "cute" or "moron". If he is "cute", then Seventeen gives the go-ahead for you to "cross" with him a couple of times before "asking him out." During this process, several items should be checked: did you feel that the young man “respects your needs?” Was it comfortable for you to “defend your rights” - namely, to refuse or initiate “physical contact”? Did you enjoy the "communication"? If any of these items remain unchecked, you need to "throw" this guy and start looking for a replacement until you get "better material". Then you will start "kissing on the couch" and gradually begin to use pills.

Sitting in an American school library, I looked at dozens of my handwritten notes and saw the opening gap between the ideals of love that I grew up with and the exoticism that I am now faced with. Where I was from, boys and girls "fell in love" and "dated"; the rest was a mystery. The teenage drama film that my generation of Russians grew up on - a socialist analogue of Romeo and Juliet filmed in the suburbs (we are talking about the 1980 film "You Never Dreamed of" - approx. New why) - was charmingly not specific about declarations of love … To express his feelings for the heroine, the main character recited the multiplication table: "Three times three is nine, three times six is eighteen, and this is amazing, because after eighteen we will get married!"

What else is there to say? Even our 1,000-page Russian novels couldn't compete in complexity with Seventeen's romantic system. When countesses and officers became involved in love affairs, they were not particularly eloquent; they did things before they said anything, and then, if they did not die as a result of their ventures, they silently looked around and scratched their heads in search of explanations.

Even though I didn’t have a degree in sociology yet, it turned out that I did exactly what sociologists who study emotions do with Seventeen magazines to understand how we shape our concept of love. By analyzing the language of popular magazines, television series, practical advice books and interviewing men and women from different countries, scholars such as Eva Illuz, Laura Kipnis, and Frank Furedi have clearly shown that powerful political, economic and social factors influence our beliefs about love. Together, these forces lead to the establishment of what we call romantic regimes: systems of emotional behavior that influence how we talk about our feelings, define "normal" behavior, and establish who is good for love and who is not.

The clash of romantic regimes is what I experienced that day, sitting in the school library. The girl following Seventeen magazine's instructions was trained to choose whom to bond with. She logically based her emotions on "needs" and "rights" and rejected relationships that did not fit them. She was raised under the Choice Mode. In contrast, Russian classical literature (which, when I came of age, remained the main source of romantic norms in my country), described how people succumbed to love, as if it were a supernatural force, even when it was destructive to calmness, sanity and life itself. In other words, I grew up in Destiny Mode.

These regimes are based on opposite principles. Each of them, in their own way, turns love into an ordeal. However, in most countries of Western culture (including modern Russia), the regime of choice dominates all forms of romantic relationships. It seems that the reasons for this lie in the ethical principles of neoliberal democratic societies, which perceive freedom as the highest good. However, there are good reasons to reconsider your beliefs and see how they can actually harm us in a subtle way.

To understand the triumph of choice in the romantic realm, we need to view it in the context of the broader appeal of the Renaissance to the individual. In the economic sphere, the consumer is now more important than the producer. In religion, the believer is now more important than the Church. And in love, the object gradually became not as important as its subject. In the XIV century, Petrarch, looking at Laura's golden curls, called her "divine" and believed that she was the most perfect proof of the existence of God. After 600 years, another man, blinded by the glitter of another heap of golden curls - the hero of Thomas Mann Gustav von Aschenbach - came to the conclusion that it was he, and not the beautiful Tadzio, who was the standard of love: “And here, crafty courtier, he expressed a sharp thought: loving- de is closer to the deity than the beloved, for of these two only God lives in him, - a cunning thought, the most mocking thought that ever came to a person's mind, a thought from which the beginning of all slyness, all secret sensuality, love longing came from " (excerpt from "Death in Venice", Thomas Mann. Translation: N. Man).

This observation from Mann's novella Death in Venice (1912) embodies a great cultural leap that took place sometime in the early 20th century. Somehow the Lover has removed the Beloved from the foreground. The divine, unknown, unattainable Other is no longer the subject of our love stories. Instead, we are interested in ourselves, with all childhood traumas, erotic dreams and personality traits. Studying and protecting the fragile self by teaching it to choose its attachments carefully is the main goal of the Choice Mode - a goal achieved with the help of popularized versions of psychotherapeutic techniques.

The most important requirement for choice is not to have many options, but to be able to make practical and independent choices, while being aware of their needs and acting on the basis of their own interests. Unlike the lovers of the past, who lost control of themselves and behaved like lost children, the new romantic hero approaches his emotions methodically and rationally. He visits a psychoanalyst, reads self-help books and participates in couples therapy. Moreover, he can learn "love languages", use neurolinguistic programming, or rate his feelings on a scale of one to ten. American philosopher Philip Rieff called this personality type "psychological person". In his book Freud: The Mind of a Moralist (1959), Rieff describes him as “anti-heroic, calculating, carefully keeping track of what he is pleased with and what he is not, considering relationships that do not bring benefits as sins that should to avoid". The psychological person is a romantic technocrat who believes that using the right means at the right time can straighten out the confused nature of our emotions.

This, of course, applies to both genders: the psychological woman also follows these rules, or rather Time-tested Secrets for Winning the Heart of a Real Man (1995). Here are some of the time-tested secrets suggested by the book's authors Ellen Fein and Sherri Schneider:

Rule 2. Do not speak to a man first (and do not offer to dance).

Rule 3. Do not look at a man for a long time and do not talk too much.

Rule 4. Do not meet him halfway and do not split the bill on a date.

Rule 5. Do not call him and rarely call him back.

Rule 6. Always end the phone call first.

The message of this book is simple: since the "hunt" for women is written in the genetic code of men, if women show even the slightest share of participation or interest, then this upsets the biological balance, "castrates" the man and reduces the woman to the status of an unhappy abandoned female.

This book has been criticized for an almost idiotic degree of biological determinism. Nevertheless, new editions continue to appear, and the "hard-to-reach" femininity that they promote has begun to appear in many topical advice on love relationships. Why does the book remain so popular? The reason for this can undoubtedly be found in its basic position:

“One of the greatest rewards for fulfilling the Rules will be that you learn to love only those who love you. If you follow the advice in this book, you will learn to take care of yourself. You will be preoccupied with your interests, hobbies and relationships, not chasing men. You will love with your head, not just with your heart."

With Select Mode, the no-man's land of love - the minefield of unanswered calls, ambiguous emails, deleted profiles, and awkward pauses - should be minimized. No more “what if” and “why” thinking. No more tears. No suicides. No poetry, novels, sonatas, symphonies, paintings, letters, myths, sculptures. The psychological man needs one thing: steady progress towards a healthy relationship between two independent individuals who satisfy each other's emotional needs - until a new choice separates them.

The correctness of this triumph of choice is also proved by sociobiological arguments. Being trapped in bad relationships all your life is for Neanderthals, we are told. Helen Fisher, professor of anthropology at Rutger University and the world's most famous love researcher, believes that we have grown out of our millennial agricultural past and no longer need a monogamous relationship. Now evolution itself prompts us to look for different partners for different needs - if not simultaneously, then at least at different stages of life. Fischer praises the current lack of commitment in a relationship: we should all ideally spend at least 18 months with someone to see if they are the right fit for us and if we are a good couple. With the ubiquitous availability of contraceptives, unwanted pregnancies and illnesses are a thing of the past, and the birth of offspring is completely separated from romantic courtship, so that we can take our time to arrange a trial period for a potential partner and not be afraid of the consequences.

Compared to other historical views of love, Select Mode looks like a waterproof jacket next to a wool shirt. His most tempting promise is that love shouldn't hurt. According to the logic that Kipnis demonstrates in his book Against Love (2003), the only type of suffering that Choice Mode recognizes is the possible productive stress of “relationship work”: tears shed in a family counselor's office, bad wedding nights, daily attention to each other's needs, the frustration of parting with someone who “doesn't suit” you. You can overwork your muscles, but you cannot get injured. By transforming broken hearts into troublemakers of their own, popular advice has given rise to a new form of social hierarchy: emotional stratification based on the false identification of maturity with self-sufficiency.

And that is precisely why, says Illuz, 21st century love still hurts. First, we are deprived of the authority of the romantic duelists and suicides of the past centuries. They were at least recognized by society, which in its assessments was based on the idea of love as an insane, inexplicable force, which even the best minds are unable to resist. Today, the longing for specific eyes (and even legs) is no longer a worthy occupation, and therefore the torment of love is intensified by the realization of one's own social and psychological inadequacy. From a Choice Mode perspective, the suffering Emmas, Werthers, and Annes of the 19th century are not just inept lovers - they are psychological ignoramuses, if not obsolete evolutionary material. Relationship consultant Mark Manson, who has two million online readers, writes:

“Our culture idealizes the romantic sacrifice. Show me almost any romantic film, and I will find there an unhappy and dissatisfied character who treats himself like trash for the sake of loving someone."

In Choice Mode, loving too much, too early, too explicitly is a sign of infantilism. All of this demonstrates an intimidating willingness to drop the self-interest so central to our culture.

Second, and more importantly, Choice Mode is blind to structural constraints that make some people unwilling or unable to choose as much as others. This is not only due to the unequal distribution of what the British sociologist Katherine Hakim calls "erotic capital" (in other words, not all of us are equally beautiful). In fact, the biggest problem with choice is that whole categories of people can be at a disadvantage because of it.

Illuz, a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, argues convincingly that Choice regimes in their individualism stigmatize serious romantic intentions as “excessive love,” that is, love at the expense of self-interest. Although there are enough unhappy men in the world who are despised for their “need for others” and “inability to part with the past,” women generally fall into the category of “codependent” and “immature”. Regardless of class and racial factors, they are all trained to be self-sufficient: not to “love too much”, “to live for oneself” (as in the above “Rules”).

The problem is that no pleasant bath can replace a loving look or a long-awaited phone call, much less give you a baby - whatever Cosmo may say about it. Of course, you can do in vitro fertilization and become an amazingly mature, amazingly independent single mother of frisky triplets. But the greatest gift of love - the recognition of someone's value as a person - is essentially a social thing. For this you need an Other who is significant to you. It takes a lot of Chardonnay to get around this simple fact.

But perhaps the biggest problem with the Choice Regime is its misconception of maturity as complete self-sufficiency. Affection is considered infantile. The desire for recognition is called "dependence on others." Intimacy should not violate "personal boundaries." Although we are constantly required to be responsible for ourselves, responsibility for our loved ones is highly discouraged: after all, our interference in their lives in the form of unsolicited advice or suggestions for change can hinder their personal growth and self-discovery. In the midst of too many optimization scenarios and failure options, we are faced with the worst manifestation of Choice Mode: narcissism without self-sacrifice.

In my homeland, however, the problem is the opposite: self-sacrifice is often done without any introspection at all. Julia Lerner, an Israeli sociologist of emotion at Ben Gurion University in the Negev, recently conducted research on how Russians talk about love. The goal was to find out whether the gap between Seventeen magazine and Tolstoy's novel had begun to close in the country as a result of the post-communist neoliberal turn. Answer: not really.

After analyzing the discussions in various television talk shows, the content of the Russian press, and conducting interviews, she found that for Russians, love remains “a destiny, a moral act and a value; it cannot be resisted, it requires sacrifice and involves suffering and pain. Indeed, while the concept of maturity that underlies the Mode of Choice sees romantic suffering as a deviation from the norm and a sign of bad decisions, Russians see maturity as the ability to endure that very pain, to the point of absurdity.

A middle-class American who falls in love with a married woman is advised to break up with the lady and spend 50 hours in therapy. A Russian in a similar situation will rush into this woman's house and pull her by the hand, right from the stove with boiling borscht, past crying children and her husband, frozen with a joystick in his hands. Sometimes things turn out well: I know a couple who have been happily living for 15 years since the day he took her away from the family New Years celebration. But in most cases, Destiny Mode leads to confusion.

According to statistics, there are more marriages, divorces and abortions in Russia per capita than in any other developed country. This demonstrates the intention to act according to emotions in spite of everything, often even to the detriment of one's own comfort. Russian love is often accompanied by alcohol addiction, domestic violence, and abandoned children - side effects of ill-considered lives. It seems like relying on fate every time you fall in love is not such a good alternative to being too selective.

But in order to heal the ills of our culture, we do not have to completely abandon the principle of choice. Instead, we must dare to choose the unknown, take uncalculated risks, and be vulnerable. By vulnerability, I do not mean flirtatious manifestations of weakness in order to test compatibility with a partner - I ask for existential vulnerability, the return of love to its true mysterious appearance: the appearance of an unpredictable force that is always taken by surprise.

If the understanding of maturity as self-sufficiency has such a negative effect on the way we love in the Mode of Choice, then this understanding should be reconsidered. To be truly adults, we must embrace the unpredictability that love for another brings. We must dare to cross these personal boundaries and be one step ahead of ourselves; maybe not to drive at Russian speed, but still run a little faster than we are used to.

So make loud declarations of love. Live with someone without being absolutely sure that you are ready for it. Grumble at your partner just like that and let him grumble back just like that, because we are all human. Have a baby at the wrong time. Finally, we must reclaim our right to pain. Let's not be afraid to suffer for love. As Brené Brown, a sociologist who studies vulnerability and shame at the University of Houston, suggests, perhaps "our ability to keep our heart whole can never be greater than our willingness to let it break." Instead of worrying about our integrity, we need to learn to share ourselves with others and finally admit that we all need each other, even if the author of Seventeen magazine calls it “codependency”.