The ideal thing would be to be able to love a woman just as well as a man, a human being pure and simple, without fear, without pressure, without obligations.
—After The Second Sex
In a letter to the American novelist Nelson Algren, with whom Beauvoir had an intense romance, she said: “If I were proud of anything in my life, it would be of our love. I feel we have to tell to each other as many things as we can, so we are not only lovers, but the closest friends at the same time.”1 They did not, however, stay friends or lovers. Algren wanted to marry Beauvoir. She loved him but was interested neither in marriage, nor leaving Sartre, nor moving to Chicago. Was it this tension between sex and friendship that led Beauvoir to observe that being in love, for a woman, always risked tipping into a state of fear, pressure, and obligation?
In a classic line from the 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally, Harry tells Sally, “Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” Harry’s point is that the man will want to have sex with the woman and the woman will fall in love with the man, which dooms the friendship. Often there is an element of truth to this argument, if in an overgeneralized and heteronormative sense. (This tension seems to be part of the tumult between Beauvoir, Sartre, Olga Kosakiewicz, and Wanda Kosakiewicz discussed in the previous chapter.)
Nevertheless, it is simplistic and cynical to reduce interpersonal relationships to animalistic impulses. From an existential perspective, while we are animals, we are also our intentions and projects. To reduce our relationships to instinct deteriorates our humanity. It renders conscious choices and higher-order decisions obsolete.
Beauvoir’s writing—and an examination of her life—shows that romantic love is best when it is authentic, that is, based on the intersubjectivity of friendship. Although Beauvoir doesn’t clearly differentiate between romantic lovers and friends, she did suggest that lovers imagine themselves together in the future in ways that friends do not. In a letter to Sartre she contemplated: “The strength of a relation with somebody comes from the fact that you indicate yourselves together in the future … The connecting link: transcendence, future, activity of consciousness, reveals itself as profoundly true in the sentimental domain.”2
However, there are mystifications that lead us astray on our quest for authentic relationships with lovers. Freeing ourselves from these snares—such as being beholden to our passions or having misplaced expectations of what love should be—is essential. Only then will we be free to love in authentically meaningful ways.
In The Second Sex, Beauvoir wrote, “Authentic love must be founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms.”3 Authentic loving is about recognizing one another’s freedom, that is, acknowledging and respecting each other as individuals, and supporting one another’s flourishing. Authentic lovers are generous toward each other and the universe. And they transcend together toward shared values and goals.
This is a unique picture of love, one quite different from the traditional understanding of romantic love that views it as finding a soulmate. Authentic loving has little to do with “finding” and much more to do with choosing. The ideal of love as a oneness or merging of two people who together would make up for one another’s excesses and deficiencies can be traced back at least a couple of thousand years to Plato’s Symposium.
One of Plato’s characters, Aristophanes, is a tipsy comic and playwright who tells a wild story: humans used to be different sorts of creatures. We originally had two faces, four arms, and four legs. One day, some of them climbed Mount Olympus to challenge the gods. Zeus was deeply unimpressed and as punishment, he sliced every human into two. Since then, all humans are incomplete, unfulfilled—which explains the feeling of wholeness when we find “the one” and fall in love with our “soulmate” or “other half.” This is why it sometimes feels like we can’t live without our lover: because their absence cleaves our very being.
The soulmate idea is one of the most damning features of our culture’s understanding of romantic love. It suggests we need another person to fulfill us, that there is one particular person who can do that, and that love is destined if we just keep our eyes and apps open. For Beauvoir, looking for love to complete us is bad faith. It’s an escape from taking responsibility for pursuing our own fulfillment. Beauvoir realized she had been falling into this trap in her relationship with Sartre. The realization that she was becoming dependent on him to provide meaning in her life motivated her to write and she started with her novel She Came to Stay.4
Every person is a knotty synthesis of being and nothingness, meaning that we are made up of the past we drag behind us, our present actions and intentions, and our future possibilities. The future is a not-yet, a lack at the heart of our being, until death. Death, not love, completes us.
Our future possibilities mean that we will never be complete while alive, let alone complete another person. Any feeling of fulfillment is illusory and fleeting. We are not empty vessels that can be filled up with coins like slot machines in a casino, waiting for the winning love token to hit our jackpot. Nor are we static beings looking for a matching jigsaw puzzle piece.
A consequence of the existential idea that “existence precedes essence” is that there is no part of our being that’s fixed and can match perfectly with another being. Even if people do click, there is no guarantee that their future selves would click. The human condition is an overcoming and stretching beyond ourselves, meaning that we are forever changing—including, sometimes, preferences and passions.
Another mystification about love is that it all boils down to biology. For example, in The World As Will and Idea, Schopenhauer proposed that love was a “voluptuous illusion” that tricks people into procreating. But such ideas don’t explain why some people want to have sex without love, why some people who love each other don’t want to have sex, or why some people are attracted to those with whom they cannot or do not want to procreate.
Some dating mixers are based on the idea that love is a matter of biology. For example, some dating sites give love-seekers sweaty T-shirts to sniff with the hope that pheromones will do the hard work of finding a mate.5 New relationships are often euphoric and while pheromones may play a part in that—as can the initial spark of attraction based on looking at someone’s profile picture online—neuroscientists have found that love molecules and hormones such as neurotrophins and cortisol skyrocket during the initial phase of a relationship, but they expire within around twenty-four months of starting a relationship.6
Dating apps thrive on the hope that a soulmate, a true love, is just a swipe away. Certainly, apps can be terrific for creating a new way of meeting people, especially those with specific tastes and preferences, but they are not a love hack. They don’t make relationships easier to be in, and they cannot and should not make choices on our behalf.
In one of its more optimistic episodes called “Hang the DJ,” the dystopian television series Black Mirror envisaged a dating world in which an app would be able to simulate years of dating heartache and come up with an “Ultimate Compatible Other.” The love app runs relationship simulations until a love match conquers all obstacles in 998 out of 1,000 situations, giving participants a 99.8 percent probability of relationship “success” in real life. Still, in real life, the relationship is not guaranteed. The existential rub is that if people are free to be in a relationship, they are also free to leave.
Even if apps, pheromone sniffing, or asking thirty-six questions on a first date do help potential lovers find someone interesting, that’s only the beginning of the challenge. Relationships are not just about finding and having a partner, relationships are a mode of being-with-others. Our companionships, the different ways of our being with others, shapes who we become.
Beauvoir learned this lesson, at least in part, from her reading of American transcendental author Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The women in the novel knew, Beauvoir wrote, that the mind and morality matter more than money.7 Beauvoir was especially taken with Jo March, whom Alcott marked as superior to her more beautiful and virtuous sisters. Beauvoir respected Jo for her vigorous, daring intelligence, and she identified avidly with Jo’s bookishness. Jo inspired Beauvoir to write short stories.
In Little Women, which was based on Alcott’s own life, the daughters have some choice in whom they can marry, but there is still huge pressure for them to marry, and for at least one of them to marry a wealthy man who will support the rest of the family. Women were rarely allowed to be independent, so love (as a path to marriage) was a key strategy to save themselves and their family from destitution.
Meg March’s choice to marry a poor teacher for love is tolerated but frowned upon, as is Jo March’s resistance to marriage. Amy March’s impetuous marriage to Laurie, a wealthy man who is probably not in love with her, and whom Jo has already rejected, is deemed much more socially acceptable. Beauvoir initially hated Alcott for Amy’s marriage but respected that Jo eventually marries a kind and smart man who understands her. Beauvoir thought it to be a travesty that anything but love should tie people together in matrimony. Beauvoir also wanted a superior individual for herself, which she believed she found in Sartre.
Passionate love has always been a feature of human relationships in western society, but up until a couple of hundred years ago, it usually was found outside of marriage. Most marriages prior to the Middle Ages were arranged. Courtly love started to change these dynamics. Troubadours wrote love songs and poems about their crushes’ charms and knights jousted for air kisses and the handkerchiefs of ladies out of their league. The relationship was rarely consummated, but the fantasy fueled the idolization of love as a virtue.
Around the late eighteenth century, Romanticism with a capital “R” arrived. The Romantics were a group of artists, musicians, architects, poets, and philosophers who rebelled against the Enlightenment’s obsession with rationality and science. The Romantics thought the Enlightenment’s focus on reason and strict rules was boring. Instead, they celebrated passion, emotion, and sexual desire. Thus, the term romantic love was popularized and went mainstream.
The Romantics transformed the fantasy of courtly love into a reality. Love culminating in marriage recognized two lovers becoming one with each other, with nature, and with God. The ideal was that lovers’ bodies and souls would merge into a spiritual unity in harmony with the divine order of the universe, creating an eternal bond. The fact that God was integrally involved bestowed religious legitimacy on love marriages.
Romanticism had already revived respect for individual allure and feelings, but capitalism (at least in theory) emphasized respect for individual rights and private decisions—such as choices about whom one can date and marry—and feminism fought against women being treated as property. The result is that many people are now freer than ever to choose and refuse relationships.
I grew up wanting to find the one, fall in love, and live happily ever after. One of my ex-boyfriends and I love-bombed each other with gifts, honeyed poems, and declarations of desire. But we often argued about “together time.” He would say love meant prioritizing one another, which he understood as spending as much time together as possible. I disagreed if it meant always choosing him at the expense of friends, family, and work. I wanted more balance. I resented the pressure. He would say I didn’t love him enough and that I was heartless, cruel, and afraid of commitment. Tensions would skyrocket. We would both get angry. At times, I felt in danger.
Once, I considered jumping out the window. It wasn’t far to the garden below, so it would not have killed me. But I might have risked a broken ankle, and I didn’t want to be dependent on him to take me to a hospital. A knight in shining armor was a role he would have relished and expected gratitude for in return.
We hovered, as if Hegel’s master-slave dialectic were happening in real time, in a combat where each consciousness sees the other as a threat. I felt terrified and was desperate to escape. He said if I left, he would break up with me. He had threatened it so many times I had lost count and wished he meant it. I ran as if I had just freed myself from quicksand. He didn’t chase me. I did not return.
At the time, I was just discovering Beauvoir’s philosophy and was starting to learn about the dangers of passion when it spirals out of control. Passion tends to be viewed as a good thing, especially in love. Glossy magazines bombard their readers with articles about how to keep the passion alive. Passionate love can be romantic, especially in the early stages. Love can make you feel like you were made for each other and that your lover is the only one who can make you feel this way, like in Aristophanes’s myth. But the problem with being overwhelmed by passion is that it reduces us to animalistic impulses. Beauvoir believed that humans are much more than systems of mechanical or chemical forces.
Initially I felt flattered by my boyfriend’s attentions, but it became horrifying when our relationship choked on seriousness, possessiveness, and jealousy. Beauvoir suggested that passionate love can be tormenting because it sucks people away from the world, isolating them: “Any conversation, any relationship with the passionate man is impossible. In the eyes of those who desire a communion of freedom, he therefore appears as a stranger, an obstacle.”8
Beauvoir argued that a person who is singularly and stubbornly focused on their passion—whether erotic, political, or other passion—risks partial nihilism. (If it were full nihilism, even their passion would not matter.) Passionate people easily slide into tyranny when they are frustrated with not being able to unite with their obsession. Passionate people become unbearable when they fail to recognize other people as ends in themselves, viewing them as means or obstacles to fulfill their obsession.
I was merely a conduit for my boyfriend’s passion, strangled by his demands wanting to know exactly where I was whenever I wasn’t with him, and sick of him trying to alienate me from my friends. I consider myself one of the lucky ones who was able to get out before tensions escalated further.
While the passionate person strives to control their world by possessing the object of their obsession, in reality they end up dependent on it. My boyfriend had become dependent on me for his happiness, which he thought would be sealed with our romantic union. The problem was that he defined the terms of our unity, which demanded my submissiveness, and he blamed me for not being able to achieve the romantic ideal, which is not an authentic version of love.
One can never truly possess another, and it’s a violation to try. To do so treats the Other as an object instead of a freedom in themselves. Even if you possess someone physically, their consciousness always escapes you. This partially explains jealousy. In the metaphysical dream of unity, there is no room for a third person because it goes against everything that the classic ideal of love represents: that there are two people who, together in fulfilling each other’s lack, make a whole.
This perspective is one of the foundations of monogamous marriage, and why affairs, at least in the United States, are considered among the worst kind of transgression. If being “cheated on” hurts so much, it is in part because it is a personal attack that implies, often mistakenly, that someone is at fault. A person who is cheated on may feel they are a failure because they are not able to fulfill the other’s needs, or that they are unable to make good decisions in choosing who to love. Psychotherapist Esther Perel argued that while adultery for men has generally been tolerated, if not normalized, throughout history, it has become much more of an issue in the modern western zeitgeist because people are calling out the sexist double standards that have always excused adultery for men but not for women.9
By Beauvoir’s definition of authentic love, my boyfriend and I failed astoundingly on many levels: He didn’t recognize my freedom. His view of love as oneness demanded my submissiveness. I could not see how to be generous without feeling like I was being annexed into his life and compromising myself. We were unable to move beyond our power dynamics. There was a gulf between us in what we expected from love and from each other. We were unable to come to an agreement about how to construct values and goals in the world together. Demanding more than a lover is prepared to give, and giving more than a lover is prepared to receive, are both toxic for relationships.
In Beauvoir’s view, passionate people are both admirable and horrifying. One can admire the pride with which the passionate person chases after the object of their obsession. And being the object of desire can feel special, prioritized before and against anyone or anything else. But my boyfriend was in love with loving. He idolized love, not me. (There was plenty in me to criticize, which he very often made abundantly clear to me.) Idolizing either love or a lover is bound to disappoint.
Beauvoir discussed the tendency for women to idolize men, and the desire to be rescued by a Prince Charming–style savior. She also noted the dangers of men idolizing women: instead of reducing women to objects, idolizing women exalts them as tools that might get men closer to an ideal, such as divinity. While devotion is held up as a virtue for both sexes, equated with being selfless and generous, devotion is most often embodied in the feminine ideal of submissiveness. The problem with loving devotion, as Beauvoir sees it, is that it can turn a relationship into a religion and turn the beloved into a god or goddess to which one voluntarily becomes a vassal.
At its extreme, the vassal of love gives up her own world and adopts her lover’s friends, interests, and opinions in order to create a merged life. When the god transcends, so does she. It does not matter that the devotee is not a sovereign subject, because she feels necessary to someone who is, and that can make her feel fulfilled. The problem is that it’s not really a shared life, but the life of the one who is worshipped.
In Beauvoir’s novel The Mandarins, Paula is a glamorous singer who gives up her career for her boyfriend because she thinks her sacrifice is the highest expression of love. Henri is flattered and mildly objects. Later, Paula is infuriated when he ignores her advice and makes his own choices. Paula’s view is that since she gave up her career, it is their life, not his. Paula also claims his successes: “It was I who made Henri. I created him as he creates characters in his books, and I know him as he knows them.”10 What began as a deeply passionate romance blazes with tyranny and resentment. Henri tires of it and leaves her for a younger woman.
Henri is certainly a jerk, and Paula might seem like an extreme case, but Beauvoir’s warning is not to fall into the traps that Paula did. Paula was wrong to assume that sacrificing her career for him would mean that Henri would let her control his. Paula’s behavior is a classic move in Hegel’s master–slave dialectic: Paula enslaves herself to a reluctant master. With her demands that he accept her submission, she becomes a tyrant.11 Paula tries to psychologically manipulate Henri, using her generosity as a weapon. She seeks to control him by making him feel guilty, like he owes her something in return for her devotion.
Fervent devotion such as Paula’s fails Beauvoir’s definition of authentic loving because subordinating oneself to another mutilates one’s own freedom and is a cloaked violation of the other’s freedom. On the flip side, passionate obsession subordinates the other’s transcendence to one’s own. While there’s nothing wrong with loving generosity, these examples—my ex-boyfriend and me, Paula and Henri—show that overinvestment in relationships can be harmful. These strategies fail to recognize the other’s freedom because they aim to have or own the Other instead of be with them. Authentic loving involves each person defining themselves and being responsible for themselves, relinquishing power games, being and treating each other as free and equal. “Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion,” Beauvoir wrote.12
And so, how can we relieve confusion? As a teenager, Beauvoir pondered in her diary that although it is instinctive for lovers to reach toward soulmateship, the realization that perfect unity is absurd enflames feelings of solitude. Later, she emphasized being better friends more than reaching toward oneness. Friendship means creating a relationship based on intersubjectivity, mutuality, equality, tenderness, affection, and a structure that the individuals in the relationship freely agree to. This means not treating each other as property. When lovers overcome power games, they open up the possibility of connecting more poignantly.
In Beauvoir’s only play, The Useless Mouths, a medieval village in Belgium is under siege. Food supplies are running short. The village issues an order banishing all the women, children, old, and sick people from the town, so that the (male) soldiers have more food and water and can defend the village for longer. Exiling the so-called “useless mouths”—by the patriarchal, sexist military definition of it—would condemn the outcasts to torture, rape, slavery, or murder at the hands of the enemies blockading the village. Louis, the alderman, leads the charge. His wife, Catherine, is outraged:
LOUIS, speaking in a low voice: Catherine, my wife.
CATHERINE: No, not your wife. An instrument that one breaks and throws on the scrap-heap when one has finished with it … To die is nothing, but you have erased me from the world … you have disposed of me as just one more stone; and you are no more than this blind force that is crushing me.13
When Catherine tries to stab Louis, he realizes what an idiot he has been in treating people, including his wife, as disposable objects. It’s disappointing that it took a near-death experience for him to see that, but still, Catherine’s defiance equalizes and humanizes the relationship and establishes it as authentic. Louis changes the plan because he realizes that without people, there is no town worth defending. For Beauvoir, love’s challenge is to hold oneself between being-for-oneself and being-for-lovers, to strive for a harmony between discordant extremes—a delicate harmony that is never a given but that we must constantly revivify.
Beauvoir did not want to be a role model. She said that it’s ridiculous to use her relationship with Sartre as an ideal because people have to figure out their own arrangements and styles. Yet Beauvoir and Sartre did attempt to live their relationship in authentic ways. They prioritized each other within a diversified life of projects and friends. They respected each other’s freedom, they supported each other; together they worked toward ends and values they believed would enrich the universe. They decided using their arrangement for sex would be a cheap use of their freedom, so they “gave” each other the freedom to love others.
However, their open relationship created chaos and heartbreak—mostly for other lovers who wanted more than Beauvoir and Sartre were willing to give. In the aftermath of their relationships with Beauvoir and Sartre, Evelyne Rey died of suicide at age thirty-six; Bianca Bienenfeld had a nervous breakdown; and many others were heartbroken. After Nelson Algren and Beauvoir broke up, he wrote about it in Harper’s Magazine, pointing out the callousness of Beauvoir and Sartre’s pact: “Anybody who can experience love contingently has a mind that has recently snapped. How can love be contingent? Contingent upon what?”14
Sometimes Beauvoir and Sartre’s lovers were also their students. As far as we know, the students were over the age of consent in France at the time. But some critics argue, and rightly so, that Beauvoir and Sartre’s behavior was an abuse of power, a pedagogical failure, and ethically problematic.15 Beauvoir and Sartre’s habits were also authentically problematic. Although they recognized their secondary lovers’ freedoms, it didn’t seem to occur to them that they weren’t creating values and ends together with their contingent lovers. Beauvoir and Sartre’s values were already established and they imposed those values on others who could take them or leave them. The secondary lovers never had the power to evolve or adapt values with Beauvoir and Sartre. This means that Beauvoir and Sartre’s fixed pact to love one another precluded authentic relationships with their contingent lovers. A more flexible pact that accommodated change and growth could have created possibilities for multiple authentic relationships.
Later Beauvoir acknowledged wrongdoing and that she and Sartre hurt others: “So our relationship is not above criticism, any more than anyone else’s, because it has sometimes meant that we didn’t behave very well toward other people.”16 She felt remorseful for Bianca Bienenfeld’s suffering and in a letter to Sartre wrote, “It’s our fault I think … we have harmed her.”17 In a memoir, Beauvoir admitted that her pact with Sartre—to be primary lovers to one another but also to have contingent lovers—was a defect in their system because their secondary lovers suffered.18 Sartre seemed to be void of any sense of responsibility or remorse.
With one another, however, Beauvoir and Sartre were generally tender, happy, trusting, and (mostly) transparent. Although they disagreed on some points—like radical freedom—they agreed on important matters and profoundly encouraged and influenced each other. They never lived together so, for the most part, they were free from traditional gender roles and domestic sterility. They read and critiqued each other’s work, developed thoughts together, and made decisions together.
While freedom was central to their relationship and they exercised it, authentic relationships need not insist on absolute freedom for the sake of it. Beauvoir was advocating for neither libertinism nor hedonism. Yet there are principles in their approach that are worth considering: agreeing to the terms of relationships jointly, reflecting on traditions and customs such as monogamy and the meaning of togetherness, and asking what’s important for the people who are living the relationship. Yet Beauvoir and Sartre were more careful with asking this latter question of one another than those in their wider orbit of love.
At first glance, Beauvoir’s approach to love might seem callous and cold because it doesn’t account for what happens when one of the people in the relationship isn’t capable of absolute freedom—such as when one’s partner gets sick—and can’t reciprocate. This is a misunderstanding because it focuses on what lovers do instead of how they love.
For example, at the end of Sartre’s life, he was unable to care for himself, so Beauvoir and her closest friends rallied to support him. This was not a violation of Beauvoir’s philosophy because she does not demand reciprocity of the exact same actions. The problem arises when people disrespect each other, take advantage of one another’s generosity or disability, or infringe upon the capacity that the other does have to make free choices. Beauvoir didn’t turn herself into a submissive woman to try to manipulate Sartre.
Nevertheless, there were moments in their relationship that might have violated her philosophy. During World War II, Beauvoir took on more domestic chores like grocery shopping and cooking for both of them because the only thing Sartre would cook was fried eggs. (Apparently, Sartre did not care to learn more.) When the doctors told Sartre to stop drinking because of his deteriorating health, he refused. Beauvoir watered down his whiskey and prevented friends from sneaking bottles to him, overriding his freedom to drink as he pleased.
Yet, care and generosity are implicit in Beauvoir’s notion of authentic loving. The question is: What would you do for a dear friend in need? If you are sick with a potentially lethal condition and your partner cares for you and brings you soup, that doesn’t mean either of you are violating the other’s freedom. Reciprocity doesn’t demand that you drag yourself out of bed to make your partner soup in return, although it does mean that you would do something similar for them if the situations were reversed. If not, that’s a red flag.
Beauvoir and Sartre spent time apart, met with friends separately as well as together, and had their own activities. Beauvoir, for example, loved to hike but Sartre couldn’t stand the outdoors. Beauvoir was, for a time, financially dependent on Sartre while she wrote one of her books, but she could have found a job if she needed to, and it was part and parcel of their agreement to share everything. She did the same for Sartre when he needed it. Both Beauvoir and Sartre financially supported many of their friends.
Much is said about Beauvoir’s relationship with Sartre that it tends to overshadow all of Beauvoir’s other romances. It shouldn’t. Beauvoir found inspiration for authentic loving in her relationships with other men including author Nelson Algren, journalist Jacques-Laurent Bost, and filmmaker Claude Lanzmann. She also found inspiration in her relationships with women. Although Beauvoir denied she had sexual relationships with women, she also said she had closely physical relationships with them that were not erotic for her—although that clarification suggests that they might have been erotic for the other women involved.
Beauvoir also said that she could not give a frank and sincere account of her sexuality because her “confession” would involve other people close to her who would be hurt. Beauvoir’s novels include accounts of sexual relationships between female characters, and in an interview she suggested that women have homosexual tendencies because women are more desirable, nicer, less egoistic, and have softer, nicer skin, than men.19
Another advantage of same-sex relationships that Beauvoir found was that although the participants are still often discriminated against (in 2019, homosexuality was illegal in more than seventy countries), the fact that such relationships have always been taboo has, in some ways, freed people from predefined relationship rules, customs, and conventions such as marriage, and freed them to create relationships on their own terms—although, of course, many would have preferred the same rights as heterosexual people.20
The lack of structure of same-sex relationships, Beauvoir believed, provides an opportunity for more sincerity, closeness, intimacy, with fewer secrets and power struggles. The absence of a social script can also open up opportunities for more collaborative, thoughtful, reciprocal relationships—and yet she also acknowledged that same-sex relationships can entail power struggles, dishonesty, and conformity.
Being-with-others is an essential part of living authentically, but it is not always the case that we have to fall in love or partner up to do it. Romantic love is not necessary to live authentically. Some people identify as aromantic, asexual, or opt out of sensual relationships entirely, finding more meaningful connections with friends, family, and pets.
In 2019 actor Emma Watson announced that she’s “self-partnered” and very happy. The rapper Lizzo, too, is empowering single-positivity when she sings about loving herself, the value of friendship, not tolerating bad relationships, and not relying on anyone but herself for her sense of self-worth and validation. My friend Lucy is very happily alone with her rescue animals and the mere thought of anyone touching her with more than a friendly hug makes her shudder.
But the dominant narrative in the western world still perpetuates the Hollywood cliché that love will complete us, that love is everything, and that there’s a soulmate out there if only we’re lucky enough to find them. Even if you don’t buy into “The One” or the “perfect match” or the “happily ever after” Disney model of love, the idea of finding a unity with another so as never to be lonely again, or at least someone to grow old with, can sound alluring. It is easy to get clogged up with commodified mystifications—or as Emma Watson puts it, the “bloody influx of subliminal messaging”—about how love should be.21
Still, there is no reason to write off sexual loving altogether. Beauvoir pointed to the emotional intoxication of sexual love that can liberate lovers from themselves and allow them to become more aware of the other, dissolving the boundaries between each other, creating a type of understanding that paradoxically gives the feeling as if they are one. Elevated above the battlefield of power games, lovers can surpass themselves instead of abdicating freedom, generously offering up their bodies to one another as they explore the limits of their being, freely exchanging without losing themselves.
Sex can be great, but so are a bunch of other ways to meaningfully and deeply collaborate, which can be just as great or greater. My friend Sabina says that one of the most meaningful connections she has is when she and her partner read a book together in the evenings while sipping wine and whiskey. In their book club à deux, they talk about each other’s impressions, being respectful of one another’s opinions—and they laugh a lot. The intellectual intoxication—of becoming aware of their sameness and differences in thinking and attitudes—helps them to understand more about each other, themselves, and their world. Their book club discussions create a sort of intersubjective communication, based on reciprocity and collaboration, without the need for one of them to be right, to be smarter, or to “win” or dominate their discussion.
Authentic relationships channel power in healthy ways, such as into cooperating, motivating, and exploring.22 These relationships involve being generous—by which Beauvoir means that each person gives their all but feels like it costs them nothing. Each person trusts, appreciates, and respects one another as autonomous individuals who freely choose to be together, and together they constantly reassess that choice. They share lives but do not make the relationship all-consuming.
Romantic love is complicated, to be sure—it can be hard to know how to start a relationship and with whom. And once a potential partner is found, we can’t know, beyond all doubt, what they are really thinking, what they want out of the relationship, what their intentions are, or how long the relationship might last. It’s understandable that people want to secure it, to create a oneness, to merge into an organic whole like in Aristophanes’s tale.
The challenge is to consider: If we shed the sediment of history and social expectations that cling to us, how would we love? What if we all developed a healthy skepticism of the dogma of traditional relationship scripts and freed ourselves from the impulse to cling to certainty? Some might argue that chaos would ensue, but Beauvoir shows us that the benefit of creating relationships on our own terms would be more authentic relationships and enrichment of the universe. There would be less disappointment about not achieving clichéd ideals, less violence, and less wanting to jump out of windows. The focus would turn away from power struggles and toward constructing the world together.
Beauvoir shows us that authentic loving calls lovers to accept uncertainty and separation as the very condition of a relationship. And even better than acceptance is to look for joy in the distance, to welcome and to love the ambiguity, the otherness, and the freedom. The quest for authenticity calls for realizing that a romantic union with an other half is absurd: it calls for loving the ways that the other is different from and separate to us. Authentic loving is not about leaving relationships to fate. Authentic loving is an active engagement, a choice to create a relationship together.
My now-partner plays a team sport, and early in our relationship I would be jealous of the time he would spend with his team instead of me. Some girlfriends gave their partners ultimatums: them or the sport. Sport often won. I was torn because I did not want to give ultimatums and wanted to be supportive of his passions, but also I found waiting on the sidelines to be boring.
It was not until I read Beauvoir’s philosophy that I figured out how to cope: while he played sport, I embarked on my own quests. I caught up with friends, went on yoga retreats, read books, and worked on my PhD. Sometimes I backpacked and got lost in new places. Coming to terms with the fact that my partner had other priorities was emotionally taxing; I had to stop myself falling into the trap that one of my ex-boyfriends did. I strove to tame my desire to be his top priority and resisted thinking that if I was not, he did not love me. Giving him the freedom to pursue his goals challenged me to exercise my freedom. While there are many temptations to imprison each other in love, an authentic relationship embraces the tension between being-for-oneself and being-with a lover. The ideal is to have relationships within a balanced life of activities that you do together and apart.
Beauvoir did not give many examples of authentic relationships—partly because it is up to lovers to work it out themselves. Relationships will be different for everyone at different times in their lives. Still, she shared a few clues in her analysis of Stendhal, a romantic humanist who wrote about authentic heroines.
Stendhal has his flaws, since his heroines forget themselves in love, and he admires and desires feminine devotion. Yet what Beauvoir takes from Stendhal for her view of authentic loving is the notion that individuals who respect one another’s freedom will be able to live and love fully and adventurously.23 The women Stendhal loves and exalts in his novels are intelligent, cultivated, and equal to men. They are subjects in and of themselves with their own futures and interests, and do not depend entirely on men. In The Red and the Black, Mathilde de la Mole scorns society; Madame de Rênal is generous, genuine, and critical of her milieu. Stendhal’s authentic characters reciprocally recognize one another in love and their lives are better and more exciting for it.
Beauvoir also pointed to the actress Brigitte Bardot (Beauvoir refers to her by her nickname “BB”) as a transcending sovereign subject free from oppression. Bardot was famous for her beauty and unabashed sexuality and was a noted sex symbol in the 1950s and 60s. In Beauvoir’s portrait, BB is an über-authentic passionate being. She is financially independent. Loving is one interest among many. She affirms sexual equality because she is autonomous, emancipated, rejects social conventions, and defies myths of femininity. Almost anything seems possible for her. BB shows that you can be authentic and have fun, and that there can be playful possibilities in power struggles. Beauvoir wrote of BB: “In the game of love, she is as much a hunter as she is a prey. The male is an object to her, just as she is to him.”24
Authentic loving involves recognizing each other as free and acting that way. Being too serious and hijacking a lover’s freedom is antithetical to authentic love. But as Beauvoir’s analysis of BB showed, authenticity doesn’t mean you can’t be playful in sexual relationships—as long as consenting people behave in constructive ways. Even BDSM relationships can be authentic as long as the people in the relationship engage on terms that they freely agree to, without exploitation, and can walk away from it or change their mind without penalty.
Authentic lovers pursue their personal projects, and also respect and support each other in their individual quests. Being supportive in this sense means tackling the world together and opening up possibilities for each other. Supportiveness is about standing side-by-side instead of head-to-head. Authentic loving is not easy and it is up to each person in a relationship to work it out together—or walk away if need be. But authentic loving is possible and it’s worth it. And, Beauvoir wrote, “Our lot is to take the risk and the anguish. But why should we hope to be at peace?”25
Love is neither destined nor found, but created. The trouble is that people often want to turn this free creation into marriage, which is neither free nor particularly creative. Marriage comes with a whole new set of pitfalls, especially when people join together in weakness and greed instead of strength and generosity.26 There are possibilities for authenticity within marriage, but it requires an upheaval in the way that people approach an institution that has deep and prolific roots across time and cultures.