conference invitations. I really felt like a “winner” by all the metrics I’d internalized. It felt good to compare myself with other people and be pleased with the contrast. I’m not proud of this.
But it felt nice when I thought retreating into a small corner academia would be possible, and when I was content to rack up esteem indicators and grant funding. These days, when people say it “must be nice” that my work gets attention, I try to explain. Actually it’s difficult, and often kind of horrible. But I still think it’s worth doing. Trying to do this other kind of work is awkward and uncomfortable. I can’t coast on my achievements (such as they are), because they aren’t going to get me where I’m going. Not even close. As soon as I started working on love, and trying to communicate my ideas beyond the narrow walls of academic philosophy, I realized I needed all kinds of skills that I didn’t get any help with during the course of my ten years of academic training.
Most urgently, I needed to learn other ways of communicating. I had learned to write only for the others in my small corner of academia. Scholarly journal style, it turns out, isn’t the way to most people’s hearts and minds. (Who knew!) So I went back to school. This is not a metaphor. I enrolled in the Creative Writing MFA program at my university. I became a student again, part-time, alongside my day job.
All my academic training had been focused on rigorous argumentation – drawing clear, straight, black and white lines from point to point. Don’t get me wrong here: I am grateful for this skill, and it’s a privilege to have had the many years of education it took to hone it. It’s not only an academic skill that helps me write papers, it’s a life skill that helps me survive. But, as with any tool, it is limited, and there are certain kinds of philosophical work it cannot do. And I feel drawn to some of those kinds of work. So I’ve had to learn more skills, not to replace the skills I learned in my first forty years of life but to supplement them.
I’ve been learning to write and think more like a novelist or a poet or a journalist, or sometimes all three at once. It’s not that it’s wrong to proceed in straight, rigorous argumentative lines. In the same way, there are times when intricate black and white line drawings are the best way to illustrate something: when close technical details are of the essence and anything else would be a distraction. It’s just that, if you are trying to paint a whole scene, a complex landscape with diffuse ambient lighting and confusing shadows, you aren’t going to depict that subject very realistically if straight black and white lines are the only marks you know how to make.
I completed my MFA degree during the COVID pandemic and, along with the rest of the class of 2020, graduated online. But, for the previous few years, I’d been switching out my professor hat for my student hat as I walked between the philosophy corridor and the creative writing corridor.
Doing and being many things at once doesn’t feel weird to me. I prefer it to the kind of intensive focus and specialization I was trained to think was normal and appropriate for an academic. My mind works better (and feels more functional) when it can stabilize itself with a broad base.
In the same way, being in more than one relationship at the same time doesn’t feel weird to me. In fact, when I am struggling with my mental health, having more loving partners on hand is a good thing. The work of supporting me doesn’t all have to fall on one person.
Which brings me back to that sadness I was talking about. It’s easy to imagine how some partners might react to their loved one deciding to pursue a line of work that was evidently making them miserable. Easy to imagine concern, or distress, followed by advice to quit and return to the comfortable old life. It’s easy to imagine, really, a partner simply not wanting to be with me if I insisted on making myself miserable like this. Isn’t love supposed to be all about the happy ever after?
Well, love is “supposed” to be monogamous too, and mine isn’t. When I was at my most depressed, not even the love of my partners could make me feel happy, but it did help to make me, and my work, feel possible.
Their recognition and support for who I chose to be, and what I chose to do, was an expression of love. Advising me to quit would not have been. Reflecting on that difference – between love that makes me feel happy and love that makes me feel possible – is what set me on the course towards the main conclusion of this book, which is a new theory of love. This new theory doesn’t compete with or replace my work in my first book, What Love Is, but it tackles a different part of the question. This book is about my theory of sad love. Or, more accurately, my theory of eudaimonic love, which has room for the full gamut of human experiences and emotions, positive and negative, happy and sad.
Eudaimonic love means literally “good-spirited” love. It’s going to take me a while to explain what the relevant “spirits” are, but along the way I’ll be able to explain what eudaimonia does (and doesn’t) have to do with romance, and happiness, and finding meaning in life. I have stopped asking the old question I was taught to prioritize – how to be “happy ever after.” This question doesn’t interest me anymore. It doesn’t look significant.
I just ambitiously promised a “new theory.” A new theory? Like a great new idea? A work of startling original genius?
The myth of the great idea works in much the same way as the myth of the “great man.” In fact, the two mythologies go hand in hand: we imagine our “great men,” such as Darwin or Newton, coming up with their “great ideas,” such as evolution or gravity, and we imagine them doing it all alone, as if they existed in an intellectual vacuum. We ignore the contributions of other people, especially “inconsequential” people, such as Darwin’s hairdresser, who chatted to Darwin about his experience with pedigree dogs.8 And we ignore the influence of existing ideas, especially ideas we don’t consider respectable, such as alchemy and the occult,9 which fascinated Newton and were hardly irrelevant to his willingness to theorize “unseen forces” at work in the universe.
In reality, great ideas grow, live, and die in, and as parts of, intellectual ecosystems. (So do terrible ideas, of course. And mediocre ideas.) When I promise you a new theory, what I’m promising to do is build you something out of bits and pieces I’ve found swirling around in my ecosystem. Some of them are very old, and some have only just appeared. I work like a magpie, gathering shiny ideas from my environment. A curator. Most of what I’m gathering is not rocket science (although it is, in some cases, science). But it’s what I’m trying to build from it that matters.
I’ll have a “new theory” if I find enough shiny pieces to build a mirror, and that mirror shows us something we need to see.
Notes
1 1. Barbara Rosenwein provides an insightful commentary on some of love’s constitutive fantasies in her book Love: A History in Five Fantasies (Cambridge: Polity, 2021).
2 2. What Love Is And What it Could Be (New York: Basic Books, 2017).
3 3. You can find a selection of them at www.carriejenkins.net/magazines and www.carriejenkins.net/radioandpodcasts.
4 4. I got hate from feminists – or at least from people who thought of themselves as feminists – for challenging the prevailing norm that all relationships should be monogamous. I had the impression that this critique came from people who had heard only that I was personally non-monogamous, and who weren’t familiar with my critique of how the institution of compulsory monogamy sustains the patriarchal status quo.
5 5. These intersections of sexualized and gendered racism were less surprising to my partners.
6 6.
