love in a particular way, by representing it as being that way, we are constructing the rules and norms and expectations for what a loving relationship should look like. We teach all of this to children. We keep going, and call that “on.” It’s not only about creating the rule, it’s also about creating the “us.”
It doesn’t stop when we grow up, of course. The cultural messaging comes blaring at us all the time. It comes in at us from every direction and can occupy any and every available medium: magazines, news, music, friends, colleagues, family members. Anything can become an avatar, a conveyance of cultural soup. (Have you ever noticed how much text is on display in your bathroom while you are brushing your teeth?)
We cannot exactly tune all this out, but we can stop paying conscious attention. Indeed we have to stop paying conscious attention, because we have to use our attention – that limited and precious resource – for other things. So most of the time we just let the messaging wash over us, and it seeps into our subconscious unchecked. This makes it even more powerful: the less attention we pay to all these messages hiding in plain sight, the more easily they reach into the most intimate parts of our lives. (These days, I wear underpants only from the company that advertises on all my favourite podcasts.)
But let’s tune in for a moment: let’s pay some conscious attention. There’s more than just stories in the soup. There’s also received wisdom. For now, I’m not going to analyze or critique this. I just want to lay it out, as cleanly and simply as possible.
1 A good life is one full of love and happiness. A bad life is one with neither.
2 Love and happiness (the best things in life) are “free.”
3 In order to live a good life, one should pursue love and happiness (as opposed to crass things such as wealth, power or fame).
These three messages may sound very familiar and homey. Perhaps they seem “obvious.” But my hope, in writing them out so starkly here, is that I can begin to defamiliarize them a little bit. What might we think of these messages if they were entirely new to us? If we were strangers to the social world they define?
When you listen in to that third message, the one about what one should do in order to live a good life, you might hear some moralistic overtones. Something like: it is unethical to pursue money, power and fame. That’s what evil people do. But in this context I am calling attention to message number three, not as an ethical proposition, but as a piece of strategic advice. A “good life” in this context is not necessarily an ethical life but the kind of life that is good for the person living it. The kind of life we would wish on our friends, or that a loving parent wants for their child. That’s what I’m homing in on here. And, in the context of the first two messages, we can see how the third message makes sense as strategic advice. If you want a good life, you’ve got to pursue the things that constitute a good life, right?
The messages might strike us at first as simply discouraging avarice. We are advised to replace the pursuit of worldly goods with that of immaterial, abstract things. But it’s not that simple. There may be ways to live a good life that do not involve the pursuit of any of these things. Indeed, that’s where I think eudaimonia comes in. But, before we go there, let’s take a look at where sad love fits into this cultural soup.
Sad love is all over the lyrics of popular music. Think of U2, for instance: “I can’t live with or without you.” Or Nine Inch Nails: “I hurt myself today, / To see if I still feel. / I focus on the pain, / The only thing that’s real.” Or Amy Winehouse: “We only said goodbye with words. / I died a hundred times. / You go back to her, / And I go back to / Black, black, black, black, black, black, black.” Sociologist Thomas Scheff makes a case, in his 2011 book What’s Love Got to Do with It, that pop music’s image of love has been trending negative since at least the 1930s, with more and more songs depicting it as overwhelming and intensely painful (as well as self-centered and alienating). I largely agree with him that love as depicted in popular music is an extreme of feeling: either intense, ecstatic happiness or excruciating longing, loss and desperation. And that it’s more usually the latter.
It’s not just pop music that’s obsessed with tragically sad love, though. The same thing occurs all over so-called high culture as well. Doomed, disastrous love drives the entire plot of classic novels such as Anna Karenina or Wuthering Heights and operas such as La Bohème and La Traviata. Juliet immediately wants to die when she finds out she can’t be with Romeo, and vice versa.
This, then, is sad love as we collectively imagine it through our songs and stories: a failure condition. Never mediocre or boring, but spectacular and devastating and explosive. Not the daily grind of greyscale depression, but a melodramatic tragedy in gloriously (if horribly) intense technicolor, or …, well, black. We aren’t presented with a subtle range of experiences. It’s as if there are only two love stories: one a blissful fairy tale and the other a total, utter tragedy.
Notice, too, that these two stories have a lot in common: tragic love and happy ever after love are all about intense feelings, whether those feelings are positive or negative. Sadness and happiness are positioned at opposite ends of a scale for evaluating an individual’s state of mind, from positive (happy) at one end to negative (sad) at the other.
Art and life are not so very separate from each other. Popular songs and classic novels wouldn’t be popular and classic unless they resonated with millions of people. In fact, there is a tight circle of mutual influence between the two. The fact that life influences art is somewhat obvious: these songs are intentionally written to speak to as many people as possible and connect to their real (if extreme) emotional experiences.
The less obvious – but equally important – fact is that art influences life too. I argued in What Love Is that the socially constructed aspect of romantic love can be thought of as akin to a composite image. If you compile thousands of depictions of a face, the features they share in common emerge in the composite image as clearly defined contours. In just the same way, as we keep piling up our cultural representations of love, the features they share in common emerge from the composite image as clear features of love. These features can (and do) go on to shape a stereotype of what love looks like and a kind of script that we are expected to follow.
As a consequence, the ways we represent love as “happy” or “sad” can exert a powerful influence, not just on what we expect (from ourselves and others), in the sense of what we anticipate, but also on what we expect in a more normative sense: which kinds of love are socially acceptable and which are stigmatized or disfavoured. For instance, consider the power of representing queer love in movies or on TV. If we never see such love represented at all, we may have no conception of its being so much as possible. If we see queer love represented, but only between ridiculous or stereotyped characters, we are encouraged to distance ourselves from it and to laugh at it. What happens if we see queer love represented but only as sad?
Think of it this way: these composite images – stereotypes – generated by our cultural representations of love serve as a kind of roadmap for life. If the only road we can see that leads to “happy ever after” is the one labelled “Normal Relationship,” we are discouraged from taking any other road. And not only that, but we are also subtly manipulated into dissuading our friends or family members from trying a different route. After all, we don’t want the people we care about to be miserable.
While it makes for good art, tragic love is not supposed to be anybody’s idea of a good life. When we say that “a good life is full of love,” we don’t mean a good life is full of Romeo and Juliet style suffering and suicidal despair. We mean that a good life is one full of happy ever after love. It’s OK for real-life love stories to be sad and dramatic for a little while, as the “protagonists” overcome some initial obstacles to their union,
