Love triangles
Robin:
Today, we want to talk about love triangles. Right. So we recently saw a movie
called Challengers about a love triangle, a 2024 movie involved with tennis.
And we reflected on it a little, but we noticed that there's apparently a lot
more movies where there's a love triangle with one woman and two men than vice
versa. Because when you ask ChatGPT to give the vice versa movies, most of the
movies it gives you are the one woman, two man version. And it does seem like
there's just a lot more one than the other. And so, you know, apparently A
Love Triangle is a prototypical story. that people like to hear, and we wanted
to reflect on what does that say about what people like to hear, what their
expectations are, what, in fact, are the relationships between the genders,
and what asymmetries can we infer here from this potential asymmetry from a
lot more stories about one woman, two men versus less stories of one man, two
women.
Agnes:
We aksed ChatGPT also about novels and, you know, going back to, it gave
examples going back to the 11th century and they were pretty much all one
woman, two men. So that does seem to be the preferred model for Luck Triangle.
I also wanna say, there'll probably, first, there'll probably be spoilers for
Challengers. Second, we're probably gonna use the character name. So if you
wanna watch, if you were thinking of watching that movie, you should just
watch it before listening to this episode of the podcast. I think it'll make
more sense.
Robin:
And we will probably mention some other movies and maybe give spoilers about
them too.
Agnes:
Sure. Okay, so we, One of us, I think it was you, asked on Twitter, why is it
more popular to have one woman, two men than one man, two women? And we got a
lot of different answers, but I'll give you my answer, which is that a big
part of the appeal of the love triangle is the competition. for the two men
that they're competing for this one woman. And even if there are love
triangles that involve one man and two women, it doesn't set up this
competition structure. And that was confirmed by ChatGPT by asking it whether
the few instances that it found involved the kind of tournament activity that
you see in Challengers. I mean, literally in Challengers, but figuratively in
other movies where there's a kind of showdown and the, you know, the best man
is going to win the woman. That structure doesn't seem to apply even when you
do have two women, one man. And that structure is what engages us. And that's
why we want to see one woman, two men love triangles.
Robin:
So before we get too far into your particular theory, we should just step back
and go step-by-step through the larger range of theories people offer. One
simple theory many people give is just that women are more into romance
stories than men. And so women will be more interested in a story where men
are competing for the women than vice versa.
Agnes:
I don't actually see why that second thing follows. That is, I agree women are
more into romance than men, but why would it follow that women would rather
see two men competing for a woman than two women competing for a man?
Robin:
The standard story is they want to fantasize about being the main character in
a romance story, so they would like to be in an advantageous negotiating
position in that fantasy. And of course, we have many fantasies about, say,
the maid, you know, being, you know, wooed by the prince or the billionaire,
things like that. So we definitely see a lot of fantasy elements where, you
know, an unusual advantage is given to a woman in the romantic negotiations in
romance stories. So that fits somewhat. Very few stories about billionaire
women, you know, dating janitor men, for example. That's not a particular
fantasy women might have, although men might have it.
Agnes:
Um, there is actually a version of that, uh, that there's a couple of movies.
I don't think I've actually seen any of them where there's like a famous
actress. Oh yeah, there's the Hugh Grant one. Notting Hill, uh, where there's
a famous actress or a famous singer or whatever. Then she ends up dating like
her bodyguard or the guy at the bookstore or whatever.
Robin:
Right, right. So there definitely are these exceptions, and I know more, but
still the pattern, we might say. Anyway, this is one story that makes some
sense, but it doesn't...
Agnes:
I want to continue to press you on this because it's not obvious to me that in
the story where the two men are competing for one woman and then one of the
men triumphs, that if you are looking at these three roles and you want to
feel represented, and you want to feel like you are in a high position, you
would pick the woman rather than the winning man. In fact, I think if a man
were watching such a thing, he might well be happy to identify with the
winning man.
Robin:
He can't be very sure at the beginning whether he's going to be the winning
man. So if he identifies with a character early on, he's facing a big risk.
But of course, the women don't have to face that risk, right? If there's a
story about two men competing over a woman, the woman identifies, the viewer
identifies with the woman character and she can be more assured that she is
going to win either way, right?
Agnes:
What I'm saying is, I'm just not at all sure that if you were marketing
romantic love triangles to men, you would want to make a movie in which two
women are competing for one man. And the man is sort of standing there in the
sidelines watching the women compete for him. Like, the gender differential
might go deeper than that. That is, it may well be that both the women and the
men prefer this version of the triangle. Because, yeah, the man maybe isn't
willing to take the risk of identifying with the character.
Robin:
Okay. So fundamentally, if we have any gender asymmetry in the world, in
patterns of anything, we're going to have to ground it in some sort of other
gender asymmetry. And that'll be part of the story here is to find other
gender asymmetries we're willing to ground this in. And we should admit from
the start that our answers are going to be somewhat culturally dependent.
We're not trying to make claims about all possible cultures and all possible
times and places. We are embedded in our culture and we are drawing from our
culture to think of examples. to back this, but we might say, at least in our
culture, what are some key gender asymmetries that might produce this? Now, I
think you're, when you say competition, we should at least pause and ask,
well, obviously any love triangle, there's a literal competition. So when you
say they compete, you must mean something else than the literal fact that they
are competing. There must be some other kind of thing they do that you're
going to call competition. That's the method by which they try to resolve this
conflict.
Agnes:
Let me use a different word. Let me use the word tournament. So with the one
women, two men love triangle, there's often some kind of gesturing at
something like a tournament. It's very overt in challengers, as I say, they're
literally in a tournament, but that structure of may the best man win, I think
that that's very different from, like, let me bring in another example.
There's a movie, Phantom Thread, in which a tailor has this woman who is his
model, but she's kind of his most recent woman, and she's worried that she's
gonna actually get replaced by the next one. And she develops a way to sort
of, you know, strengthen their relationship, which is to poison him with
mushrooms and then to nurse him through the sickness that ensues from the
poison. And that kind of, in effect, that cuts off all the other possible
women. He's tied to her. That's just very different from the tournament
strategy. So, yes, she's competing with other women, with other potential
women, and she's trying to secure her hold over this man. But, you know, it's
very much not by, like, proving that she's better than all the other women,
except if you think of it as being better at poisoning him, and then also
better... Right.
Robin:
Well, let's take the movie Titanic. The main woman is scheduled to be married
to a rich guy, and then she meets a poor guy on the boat. And the poor guy is
attractive in many ways. He's lively, and he's a good painter, and articulate,
and maybe open-minded about the new social changes of the world. The man has
all this money and social standing. He's not very nice to her in terms of
supplicative. And the main thing he does to get rid of this other competition
is to get him locked locked down under the ship, well, he might drown,
basically. It's a physical force sort of thing like poisoning. He doesn't try
to do a display to show that he's better than the other guy. We also think
about, say, sorry, Casablanca. There's a competition for the woman in
Casablanca, but neither of them are going out of their way to display or do a
tournament sort of style competition for her. Uh, they are making various
clever moves, uh, you know, the unexpected revelations and negotiations,
things like that. Uh, that's mostly the, the main male hero. The other guy's
not very active in the whole story. But the person who is active is not
competing on the basis of being impressive, although he does compete on the
basis of, say, being attractive, seducing her at some point. And that's also
true for even challengers. That is, one man basically tries to win by seducing
rather than by impressing. And that seems to be a common feature in many of
these stories. So, you know, we can think about the different categories of
ways to win these contests. Some of them can be to just be more impressive at
some overt contest. Some can be just to be more seductive and induce an
attachment. Others can be maybe to, you know, abuse the person of a crime and
get them out of the picture or to, you know, make bad gossip about them so
that they are pulled away or often perhaps just to cry and why complain a lot
to induce sympathy. There's a wide range of these strategies. And I guess
somehow maybe some of these strategies are more common for men versus women.
and maybe we like stories with some of these strategies more?
Agnes:
I guess I think even in Titanic, there's something like a tournament. It may
not be, it certainly is from the point of view of the viewer, where there are
these two candidates for the woman's affections and you're supposed to be
assessing which of them do you think is better. And in particular, I think
there is, they tend to, the two candidates tend to fall into two specific
types. Namely, there's the guy who's the practical choice and the guy who's
the sexy choice. And the practical choice is often wealthier and offers her
more stability. And the sexy choice is often going to be better at seducing
her, more wild, more unpredictable. And I mean, in Titanic, she goes with the
sexy choice. In Challengers, she goes with the practical choice. So either one
can be a viable option. But part of what the love triangle is putting forward
is this, like, two different ways to be good as a man. And it can be hard to
know which of those... And I don't think there is any analogous. If we flip
the genders, I can't tell you what are the two different ways to be good as a
woman that are potentially put forward and that the man has to choose between.
Robin:
Well, quite often in a male choice situation, there is a standard choice
between a established long-term relationship, that's the safe and appropriate
thing to do, and a tempting, sexy, but somewhat wild and less reliable
alternative. That is a very common male choice scenario. And it's analogous to
what you described. Yes, we often present the character seeing conflicting
choices where the choices have stereotypical differences in order to evoke
ordinary people's anxiety or wondering which choice they would make. And for
men, certainly it's often between say an older wife of many years and a
younger woman who is more sexy or available or lively. And that's a common
male choice for a male love triangle.
Agnes:
I mean, I do think there are plenty of movies about men having affairs.
Robin:
They're often presented as, will it be a temporary affair or will he go back
to his wife? That's a love triangle.
Agnes:
It's striking that we don't, I don't think that is the, that doesn't fit the
model of a love triangle. as well as a movie like Challengers. And maybe it's
just that in those sorts of stories, like if you think of Crimes and
Misdemeanors, that Woody Allen movie, right? It's basically a movie about
this, you know, the eye doctor, and he's got a wife, and then he's got
Angelica Houston, who he's having an affair with. But there isn't... this kind
of showdown between the two women.
Robin:
They don't act... Angelica, he's in a... There really usually aren't quite
often showdown scenes between women in affair movies. That is, the affair is
often presumed to be hidden, and then there's a showdown scene where the
hidden is revealed, and then the choice is made at that point.
Agnes:
Right. But it very much doesn't look like a competition for virtue.
Robin:
As he does for virtue, see again, like all of these moves are competitive
moves. All the different things people do to try to become the chosen person
in these movies are in the abstract competitive. So what you mean by more is
like competing on the basis of trying to seem more virtuous in some key way.
That's a different, that limits the range of competition, right? So when you
accuse them of a crime and have them locked up, falsely, that's not competing
on the basis of virtue. or even just whining and complaining and crying and
saying, how could you possibly hurt me this much? That's also not quite so
much competing on the basis of virtue. That's appealing to their, you know,
moral norms and attachment. So we could distinguish competing on the basis of
some virtue as one of the many strategies.
Agnes:
That's just what I meant by a term.
Robin:
But now that we can clarify that, we can go farther to look into these other
cases and ask, well, to what extent are they competing on virtue? Like in
Titanic, is the rich man trying to show that he's even richer and even more
well-established in the process of this conflict? It doesn't seem so.
Agnes:
I think that they each are showing off their virtues.
Robin:
OK, but certainly all of movies where the man is choosing between two women,
you know, certainly when there's the wife and then there's the new young
woman, she's definitely trying to be attractive.
Agnes:
It's not, you know, there's a question of whether the movie is trying to
convey to the viewer how attractive she is, like quite often.
Robin:
Yes. They're quite often making it quite clear she's quite attractive.
Agnes:
I think that in these one-women, two-men movies, the viewer is supposed to be
asking, OK, what choice should she make?
Robin:
And the same for the gender reversal.
Agnes:
I mean, that doesn't seem true to me for crimes and misdemeanors, like, for
example. It doesn't seem like that's an important question that you're
supposed to be asking as you watch that movie.
Robin:
I disagree. I think, almost always, there's the final resolution where the
main man asks, did I make the right choice in having this affair?
Agnes:
Absolutely. Did he make the right choice about murdering? Because he then
murders his... Okay. Jolt of Houston. And that's what the movie is then about.
Robin:
Well, obviously, if you escalate to murder, then you'll focus on that. But
definitely there's going to be this choice aspect. I mean, we might then say,
well, this was a bad choice because it made him escalate to murder. Come on.
Agnes:
Right. But the question is. Like, there's a reason why the, you know, when we
asked for movies that show us one men, two women, we didn't get very many. And
now you're making me realize there are lots of movies that Chachi P.T. didn't
produce. Why? Because those movies didn't focus on the love triangle aspect.
So Crimes and Misdemeanors doesn't focus on the love triangle. Which choice is
he going to make? And so it may well be that And when we have movies when the
man has to decide whether to stay with his, you know, stay with his wife or go
with the woman he's having an affair with, the movie as a whole takes that in,
but it's sort of about something else. And so it seems like what we want to
watch, and I think this is men and women alike, it may be women more so, We
want to watch this scene of which man does the woman choose? We're somehow
interested in that question. And it seems to me we're interested in it. I
mean, I don't actually think that that is the focus of Titanic. Titanic's not
a perfect example. Titanic is more like Crimes and Misdemeanors where it's a
little bit, that's a little bit backgrounded. But, you know, we want, we
somehow want to, the men competing for virtue, and we want to be a little bit
on the edge of our seats about which way the woman is gonna go.
Robin:
So we look at some other movies that are love triangles of one woman, two men,
Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Titanic, Moulin Rouge, Jim and Jules. Most of
these don't have very much overt competition like Challengers does. Certainly
the viewer is invited at some point to ask, which should she choose? Or should
she keep them both going, which sometimes they do. She does in Jim and Jules,
just keep them both going through the entire movie and into the conclusion. So
that's sometimes, she's got to have it, is another one where the woman
continues to take them both as long as she can. So I guess I'm tempted to
agree with you in the following sense. Often what we want from stories is to
see iconic stories in our minds realized in a particular story. And I think
that people do have this iconic story in their head that men compete and women
shoot. And that's realized more in our specific expectations say about
approach and seduction, that men are supposed to make the first approach, men
are supposed to take the risks about making an initial connection, and women
are supposed to... hesitate longer about whether they're interested or who
they're choosing. Whereas men are supposed to sort of know who they want
initially and go out and take a risk to get it. And so men are supposed to
basically make a choice sooner, and women are invited to wait longer to make a
choice. And so in that process, we see the dynamic of the men making,
proposing themselves and the women just evaluate. And that's sort of the
stereotypical, you know, initial contact structure in our society. And so
people want to see that story realized on film. And so, yes, they will look
for those elements of the story and the movie makers will emphasize them. even
if, of course, there is actually male choice and there is actually women doing
things to try to make themselves more attractive and to be chosen. But I think
maybe we still don't focus on those so much, even if they happen in the
stories.
Agnes:
And maybe this is why I think it's actually good to just focus on challengers
the details of challengers because I think as much as anything else it's kind
of a commentary on this phenomenon and making it really explicit. So it like
there's a moment in the movie where the woman. Tashi is confronted by her
husband, who is the practical choice, with the question, will you still love
me if I lose tomorrow?
Robin:
Not just love me, she says she will leave him.
Agnes:
Well, um, um, um, um, hold on. The question was, will you still love me if I
lose tomorrow? And then she says, if you lose tomorrow, I'll leave you. Is
that what you wanted to hear? And there's a suggestion in the movie, I think,
that that is exactly what he wanted to hear. That is, that the only thing that
gives this guy the fight, the drive to win at tennis, which is the only thing
he really has in life, is the thought that he's competing for this woman's
hand. And in fact, in the competition that happens the next day, it's when he
is fired up by jealousy that he then plays really well. So, there's something,
the movie at least, is, I think, suggesting that the men need this competition
as much as the women do, and the men need it in order to, like, have any
motivation at all to be men. The men aren't men.
Robin:
I think you're trying really hard to Make her a better person than she is in
the movie. I think so we did a poll basically on the three main characters
about who people thought was suffering most from the love triangle and This
man that you just described is is by far the winner in the poll Basically, you
know more than the other two characters combined and saying that they suffer
the most. So I would say this man, he says explicitly that he wants to quit
and the other main character says he wants to quit. So I believe him. He wants
to quit. He wants to stop playing tennis. He's ready to be done. And She does
motivate him, but by causing him enormous pain that he doesn't want, I don't
think he wants to win as badly as it takes to go through all that pain, but
she cares more about making him win than his pain, and she does make him win
by making him suffer the most of any character in the story. It's like
whipping a horse to make them run faster. You might make them run faster, but
it's not that nice to the horse.
Agnes:
Yeah, I don't disagree with you about what he wants, but I don't think the
movie cares that much about what he wants either. That is, the movie cares
about human excellence.
Robin:
No, we viewers can care about whatever we want. I don't have to care that much
about winning tennis.
Agnes:
Well, that's not what the viewers care about either. I'm saying the movie is
presenting us with something, and I think of the three characters, he's the
winner. He is the huge success in life, right? He is the tennis champion.
Neither of the other, not the woman and not the other guy. And he's this big
success. Why? Well, partly because of this love triangle, partly because this
woman's been pushing him. He has the grand, like, wife and is making a lot of
money and has all these endorsements because he's really successful. And she
is pushing him to continue to be successful, to be somebody. And he knows that
he is, in some sense, She's living through him, right, because she's been
injured. And the thought is like, yeah, that's got costs. The cost is lots of
suffering and maybe doing stuff you don't want to do.
Robin:
I don't think the movie takes a stance on whether that overall is worth it. I
respect the movie exactly because it presents the situation and lets us make
our own decisions about whether it was worth it.
Agnes:
Sure, I mean, my point isn't, like, my thought is, like, I don't know that how
much he suffers is the most important question that, like, that the movie
cares about.
Robin:
Okay, but if we're going to talk about this in terms of love triangles, then
we have to notice that here's a love triangle where there's a man who's been
married to a woman and she's been his coach for a while and they both have
achieved success that way. We see their pictures on ads all over the place and
they've got a lot of money, etc. And then she basically cheats on him with
this other guy who used to be his close friend and a rival for her affections
much earlier on. And then, um, she repeatedly cheats on him as a way to hurt
her husband in order to motivate him to hear the threat that if he doesn't
win, she's going to leave him. And that does, cause he does love her and he
can't stand to lose her. He, that motivates him to try harder. And that
motivates him to try. Well, we're not so sure because basically the other
person he wins against kind of agreed to lose to him. So he has a better
performance, but we're not actually sure that caused the win. But
nevertheless, he does win through her basically having sex with the other guy
in order to get him to lose, to push his career on, which he wanted to end,
but she wants him to keep going with. I mean, as a love triangle, this looks
like she has the most negotiating power here. She can play these men off
against each other to get what she wants. They are each suffering relative to
her having this leverage. I mean, she may emotionally suffer from using this
leverage, but still she has the power here and she uses it to get what she
wants, exploiting both men. and causing them pain to get the win she wants.
Agnes:
I mean, I guess I think that as much as the movie is about, like, love
triangles and suffering, it's about human excellence and being the best and
the glory of that. and it's connecting these two ideas. He was starting to
just, their marriage was dull. He wasn't achieving anything. Their lives were
being drained of meaning. There's a question of what is going to... We got the
sense, okay, he wants to quit. We didn't get any sense of what is it that he
wants to do.
Robin:
There's no... We get the sense that those people speculated about him. He
wanted to spend more time with his kids. He wanted to be on TV shows
commenting about other people's games. They sketched out the sort of things he
would be doing. And that does sound plausible. I mean, he wasn't wrong about
what he'd be doing. So some of these other movies that also have love
triangles, you also mentioned, well, you know, they're not ideal things
because they have all these other things going on. I think that's true about
Challengers, too. So maybe a thing to notice here is we're not that interested
in just a love triangle story.
Agnes:
Yeah.
Robin:
It needs to have other things going on and other things at stake that, like,
weigh against the love triangle that makes the love triangle more interesting
as a story.
Agnes:
I guess I just think that your Like, your way of presenting what's going on
is, like, as though she were the orchestrating everything. Doesn't seem right.
It seems to me that these men want to compete over this woman. That is,
that's, like, what's coloring their lives, is this competition. And it's
what's energizing them. And that's part of why we're interested in love
triangles, is because we're interested in the fact that love energizes life
and motivates.
Robin:
people. But if we look at these other love triangle movies, we're not seeing
that. So I'm not sure how general a theme that is really for love triangles,
that it's all about motivating the man to try harder. Most of the other love
triangle stories with one woman and two men. The men aren't being motivated to
excellence, particularly. I mean, was Jack's painting and a particularly
excellent painting because he was competing for the woman's, you know,
affection in Titanic? I mean, he made a nice painting, but I'm not sure it was
an especially excellent painting. We're not supposed to focus on the painting
as the excellence achieved by Titanic.
Agnes:
Well, I don't know. I mean, I do think that the movie is about the things love
motivates you to do. And so, in that case, it's that he dies, right? He
sacrifices his life for her because he loves her. That's, I think, less
directly, you know, attempt to compete, right? So, that, but yes, I think it
is about love as a powerful motive.
Robin:
But that's going to be true even in the reverse, gender reverse versions of
these. All love triangle stories are going to have powerful motives on all the
characters. They're all powerfully motivated by the love triangle. And then
they do many things like murder, you pointed out in the other movie. So yes,
powerful motives are all the way through these things, but they seem to vary
quite a bit in what strategies people use to try to win or deal with the love
triangle. And that's, I think, an interesting fact. That is, there's this old
observation, which I think is roughly true, that to make a movie that both men
and women can go to on a date, you need some things that appeal to men and
some things that appeal to women. One of the standard stories is you got to
have some romance in there to appeal to the women, and then you can have some
other action to appeal to the men. And many of these movies kind of fit that.
They're going to have love triangle, the romance part, and they're going to
have some other action part. and we're gonna connect these together and make a
story everybody can enjoy.
Agnes:
It may be that it's a lot easier to get something in there that's gonna be
interesting to the men if you have it be two men competing for a woman, first
of all, twice as many men. And second of all, they can be doing things, the
very things they're doing can be things that might be interesting to men,
like, I don't know if men are into tennis, but. Some are. Yeah. So that, it
could be that that orientation of the love triangle gives you, allows you to
appeal to more, more people. But why is, like, there's a lot of different ways
that you might present love. and also a lot of different ways that you might
present love as energizing people. But it's pretty, it seems like a pretty
common way that we get it in movies is precisely the love triangle, where
there's, it's almost like the possibility of another person makes the love
more visible to the viewer, to the reader. Why is that?
Robin:
Well, I mean, obviously we value things more that we have to sacrifice for. So
here, if we just have two people meet each other, like each other and have a
great time, we don't have much conflict for the story. And we also, they
aren't really showing how much they value each other because they haven't
really been forced to choose. between much to get the other person. So that's
why we often need obstacles in romances. There needs to be some obstacle to
the parties getting together, something for them to struggle to overcome,
maybe something difficult, some high prices to pay in order to convince us
that they actually care a lot about this and perhaps are worthy of it. So a
love triangle is one way to show that. And I think interesting, like, if you
think of Romeo and Juliet or something, like, they've got the families in
their way, say, and we see how much they love each other because of how much
they're willing to risk their family's displeasure and go around it or even
kill themselves. But that still presents them as basically liking each other,
and they don't have much conflict within their relationship. There's just
these other obstacles between them. But now a love triangle forces some two
out of the three characters to say, I don't just want their happiness. I want
them to be happy with me. So that it highlights the selfish feature of a
relationship. Otherwise, Romeo and Juliet, it could just be, we're trying to
get together and get these obstacles out of our way and we love each other.
And, you know, then it can all look very other oriented and selfless freely.
in the romance, and I think maybe, you know, we all kind of know romance has a
bit of a selfish part, and the love triangle really highlights that selfish
part. Two of the three characters are basically saying, you know, but what's
in it for me?
Agnes:
They... Oh, I see. You're saying the two that are competing for the woman.
Robin:
Right, they definitely, I mean, sometimes they just stand back and, you know,
so Casablanca, we're not giving too much of a spoiler, people don't know, in
the end, one of them says, I give in, you are better off with the other man.
Agnes:
Right, and that makes it extra romantic, I think. The fact that, in effect,
they're giving up this little thing, this little bit of self.
Robin:
Right, but if they gave it up right at the beginning, it wouldn't work.
struggle for it and want it, and then give it up. So we need, in order to
convince us that it's a real sacrifice, if he had right at the beginning given
in, it wouldn't be much of a story, right? He has to make us think until the
very end that he's trying hard to get her, and then give in. And of course, he
even has the story that she let him seduce him in order to flatter himself,
because, and then let her go. just to show that he really does like her a lot
and it's hurting him to let her go.
Agnes:
But also, it's like he really could have kept her.
Robin:
It's his choice to let her go. Yes, exactly. So you can't be letting her go
unless you show that you could have not let her go. Then it's the great gift
of letting her go.
Agnes:
So maybe really the idea of the love triangle is to show how wonderful men
are. That is, and that's the compromise between the two sets of viewers,
right? Like, the, you know, the woman is the one, she's in this sort of
advantageous position, but like, it's very easy for men to have an incredibly
cynical and negative take on the woman, as you had on Tashi in Challengers,
this kind of, you know, manipulative, selfish, like, person who wants to make
other people suffer, but the men just get to compete for virtue. And even
potentially to, you know, this move where they're like men- Depends on how
they compete. The other man.
Robin:
Like in Crimes of Misdemeanors, he competes by murdering.
Agnes:
Well, but the Crimes of Misdemeanors is a weird case because it's one man, two
women, right?
Robin:
Right.
Agnes:
So that's just not gonna fit our pattern. And it also is a case where the
competition isn't the focus. So, but like, You know, if the idea is that the
competition with the other man plays the role of, you know, like, there are
all these fairy tales where, like, the prince has to, like, do all these
challenges so that he can win the princess. Um, like, in, um... Right. Uh,
well, like, in the Magic Flute, they both have to go through the challenges, I
guess. I was thinking the Magic Flute, but it's not just the prince. Right.
So... What? The other person would be, like, in place of that.
Robin:
So to me the striking feature about the love triangle story is that it has not
just how much do I care about something and how much am I willing to sacrifice
for it and how good am I in deserving, it also has this altruism-selfishness
trade-off for all three parties. Because as in Casablanca, they could say, you
know, you two seem to like each other a lot. Maybe what matters for me isn't
so important as what you guys can do together. I'm going to let you win. Or
even, you know, the, even in challengers, we might think, well, she might like
the other guy more, but she wants this tennis star to have a more grand tennis
career. And maybe her love of tennis makes her pick the man who could achieve
more in tennis, even if she would have hotter sex with the other guy. Um,
although we don't know that she's ever actually going to stop having sex with
the other guy, but, um, maybe we could presume. Uh, but you know, there's this
trade-off between what I want and then what's good for other people that you
don't get in just a pure pairwise love story so much. I mean, Romeo and Juliet
could ask, why should I upset my families to have this relationship? And, you
know, if they took that trade-off seriously, that would be an interesting
altruism versus selfishness dynamic, but the story doesn't go there at all.
But at Love Triangles, you can't help but wonder, am I being selfish here?
Especially in an affair story, like where you've had a relationship, you made
a commitment, and maybe now you'll bail on it to have another relationship.
You might very well ask, am I being selfish here to bail on this commitment
for this other alternative?
Agnes:
I agree, but I guess the thing that I feel like is getting missing is that
love triangles are sexy. Even in the story, it's like there was this kind of
sexlessness in Tashi's marriage to Art, and then when Patrick shows up, now
Seps is on the scene again. There's this way in which it's almost like a
suggestion that The three-person situation is the erotic one. And with the two
people, like, they can be nice to each other and they can be married, but,
um... There's something sanitized about it. It's not sexy.
Robin:
I think you're right. I think it's a perhaps ugly truth, but it is revealed
more by the conflicts here that in fact, you know, we'd like to tell the story
of a romantic relationship and sort of treating each other respectfully and
coming together and having a long-term commitment and, you know, taking each
other into account. And we like to include sex in that picture because, hey,
sex is a way you please the other person and get pleasure out of the
relationship. But there is a sense in which the sexual drives are more primal
than that. they're more selfish and they're more aggressive even and fighting.
And so we might feel a sexual desire about something that isn't good for us,
isn't in the abstract respectful, but still compelling. And that desire might
be all the stronger when we feel a, you know, competition or conflict over
someone. That is, we might be all the more aroused by the fact that somebody
is competing for this person's attention and that we want to win their
attention. And that selfishness may in fact be more sexy because in some
sense, sex is kind of selfish.
Agnes:
I think that even like the scene where Art tells, asks Tashi, will you still
love me if I lose this? And kind of confessing that he doesn't want to do
tennis anymore. It's plausible that all of that comes out of him because
Patrick showed up on the scene again. That is, even being able to confess that
he doesn't want to do tennis, like being able to have honest... Sure. It's
that the existence of the entry of the third person creates this kind of
crisis. And so it's both that the relationship becomes more sexy and that
their lives become, like, the tennis gets better. Everything gets better, in a
way. More painful to you, more suffering, sure.
Robin:
But the- To an economist. To an economist, this is the lesson of competition.
I mean, we recommend competition for many good effects, and then people often
go, but competition is damaging and stressful, and somebody loses. And many
people often wish we could organize society around less competition. And this
is a sort of story of the virtue of competition in a romantic context, but
That is the story, yes. You might say competition brings out the abilities and
energies of people in ways that lack of competition doesn't, in business, in
government, and in romance. But there's a trade-off of the cost of the
competition. You have to face and admit the cost.
Agnes:
Tashi is the one who has that insight. That is, she believes in competition.
She believes her husband needs to keep competing, not, like, sit back on his
heels and, you know, get some cushy life in which he would never need to
compete again and he can just relax and enjoy his life. Like, she sees that as
a kind of death. That nothing is pushing you to drive or excel. Um, and she
thinks the same about her relationship. And, um, and the men are kind of...
without her pushing them, there's something half-hearted about them.
Robin:
Something like... So, there's an interesting analog between, say, marriage and
tenure.
Agnes:
Is there? Yeah.
Robin:
Where, you know, marriage is sort of this idea that we can stop competing now,
we've picked each other, and we won't work as hard, but we feel safer about
it. And similarly for academic tenure, there's the idea, okay, you've competed
enough, you've done enough, and now you can be safe.
Agnes:
Right, that's what Art wants. He just wants to meet Snape and have tenure and
never have to strive for anything again and live without.
Robin:
I have a question for you. If we project the future of the movie Challengers
forward, Art is going to continue to have struggles, continue to have times
when he's not doing as well as other times, and he's gonna continue to perhaps
need a kick in the pants motivation, Will Tashi continue to have affairs, have
sex with Patrick in order to motivate him? I mean, you know, can he, and will
his anticipation of that continued future, will that destroy his motivation?
That is. Can it be the prospect of a future safe point that could be an extra
motivation? And the idea that he, every time he wins the match, it's just for
another month or two before she's going to be having sex with Patrick and
threatening to leave him again. You know, can that continue as motivation or
will looking forward and seeing that prospect, he's just going to give up? You
see the trade-off here, right?
Agnes:
I do, but I guess I just think she's pretty good at this, so she's gonna do it
to the degree that it will work out. She understands him pretty well. I mean,
like, insofar as she is this machinatrix, like, she got it all to work
perfectly. And it's not like she's having sex with Patrick all the time.
What's represented in the movie is, like, she had sex with him... Twice.
Twice, right.
Robin:
Oh, that we see. That we know, right? Right, okay.
Agnes:
Uh, so, so, um, um, that is, that is, the movie represents the men as being a
bit hapless. And Pat, I mean, my, my thought is that the reason why it's not
gonna work to continue this with Patrick is not that Art will only put up with
it a certain number of times, but Patrick really does seem like he's on his
way out. That is, he's a kind of has-been. And it's, he's not gonna be a
plausible competitor.
Robin:
Well, then she might pick somebody else to have sex with.
Agnes:
But Patrick was kind of in a uniquely good position in that they had this
history of competing. And so, yeah, like that's the, you know, the movie, I
think one of the things the movie suggests with Patrick coming to her and
saying, will you be my coach, is saying he realizes that he needed that
motivational push as well.
Robin:
Okay, so well now let's turn it around. Think of all these movies where
there's an older man with an established marriage and then attempting a fair
young woman. To what extent do we want to say, well, that wife was taking it a
little, you know, too easy, was too secure and too tenured in their slot. And
this, you know, competition with this younger woman would induce the older
wife to reform herself, complain less, you know, lose weight, learn a hobby.
Agnes:
Sorry, we never get that. That's just I mean, maybe. Sorry. I'm sure there's
some movie that tells it. But right. You know, I haven't seen it. And usually
the men are lying about this. They're cheating on their wives and they're not
telling the wives. So the wives don't know that there's.
Robin:
Well, Tashi didn't tell Art either. I mean, he had to figure these things out
himself. She did not tell him.
Agnes:
fair, but she is picking someone where there is this established... Sure, but
the man could pick the wife's younger sister to have an affair with.
Robin:
I mean, the husband could pick someone who would especially motivate his wife.
In principle, would that be a more attractive story? Would we sympathize more
with the husband who motivated his wife by picking someone whose wife was
especially...
Agnes:
percent of us genuinely be motivated and getting a whole leaf on life and
achieving amazing things because of this. Absolutely.
Robin:
But would we want to hear a story like that? That's the question. If you wrote
a story like that, would that be appealing?
Agnes:
I don't know. I mean, it is striking that we don't seem to tell that story. We
don't seem to tell the story, regardless of whether it's an older woman or a
younger woman, we don't seem to tell the story where the women are energized
and become excellent through competition for a man. We just tell the other
story.
Robin:
Well, we do hear stories, actually, of women who get divorced and then remake
their lives and go on to success, but they still tend to really complain about
the man. They don't say, you know, thank God for my ex-husband. He kicked me
in the pants and made me, you know, reform my life. Usually, it's still pretty
critical.
Agnes:
Right, but also, in those movies, the woman isn't trying to get the man back,
so it doesn't fit. I mean, yeah, the woman, there's plenty of movies where
women are, you know, transform themselves or whatever, but this is
specifically that the competition brings out excellence. And that's just not a
story that we tell. I don't know that we're prohibited from telling it, but.
Robin:
So there's a TV series about a rich guy in Atlanta. Do you remember that one?
A Netflix series. And basically his ex-wife is a big character in the story.
And she resents that he left him. And then in the end, you know, bad things
happen to him. But there are stories like this where a woman basically resents
the fact the man left her and is continuing to want to get him to feel like he
was sorry that he was wrong to have left her. So that's a way in which she'd
be competing for his, you know, judgment that he had made a mistake.
Agnes:
Right. But that's just like that's not very attractive resentment. Right. So
maybe we're not willing to make to beautify women in the process of
competition. We're only willing to beautify men. When women do this, they look
ugly. When women compete over men, they look ugly and desperate and pathetic.
When men compete over women, they look glorious and amazing in their
champions.
Robin:
That may well be true. There's definitely a related literature about competing
in business and other personal interactions where men are more okay with overt
competition and more motivated by women and women, you know, tend to be less
motivated by overt competition and business and other sort of school contexts.
So maybe we just have this norm that men should be competing more.
Agnes:
I almost wonder, you know, in the movie, it's just very, very clear that Tashi
is the most competitive one of the three, right? But she gets this injury that
prevents her from pursuing her own, you know, ambition.
Robin:
Right. And so she has to compete through these men.
Agnes:
Exactly. But I almost feel like that's Like, you know, we can say, well, the
injury represents her femininity in some way. Like, she's this super
competitive person, but she's a woman. So we got to take, we got to sideline
her. And then we got to get some people who are allowed to compete, namely
men, and they're competing. But somehow she's, it's like her trapped
competitiveness is what's driving the whole movie and is working through them.
So it's, there's something about the movie that is itself a weird gender
commentary. where she's masculine in her competitiveness, but the injury
restores her femininity, but her masculine competitiveness is still driving
the movie.
Robin:
So I think there are like war movies or something where soldiers like compete
over some woman who motivates them to, you know, compete. But then she
couldn't have as easily been in their role. So maybe this tennis movie was
trying to make it clear that she could have been like them, if not for this
injury, so that it didn't have these, you know, the presumption that only men
could compete well in this role.
Agnes:
Right. OK, maybe we should stop.
Robin:
That seems like maybe we should. All right.