Romantic validation
Robin:
What should we talk about?
Agnes:
I want to talk about romantic pain. Why romance is distinctively painful. Is
it?
Robin:
Is it distinctively painful?
Agnes:
Well, as you know, I've been listening to all these Taylor Swift songs. and
they all seem to me to focus on, there seems to be a thesis behind all the
songs, namely, romance is distinctively painful. That is, there are certain
sorts of pains that are characteristic pains of romance, and they're somehow,
I'm not even saying that they're the most painful things, but there's a
distinct pain that is the pain of romance.
Robin:
A different type of pain.
Agnes:
Right, and the pain of romance isn't just like, You know. Is it the pain of
not having something? That is, it's the pain of having something taken away
from you or not getting what you think you're owed or something like that. So
if we just think about like, you know, the difference between losing your
lover because they die versus losing them because they leave you versus losing
them because they leave you for someone else. The distinctive pain of romance
is the difference between those pains, and the way in which the third one,
being left for someone else, has its own character, and it seems to me to be,
I'm gonna just put forward a thought about it, is that we see it, we see
romance as the kind of crucible or test of our worth or our value. So that
when we get romantic rejection, we think of that as a rejection of who we
really are. And that's connected up to the thought that in a romantic context,
you make yourself vulnerable to the other person. You like expose who you
really are. It's almost like you're taking the real test, right? So like most
of the time, in most of your social interactions, you put on a friendly face
and you try to act nice and you make sure the interaction doesn't last too
long so that it doesn't outlast how long you can put on that friendly face
for. And whether the person accepts or rejects you, all they've really
accepted or rejected is the friendly face that you were able to put forward.
But somehow, romance is the real test. You put forward who you really are, and
then the person gets to judge it and tell you whether that's good or bad. And
what they've judged is the real you. So you could really feel rejected if they
say no. The puzzle there is that It seems like what we try to do is game this.
Like, for one thing, it's as though, well, if I really expose myself to you
and show you who I really am, then it's somehow terrible of you not to accept
me. It's like, I have to pass the test. And the way that we game the passing
of this test is we try to coordinate it. So you make sure that the other
person is just as invested and vulnerable as you are, so that they better say
you pass or you won't say they pass. there's some kind of cheating going on
there where it's like it's almost as though what we want is an evaluation of
ourselves but actually we want to cheat and like force it to a positive
evaluation by trading on the other person's having the same vulnerability.
Robin:
Okay, so let's go through this slow. Let's compare first a set of other
similar kinds of pains. Maybe a failure at career, you know, you might feel
the pain of not getting promoted or picked for something when somebody else
you thought was less deserving gets picked. Perhaps the pain of thinking that
your parents favor your sibling and not you over, you know, for their help and
their affection, maybe a friendship, you know, where you wanted someone to be
your friend and they were staying distant. Even hobbies, you might, you know,
be an actor as a hobby and get rejected for a role that you thought you
deserved or wanted. So these are, seems like similar kinds of pain. You're
invested in them, and then it hurts to be rejected. And then you might be
rejected for someone else, not just by the universe, abstractly. There might
be a particular alternative that took your place.
Agnes:
Right. And I just want to agree that I think romantic pain is similar to all
those pains, but quite different from the pain of loss, say.
Robin:
Sure.
Agnes:
a loved one or the pain of, for instance, you know, if your child is in pain,
you're in pain. That's a kind of pain of love. Very different from romantic
pain. Right. I agree. Romantic pain is similar to all these other arenas in
which we might feel judged. And then we might feel like we're judged as
wanting. And I think we can be judged as wanting in all these other ways.
Robin:
And then we might distinguish this one from those other ones, perhaps by
saying that in our culture we've decided this one counts more, or that you're
expected to invest more of yourself in this, perhaps. It's more of who you
are, I guess, being judged in this sphere. But that's odd because there's this
usual idea that maybe your career self or your hobby self is somewhat separate
from your romantic self. And that, you know, your romantic partner is supposed
to be okay with maybe you choosing changing careers or changing hobbies,
right? Because that's a different sphere of life. And you might even think
your ultimate value to the world is more tied up with your career or even
hobby than it is with your romance. So sometimes we belittle the romance to
say, well, that's good for you. And I'm glad you're enjoying it, but we don't
tend to. think of it as contributing to the long-term growth of humanity or
something. So it's interesting then that we might think of it even so as
something that matters more. Maybe we just say it matters more to us, even if
it doesn't matter to the world.
Agnes:
I'm not sure who we is, but you've done polls showing that most people don't
care much about the long-term growth of humanity. Very little of their
evaluative energy is using that as a reference.
Robin:
But just even society more generally at the moment, right? So we might say
your career helps us all and we can all be grateful for your role in the
world. And your romance doesn't seem to so much benefit the rest of us.
Nevertheless, individuals might still care more about succeeding at romance
than they do with these other things.
Agnes:
Right, because you might think that the benefits that I produce for the world
are not me. They're the benefits. They're separable from me. That's great for
you guys if you get all those benefits from me, but I have this question, how
good am I? Not how good are the benefits that I produce, but how good am I?
And I think that we think the people best placed to assess how good are you
are the people that see everything about you. From every facet, the people to
whom you're most open and those are gonna be your loved ones, but somehow
especially your romantic partner. I do think people who put a lot of stake in
their career Like it is possible for career to have clues to this place in
someone's life where they view that as the ultimate testament of their worth.
And if they they're just devastated if they don't get a certain job or if
someone else has chosen over them or whatever, I think it can be pretty
similar. But it's still even in those cases, it still seems a little smaller
in scale to the kind of emotional wreckage of
Robin:
Although, interestingly, fertility trends suggest that in the last few
decades, we had this norm that people should put off making their important
romantic choices until they get their career settled.
Agnes:
Yes, true. I think that we've had a norm saying you don't make your final
romantic commitment until then. But people get involved in romances from a
pretty young age, and those romances can be emotionally devastating. In fact,
I think they're especially likely to be.
Robin:
So even though they aren't as important from the overall life point of view,
in terms of certainly when you finally commit, that would seem to be the more
important choice.
Agnes:
I think that Um, the, maybe the period of life that I'm thinking of is, um,
the period where you're dating and, you know, you're in the space of romantic
rejection. Now, I think you can be in that space once you're married too,
because you can get divorced, your spouse can leave you, you can leave them.
Um, but it's... It's people who are dating and who in some sense are kind of
committed to dating rather than committed to marriage that are going to be
especially susceptible to this. So I think we probably have more romantic
trauma than we did back when the norm was to commit earlier.
Robin:
So it seems to me that in some of these other areas where we could be rejected
and have a lot emotionally at stake, The trajectory of our acceptance or
rejection seems more predictable and slowly changes. Like if your parents
don't like you as much as your sibling, that's probably been true for a long
time. It's not a sudden news showing up. So maybe you get used to it. Your
career also tends to build slowly and gradually. Even, you know, hobby success
will tend to build gradually. And so even though you may be pained by, say,
the failure at your acting career, there won't be a sudden moment where it's
all rained down on you. You will have gotten lots of clues slowly over time.
And then if we're focused on this period of romance where they aren't expected
necessarily to be lifelong and they're going to be short term, then I guess
another distinctive feature about them will be the fact that you're just, the
ups and downs are happening at bigger scales, right? And of shorter times,
that is, there's just a lot more volatility here. It's, it's more like maybe a
singer who, you know, suddenly has a hit and then doesn't anymore, or a comic
or something where the ups and downs would be more dramatic, it seems like
compared to these other areas of potential pain and rejection by people and
evaluation of you, these kinds of romances are especially painful because
there's just, they keep changing year, you know, every few years and they just
weigh up and weigh down. And that's somewhat different than it used to be. So
used to be that romances was more like these other areas of life. in that
there was, of course, big consequences, but because you had your whole family
helping you pick out partners and society matching that and then encouraging
commitment relatively soon, it was more like the other areas of pain. where,
you know, there certainly was highs and lows and you could succeed greatly or
fail badly, but you were going to get that sort of a more slow trajectory of
that and get a lot of, you know, the information would be coming out in
smaller chunks until you finally either, you know, had terrible rejection or
great success. And so then modern romance, at least of the sort you're focused
on, is an exception, not only compared to these other areas of life today, but
also compared to how romance used to be.
Agnes:
Right. So, I mean, so one thing I wanted to say was that, you know, the
postponement of marriage, you've put this in terms of like, it's capstone
rather than cornerstone. And that's not to say it's less important, right?
That is. it now is much more of a signal of your worth. Who you marry is a
sign of your value. And so you gotta build up the value so that your marriage
can then echo that value. So the very idea of postponing it until later is not
demoting it in importance. In some way, it's raising it in importance. It's
demoting childbearing, for sure, but not necessarily marriage. Let's just go
back to the previous point. On this point, I think that you're right that
these, the romantic signals are going to be especially volatile. But I also
just think that it may be that they are signals of something new. So both of
us took a look at the sociology book about romantic pain and one of the things
that struck me- Might as well give the name and author. Ava Illouz and the
name is something like why love hurts?
Robin:
Yes.
Agnes:
Um, so, so, so she compares like books of manners and in relation to courtship
and stuff from like the end of the 19th century to ones in like towards the
end of the 20th century. And the ones at the end of the 19th century are all
about like. How to ride a bicycle elegantly. Do you introduce a man or a woman
first? Which food and wine to serve? It's all about behavior. Whereas in the
20th century, it's all about being self-confident, having emotional health.
you know, Mars versus Venus, like how not to reveal that you like him too much
or seem needy. So it's all about emotional needs and mutual validation. That
may be kind of a new thing, that is that the idea that the other person is
supposed to play a certain kind of emotional role in validating your worth may
just have been less true back when the main thing was like, did you sort of do
the right behaviors? And it might be that that's related to the volatility
issues. So if there's some kind of weird game that people are playing on a
date where Part of what needs to happen is that I sort of need to pretend that
I'm not getting validation from you while at the same time seeking it and like
resisting providing it, but also providing... You tell me as the person who
studied this area, but maybe that's going to produce certain kinds of
informational messes. that is really unclear signals to a greater degree.
We're sort of fighting over the signals in a weird way that maybe you weren't
when you were just trying to like ride the bicycle elegantly.
Robin:
So I think I sent you a paper earlier today on how mating criteria have moved
from material to non-material things. So that is instead of trying to find a
partner that you'll have a home with and have a steady income and have the
same sort of shared social connections and raise a family together, it's more
about having this emotional connection and how we feel about each other. And
I've heard the description that marriage used to be about co-production and
now it's about co-consumption, say. And it occurs to me that we could make a
parallel between different kinds of careers. So if you think of the career of
a doctor or nurse or an engineer or even a grocer, These are careers where to
be good at it, it's something it's easier to see and predictable to get good
at. And then compare that to the career of an actor or a singer or comic.
These are careers where you're supposed to make an emotional connection with
your audience and get them to connect with you. So you have to sort of be more
emotionally open and vulnerable. And that it is more volatile in the sense
that it's just harder to sustain that and to predict it, whether people will
like your songs or your jokes. And maybe in some sense, you know, the career
of being a married person has switched from being a grocer or an engineer to
being a comic or singer. what you are trying to do now is to induce this rare,
special spark of interaction, which is just harder to do and more emotionally
vulnerable. And if you fail, it's sort of Margot's cuts to the heart of you.
So there is this idea that singers or comics, right, to be good, they just
have to reach deep inside themselves and find their emotional core and reveal
it and then, you know, be open and find a way to get others to connect to you
more directly. Right. It sounds like we've turned romance into that kind of a
career.
Agnes:
So yeah, so the phrase that popped into my head was like the idea of bring
your whole self to your job, where then many people score in that and they're
like, look, I have a life and my job is just some small part of who I am,
right? But then other people are like, oh, I wanna bring my whole self and I
want employees who will bring their whole self. So the more you bring your
whole self to your job, the more your whole self can get rejected by your job.
And it's hard to imagine, at least hard for us today to imagine not bringing
your whole self to a romantic relationship. That is, it seems like it's just a
prerequisite, but maybe it wasn't always the case and you had to bring
yourself to a romantic.
Robin:
So think about the movie Titanic. Our heroine, you know, is choosing between a
secure, rich, you know, well-connected fiancé and this emotionally engaging,
fun artist. And there's a sense in which the fiancé is offering his whole self
to that relationship. He says, look, I should be good enough for you. I have
the right family connections. I'm willing to marry you. You know, I'm going to
treat you right. But he's not opening himself up emotionally to her and he
doesn't think that should be required.
Agnes:
Right. Right. So. It seems to me that there is an extra level of. a difficulty
or confusion or whatever that's introduced, if we compare Wuv to the comic or
the singer or the actor, they're relating to an audience, right? But imagine
that somehow like a comic and another comic or something, or an actor and
another actor, each is trying to pull the other or be the actor before the
other, where I think part of what's kind of maddening is that the very signals
themselves are being fought over. And that's going to, that's gonna just make
the situation much more confusing.
Robin:
I was just thinking that for a comic site, if you saw several of their shows,
and you saw that they were pretty much almost the same, you might be a little
personally disappointed because you weren't as entertained, but you might say,
well, of course it makes sense. They don't show their, change their show each
time, but with a lover, you might think, no, they can't just keep giving me
the same show. They have to keep reinventing the show every day, or it's not
an authentic love show. And now it's even harder than being an actor or a
singer or, you know, comedian, because at least they can work with an audience
and find a shtick that works. and then stick with it.
Agnes:
Right. And I guess the thing that I'm sort of like struggling to put my finger
on is this thought that what you're trying to get information about from the
other person is somehow something incredibly itself just hard to know and
unstable. where let's imagine in the olden days, the other person's choice of
you would give you information about your social status. If somebody of X
social status picks you, that suggests something about the status that you
have. But you have all these other bits of information about that in the world
around you. the romantic partner is just one source. And you might just think
there's gonna be a lot of consensus and a lot of just like objectivity on this
question of like, what is your social status? If that's what we understand is
like your worth. But it almost feels like in this kind of the courtship mode
of seeking validation, that the validation becomes like this construct between
the romantic couple where, you know, each person just seeks it from the other.
And it's like, each of us is trying to, look, I'll give it to you if you'll
give it to me, where we're like an exchange, where it's almost like you're
kind of creating the value that you're appreciating, but I just find it very
hard to understand, because it's like, how even do I value that valuation of
me if I know that it's just I held you hostage with my valuation of you? How
does that make me good?
Robin:
I noticed that there's this interesting trend in the arts, compared to say
1,000 or 2,000 years ago, Long ago, the best artist was the one who could most
channel the standard kind of art and be the, you know, be the best version of
the kind of art everybody else was trying to do. So there was very standard
ways to do architecture and art paintings and statues and clothing and even
interior decoration. And everybody was trying to be like the standard best.
And then in the last few hundred years ago, we've changed to this very
fragmented, distinctive style of artwork. Each artist is supposed to invent
their own distinctive style of art, their own distinctive style of painting or
singing or something. And that part of what it is to be a famous artist is to
be very distinctive. And so the artist has to invent a new self. And then if
we are applying to those norms to romance, we say, well, you can't just be a
generic great lover. That's great for everybody as a lover. You need to be
uniquely different for me as a lover when we have to make this unique
relationship. And so we're, we're, you know, we're raising the standards even
more. At least the artists can just develop the unique style and just keep
doing it over and over again through the rest of their life. But the lover is
supposed to be inventing a new kind of love with every new relationship and
maybe every new year of the relationship, so it doesn't go stale. There's this
norm, not just you have to be authentically yourself and unique, but each pair
has to become authentically unique. and distinctive and then make each pair
every year has to be authentically. So you have to keep reinventing it and
making it fresh and then validating to each other that they both agree that
this is acceptably good and unique and fresh. It seems crazy high standards in
some sense.
Agnes:
I just want to read you, this is a quote from the book that I mentioned, but
she's quoting a psychoanalyst. The psychoanalyst's name is Ethel Specter
Person. In mutual love, the lovers validate one another's uniqueness and
worth. They literally confirm the existence and worth of each other's
subjectivity. Which is to say, like, you know, I don't have any subjectivity
unless my lover confirms that I have subjectivity, like that I experience
color or whatever. That's what this is saying. In love, there is a chance for
the lovers to be fully known, accepted without judgment, loved despite all
shortcoming. Our insecurities are healed. Our importance guaranteed. Only one
will become the object of love. Okay. So it may well be that this
psychoanalyst is writing about this as a fantasy or whatever, not as a, not
criticized per, but. But the point is that there's something, there's some
kind of validation of my very existence as a subjective being that I hope to
achieve and love, I guess. I think the thought that it has to be constantly
refreshed isn't quite right. That is actually what, it needs to be refreshed a
lot in the dating stage. And I think people make much fewer demands along this
front once they're married. And, you know, once they've been married for a
long time. So I don't actually think our model is a model of this has to be
continually reinvented, but it does need to be reinvented in the early stage,
and it sort of seems like there's at least many people, and maybe especially
men, who are kind of so into this stage that they're going to, like, not
commit, right? So that they can have this experience of validation continues.
The way to have the continuous experience of validation is to be regularly
helping the person and finding a new person where you can be at this early
stage.
Robin:
I mean, it definitely seems like there's an important element of those
distinctive stages of relationships and the relative priority placed on the
virtues of each. That is, you know, the more ancient model was that the whole
point was to get quickly to that later stage. Right. And that all this
preliminary early stage was all a way to figure out who you wanted to have
that later stage with and to be picky and careful about it. But that's the
point of getting to that later stage. Whereas today we more value that earlier
stage for itself and maybe even so much so that many people never want to get
to that later stage if that's the cost of losing the virtues they see of the
early stage. They're only willing to maybe commit to someone if they think
there's a chance that in this committed the relationship, they'll still get to
keep these valued features of early romance.
Agnes:
Right, and it seems to me that it may be that in the worlds in which people
didn't value the early stages as much, that's because the early stage didn't
provide what it now provides, namely this validation of your existence, or
validation of your worth, or something like that. It might have validated your
social standing, and this is the story that this sociologist tells, is
basically it eludes that your marriage partner might have to some degree
validated your social standing, but you have lots of other ways of validating
that besides your marriage partner. So the main goal of the marriage partner
was the stuff you could do with marriage, which is like have an established
life. And relatively little of the contribution was to your worth as a person
and your psychological needs.
Robin:
I think I'd want to rephrase that sort of description in terms of just
changing status markers. That is, different societies just have different
things that count for status, and they give different weight to different
things. whatever things they are, if you have more of those, you are validated
and that more signs of your having those as validation. So the idea of being
validated isn't unique to our culture compared to ours, others, but the thing
that could have changed is what are the status markers. So if the idea of this
passionate, you know, unique early romantic love where it's all about, you
know, lust and passion and connection, somewhat disconnected from your money
and your career and your family, etc. If that's a thing we value, then to be
validated, you need to have that. And if previous societies didn't value it as
much or consider it a status marker as much, then you wouldn't be trying to be
validated in those terms previously. You would be trying to be validated in
whatever terms they counted for status. So again,
Agnes:
I think that that's not quite right, though, because that would suggest that
what I really cared about was, like, being seen as having this passionate
romance, et cetera, by the outside world. And at least, like, a lot of Taylor
Swift songs suggest, no, that's... I don't care at all what the outside world
knows about this. I don't need to have this status for the outside world.
Rather, what the situation is, is that you become hostage to exactly one
person's status assessment of you, namely the lover. So the lover... I can
translate this into status language. is that your status is now only a matter
of what this one person thinks of you, such that if they break up with you, if
they don't care about you anymore, then it's like your worth is just gone
because they're the only person who can decide your worth. So it's not society
at large, it's this one other person.
Robin:
But that's consistent with what I meant. So when I say status markers change,
I don't mean change in the appearances and what appearances we care about. I
mean a change in the actual things we find virtuous, such that we want them
and want them to have them to have value. So this is a change in what are the
things we count as virtue.
Agnes:
Right, but it's also a change in whose eyes are we being judged in? Of course,
yes. And here the thought is that there's just one other person and that makes
you incredibly vulnerable because if they're a bit unpredictable, then you
don't have any backup. So if it's like your social status, there's lots of
different
Robin:
An analog would be a world where you have a boss, and the boss just determines
a lot about your life, then it's really important that you please your boss.
In order to please everybody else, you need to please your boss. So those
don't come apart. So here, to impress the world, you need to impress your
lover. So you focus on impressing your lover, but we don't have to actually
decide which one you care about more. They go together.
Agnes:
You might just really not care at all about impressing the world. Like, that
might be gone. I think that's the story anyway that Eleuze is telling. It's
not that, you know, in order to get the other things you have, this person's
not the gatekeeper. They're actually the only thing that matters. It becomes
this kind of monolithic thing where they determine your worth, and it's not
that other people think you have worth if they do. The other people don't
matter. This person matters.
Robin:
But you still got to choose who this person was, so in the early stages of
deciding that they should be the one who matters,
Agnes:
And that's what, that's the complicated, you know, negotiation where it's as
if what you're saying is you're trying to, you're trying to come up with like
a contract, like I'll be your assessor if you'll be my assessor. If we can
just both agree, we're gonna assess each other really high. It's like we're,
it's like we each have to take a math test and we're gonna grade each other's
tests and we're gonna agree in advance to give each other 100% no matter what
we score on the test. That's like what romance is striking me as, which seems
crazy, because it seems like if we do that, if you and I agree we'll each give
each other 100% no matter what we score on the test, and I get my score back
from you and it says 100%, I know that doesn't mean that I'm not good at math.
So why do I feel validated by you when I know we made this deal?
Robin:
I don't think people are very consciously thinking in terms of getting a high
grade from you per se, but I think that as we get close, our attention focuses
on the other person, and then we want them to have their attention focused on
us, and we want it to be positive in both ways.
Agnes:
It's not attention, it's validation. Validation means saying that something is
valid. And the question is, are you valid or not? And it's like they're only
allowed one answer, so how's that validation?
Robin:
In these contexts, I think these concepts are just so collinear, i.e. just go
together, that we can't disentangle them. You want them to love you. Yes,
that's validation. Is it you want them to love you because it's validation, or
you want validation because it means they love you? I don't think we can tell
exactly, in the moment at least. But the key thing for your points is that,
again, compared to these other areas of life or even in the past, success and
failure in other areas tends to sort of go more, you know, a more steady trend
over time. You get lots of little clues that add up to the total signal at the
end. And yes, you could be very disappointed, but there's no particular moment
you are especially overwhelmingly disappointed. But now in this world, where
you're supposed to have these sequence of relationships, each of which is
entirely you, you're entirely open and vulnerable, and everything about you is
supposed to be visible and at stake. And then, you know, it breaks off and you
have another one. Well, now it just seems obvious that yes, you're just going
to have much higher ups and downs. than in these others, that can be the
straightforward explanation for why so much romantic pain compared to other
areas of pain.
Agnes:
I think that it's important to understand it as validation where what's
happening is somebody is affirming or approving of your value and that
convinces you that the value exists and is there. That is, that's the
structure. It's not just that they want someone to love them. because they
wouldn't necessarily want a pet to love them or they wouldn't want so and so.
They want the kind of person who, if that person loves them, they feel
validated. That is, they feel valuable and important and significant. I'm
going to read an exchange from this book. This is an Interviewed with Talia, a
42-year-old academic with two children, she works at a large university on the
West Coast. After telling me the story of her breakup with a man with whom she
had an extramarital affair, she adds, You know, it hurt. I agonized over it,
but I feel that I also took away very important things from that story.
interviewer. What things? Talia. He was, well, he is, a very famous academic.
Everyone is in awe of him. Before I met him, I felt I was this invisible,
insignificant thing that no one paid attention to me. I always felt the more
stupid one in the room. But when he chose me, when we were having the affair,
I felt I had become a very special person. I literally felt smarter, and I
could go up to people I would have never dared talk to. I could talk to them
and feel their equal. Even now that it's over, I feel I learned something
important about myself. Because if he could think I was special, then I felt I
was special. I became less afraid of people. Okay, so this is just someone
pretty directly communicating what it is to be loved. It's not just that he
loved her. It's that his love was an indicator that she was valuable or
important. And the puzzle that I'm trying to raise is if that's what she wants
from him, but if they've made this deal that they're going to provide it to
each other, then how can his love be evidence of her worth?
Robin:
So a principle of yours that I've heard from you before is that you want to
give descriptions of people that they might embrace. And I think You know, and
there is these correlations that what men want in a relationship is more about
looks or passion and what women want is more resources or status. That's, you
know, in various surveys of mating preferences.
Agnes:
So becoming less true.
Robin:
Becoming less true, but still.
Agnes:
They are more into.
Robin:
But still true. Okay, so it, I mean, it might be more true for women that they
would be more willing to consciously say, I like this man for his status and
his status validates my status. Um, it's less true for men. I think most men
are just not willing to embrace that as their view of their relationship. They
might say, I love, you know, I love her because she's hot. That might be true,
but it's not so much that she validates me, but. I mean, that still might be,
I think, an acceptable description from a distance of them. They're just less
willing to embrace it themselves. But I don't think there's so much of a
paradox in the example you just give, because this man isn't primarily high
status because of her evaluation of him. It's these other people who validated
him, and then she will be validated by connection with him, who is validated
independently elsewhere. It's not just two people who arbitrarily raise their
evaluations of each other. It's his prior status then validates him and then
his picking of her validates her through that other status.
Agnes:
Fair enough. If we imagine that in this case, there wasn't this coordinated
effort where she would be careful not to choose him until she could see that
he was going to choose her. If we assume that that didn't happen in this
story, then okay. It seems like that element of it is constantly there, that
that's what dating is. It's that she would withhold from him any validation
until he would give it to her, and then the fact that he had this status
wouldn't help.
Robin:
A related question happens in academia. The top of academic fields are people
whose status as being at the top are validated by the fact that other people
at or near the top say they're the top, right? It's called a mutual admiration
society. And once we realize that that's the structure, the people at the top
are the top because other people at the top say they're the top, we might say,
well, I can't trust that. I can't believe those people are actually good
because look, it's just part of this mutual admiration society. And if you
thought the process of producing that mutual admiration society was really
random, that might well be a reasonable conclusion. But if you believe the
actual process by which they got to the top involved a lot of moving from
lower levels with lots of comparisons made, et cetera, you might think that
that whole process did validate those people at being at the top, even if
there is a lot of mutual admiration going on. So you could just look at the
whole history of these people moving into these relationships and still say,
well, look, that whole history does support their claim. Even if there is
this, you know, mutual supporting element at in their last acts of choosing
each other. And maybe you'd even want to discount those last acts somewhat,
but the whole process could still validate the claim.
Agnes:
But then it seems like, like in the case of the academics, right, there's all
this back up in the world. It's like the old world of dating where we had to
decide how to do the bicycle elegantly. That is, there's all this other
evidence about your worth as an academic. Like you have some fancy names
before your professorship and you have a big office and you're an academic in
the first place. And so this mutual admiration is then backed up by this whole
edifice. And it's not as clear that that exists in the romantic case when like
everybody's falling in love with everybody else is that the bar is pretty low
if everyone can have love.
Robin:
But not all love counts the same. That is, her love to somebody else who
wasn't as famous as him wouldn't have counted as much. That is, the fact that
he was famous is part of what she thought was attractive to him and validated
her. So in romance, there is in fact a lot of that similar structure. It's a
different kind of structure than it was in the old Victorian days for sure,
but there's a lot of it. And in fact, I mean, the story is often told, I think
roughly true. Our world is more like a mating market, i.e. each person has
more choices and they make more choices more often and they get more signals
about the choices they have. And that predicts that basically people are
making a more precise estimate now about the market value of the potential
choices than people could in the past. The net value effect of all these
signals is to be more informative, not less than it was.
Agnes:
I think that, so this is where I think that the idea of the totally
idiosyncratic status marker, you still haven't integrated that into your model
of what I'm saying. That is, if the point is that my romantic partner solely
determines my worth and whether or not they accept or reject me, let's say we
break up. And then I have a new romantic partner. There's no commensurability
between those two things. Now this other person determines my worth. And the
fact that it was validated by this earlier person or not valid, doesn't
matter, that's over. And it's one person, all my eggs are always in one
basket. Even if I do a lot of these things, it's still always only in the one
basket of the relationship that I'm in. So I don't get a lot of signals about
my worth. Only if signals are erased.
Robin:
Well, they're not a race, you're just not attending to them at that moment. So
a common observation that I've noticed for a long time is just if you ask
people in a new relationship how long they think it will last or how sure they
are that it will last, they're pretty overconfident. They don't give you very
accurate statistical estimates about how long or how likely it is to last.
that part of the idea is you're supposed to be overconfident. You're supposed
to be investing yourself in it in an overconfident way. And you know, that's
part of this focusing all your attention on them as validating you. That's an
overconfident or an overinvestment in them choice that's part of the mutual
relationship and it's expected to be like that. You're expected to put, that
is a person who gave very accurate estimates about their partner. The partner
heard that they would, take that as a sign of I'm not very committed to the
relationship.
Agnes:
Right. Exactly. But that's just you put all your status eggs in one basket.
Robin:
That is emotionally at that moment, but not behavioral.
Agnes:
What we're trying to do is understand the emotions. I don't care about that. I
care about how you feel, because the point is, what is the nature of the pain?
What is the distinctive character of the pain? And I think that, say, I'm in a
committed relationship, and I reject the person. But they never rejected me,
so I should still feel pretty good status-wise, right? And now I'm in another
relationship, and now this person, it's not clear whether they really want me
or not. I don't think I can tell myself, well, look, the last guy really rated
me very high, so I have pretty good status. No, I'll just be devastated,
insecure, fully questioning, as though that previous thing didn't happen at
all. It's almost like, not just are all your eggs in one basket, but maybe all
of your eggs are in the one basket of what's happening at this moment.
Robin:
Yes.
Agnes:
Wait, I'm going to read another quote. Um, this is, um, this is, um, okay, a
40 year old lesbian woman in a new relationship. She said in an interview, we
had an amazing weekend where I met her friends and family. And also we had
amazing sex. And after that weekend, she told me, maybe you should come only
for two hours tonight. Or maybe we should wait till tomorrow to see each
other. I felt such anger and rage at her. And you know, now as I'm talking to
you, I feel overwhelmed with anxiety. I feel paralyzed. How could she do that
to me? So this is someone where she just met her girlfriend's family. They had
sex. It was wonderful. But then, but then, but now it's the next moment. And
the girlfriend's like, maybe let's just get together for two hours tonight.
And there's that absence of the signal and she can't take the status that she
got over the weekend. It doesn't transfer anymore. That's gone.
Robin:
So maybe the question that you're really just asking is, why do we tend to put
a premium on very, you know, isolated pairwise relationships? That is, so like
when you have a set of friends, You can have a group of friends and they all
like each other and you ask, which one's your best friend? You might not be
that sure. You might pick someone, but their best friend might be that much
better than others. And it would be okay to have a group of friends where you
all liked each other pretty similar and nobody was the best, exactly the best
friend. There weren't particular pairs that were especially strong. I mean,
there could be, but that would be okay. But it just, it would also be okay if
there weren't any particular strong pairs. It was just a group of friends who
likes each other, right? And that's also true for co-workers. It's okay for
co-workers to mutually respect each other and get along without there being
particular pairs of co-workers who are especially strongly bonded. But in
romance, it's that. It seems a different standard. No, the point is you're
supposed to pick one person. And you're really supposed to distinguish that
person from everybody else. And you're supposed to be focused on that one
person as the relationship. And that's a huge priority. And so basically to
accommodate that priority and to prove it or to show it to people, we overdo
it. we signal as much as we can that we are just going to go as full into this
pairwise relationship as we can. And the other partner is, of course,
vulnerable to that if we don't do the same as them. So we have to have this
mutual dance by which we mutually ramp up our commitment to each other. And
then we might way exaggerate it. And certainly a lot of romantic stories like
Romeo and Juliet or whatever are these over-the-top descriptions of how much
one person was committed to each other after hardly knowing anything about the
other person, knowing them for very long. But we love those romance stories
exactly because it's about this pairwise strength, right? So it's up, I'm
suggesting thinking of a signaling story where that's just because You know,
clearly it makes some sense evolutionarily, there would have been this
priority of pairwise relationships and mammals going back for many millions of
years, and you had to pick a particular other person, and you wanted to signal
that you were attached to that one other person, they're not just one of a
number of mutually similar options and that you're going to spread your
energies about them and you're going to pick one. And if that's the thing, and
of course that was true in the past, but the difference is now you have this
one, but it might not last that long and you're picking another one soon. And
so you have all this.
Agnes:
How is that the one then? I mean, so it like, it makes sense to me, the story
that you've told makes sense of like commitment and deciding to be married and
all of that. But the, But the putting all of the value of your worth eggs into
the other person's basket, but only for like six months until you find the
next person to put your eggs into their basket, that's just, it's a way to be
incredibly emotionally fragile.
Robin:
That's where I will just pick the arbitrary cultural choices, you know,
theory. That is, our culture happens to have stumbled into a world where we've
decided that that's the mark of virtue, is how strongly you are attached to,
or, you know, involved with whoever you're with, even if it is only a
short-term thing.
Agnes:
Maybe the thought is, if If we were to agree that, say, social status or
wealth are a mark of virtue, that is being, you know, aristocratic or
whatever, high class is a mark of virtue, then we could go for that or we
could anyway rest our worth on that. But once that goes away, we start to have
a very hazy inception of what our worth is. Um, and that's really the culprit
here is this thought that I have some, I have some idea of what my worth is.
And then, um, the only person who could assess it, they have to be uniquely
placed to assess it. They're like the only person who could really see it
properly. Um, and, um, and that person themselves doesn't really even know
what they're looking for. So then it's maybe the fact that the concept of
worth, of what makes a person worthwhile or good has shifted around to a point
where we're just very confused about it.
Robin:
I mean, most societies have had very different status markers, but they were
usually relatively legible ones that people could figure out. So I think the
fact that it isn't wealth doesn't mean it couldn't be legible or stable. You
know, for example, often coming from the right family, having the right social
connections.
Agnes:
I was trying to include all of those as like social status. I mean, maybe we
just don't have very legible status markers anymore.
Robin:
My suggestion from earlier is that we've celebrated this uniqueness, artistic
uniqueness, authentic concept that we celebrate on artists. That would be why
it would be a legible was because we decided to celebrate this distinctive
uniqueness features of not just art, but romance, especially because for
romance, each pair is going to be unique. and authentically unique, whereas
for the artist, at least they could just be unique for their lifetime, but
don't have to change every year.
Agnes:
It might be the other way around. It's not that we somehow arbitrarily picked
the uniqueness one out of thin air, whereas previously we'd gotten all these
legible ones. It might be that we had a slow erosion of the legible status
markers, such that I feel like even in the 1980s, wealth was still a pretty
good status marker. Like the idea of having a fancy car or whatever, that went
out of style in the 1980s, but I still remember that. And what happens when
you run out of all the old ones? Then you're like, well, it's an ineffable
something, and making the art idea the closest idea we have to it.
Robin:
In all these studies about what people choose their mates on, definitely
status and wealth has gone down, or family connections, but the thing that's
gone way up, which is very legible, is hotness. People just care a lot more
now about hotness than they used to, and their actual choices care more about
hotness than what they say they care about. So hotness is pretty legible, and
it does seem to be the actual dominant feature people are choosing for, but
maybe they're just not okay with admitting that hotness is it, and they have
to make up this other ineffable, you know, passionate, unique thing as a cover
for the hotness. It's just not okay to admit that, well, you're just going for
hotness.
Agnes:
I mean, it may be that, look, you have to pick on the basis of something at
the early stage, and hotness is very much on the surface, right, even more
than wealth or status, But I think that, so I find it very plausible that
that's like gonna govern initial attraction. But less plausible that if you're
like, well, when you love someone's like, you know, when you've gone through
the negotiations and you've decided to like validate their existence or
whatever, that that's on the basis of their hotness. That is the idea is,
maybe it's a little bit like, you know, go where the wealthy people are and
marry for love. You're just going where the hot people are. You're going to
start with hotness, so then you end up with a hot maid, and that probably
gives you status. But still, the conceit is that you love that hot person not
for their hotness. If they thought you loved them for their hotness, you would
not be validating them in the relevant way. You have to love them for their
ineffable something or other.
Robin:
Let me turn this around and make an observation I made before, but forgot in
this context, I think that just in fact, people don't typically know why they
like people and why they like them, how much, but it's something we're very
sensitive to being out of control on. So we like, we're trying to feel in
control. So we try to identify as much as we can or the features that attract
us or don't, or that would make us attract other people. So we talk up. our
control, as if we had more control of being able to tell who's attractive and
who we're going to be attracted to and who's going to be attracted to us. And
so, you know, even in the past, when people would have been family connections
are well still, in fact, people would have been more or less attracted to
different people, even if they scored the same on these things, they wouldn't
know exactly why. And, you know, the world would just have to allow some
uncertainty and tumbling around till people paired off who liked each other
more than average, because that was just important. And today we also, you
know, try to talk as if we could control or anticipate, but maybe, you know,
the base, the fundamental truth is just, we're just always a bit, quite a bit
out of control of who we like and even knowing why we like who we like. Uh,
and that makes it somewhat easier to celebrate the ineffable uniqueness and
distinctiveness because, well, it was always there anyway.
Agnes:
It seems to me that the question of knowing why you like someone and the
question of control are quite separate. Because if you know you like people
that have a certain kind of property, that may not be something you have
control over. You may not have chosen the property as being one that you want
to argue for. And in fact, Yeah, so I guess I- The question might be, how bad
is an arranged marriage gonna go?
Robin:
If your parents pair people up according to social status and wealth and how
the families get along, how bad will that go? I mean, apparently it didn't go
too bad in societies that accepted it, but there's still gonna be an element
of, even in arranged marriages, you put the two people in the same room and
the parents go, are they getting along? And sometimes they just don't get
along and then the parents have to go find another match, right?
Agnes:
Right. And you could think of like, so in, you know. In a way, every society
was an arranged marriage society until pretty recently, because Arranged up to
a point. Right. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. Arranged up to a point. So
maybe you had a choice between three men or something. You arranged one of
those three. And of course, even now, maybe you have a choice of 500 men, but
still, it's one of those 500. Um, but maybe the crucial part is you could
choose nobody. And so that's the sense of which is not a forced choice. Um,
and, um, and so it's like, if it's just you either, you know, you have to
choose this one versus you have to choose between these two. It's like, it's
not that different. Um, um, and so, yeah, I mean, I, I guess the, um, maybe
it's the idea that, um, If, if someone could choose both between you and
nobody, because that's like a viable option for them, and between you and lots
and lots and lots of other people, and then they choose you, then that's a
more plausible scenario for thinking this validates my worth than if you are
only ever between one other person.
Robin:
So I think the number of choices is somewhat illusory. If the question is,
when you get close to this person, how well does it work and how long does it
last? Then you can't really do that with 500 people. So with 500 people, you
can look at surface features and wealth and popularity and looks and things
like that, but there's a sense of which, well, If we aren't willing to just
choose on those, you weren't willing just to commit on those things. You say,
okay, well, that's good enough to try, but let's see how we get along. And do
we, if we open ourselves up completely and show ourselves everything and try
to, you know, really engage deeply, does that work out well? And then if so,
how long does it work out? Well, there's just a way in which you can't try
that for very many people. Maybe it's more than three, but it's less than 30.
or not that much more than 30, I guess, for some people. And so that's in some
sense, but maybe the unique, the pain of the modern world is we're pushing
more in that direction. That is, we're going, we're demanding more of how
magical that connection is and how long it lasts. And it needs to be more
unique and more sparkly in order for it to be good enough. And maybe the key
puzzle is why we have these much higher standards for that. Whereas in the
past, if you, you know, if your parents put you together in a room for a day
and you got along in that day and you seem to like each other when you go and
I was better than the other three guys they introduced me to, yeah, let's,
let's marry this guy. It was much lower standard for how far you'd get.
Agnes:
I think it is the fact that you weren't seeking that the interaction with the
other person be a constant source of validation. I'm going to read one more in
exchange for this book. This is Daniel.
Robin:
We had enough quotes, haven't we?
Agnes:
No. He's a very successful 50-year-old guy who I think we meet him in an
earlier chapter. I think he's a guy who just has like a string of women and he
won't commit to anyone. And so he says, love is great, but it's also
difficult. What's difficult on a day-to-day basis is when I lose confidence
that I'm getting the love I want. The interviewer, what can make you feel this
way? Daniel, not to get the right signals, the signals that indicate I am
loved. For example, she sent me a text message expressing concern about me.
That made me very happy. Then I sent her a message asking that she updates me
about her day. She said, OK. And then at night, I get this email. Quote, I
have guests. We'll talk tomorrow. Sleep well. And that throws me off. Then I
analyzed every single word and tried to scrutinize them. These things can make
me cry. Like, it's not enough. He, in none of them, does he feel like this
person is really and fully validating him. The validation is somehow never
complete. He's never getting enough of it. And that just, it seems like a very
different kind of demand from the demand that is being made in Jane Austen.
Robin:
So we're nearing out of time, so let me suggest a summary here. Okay.
Economists believe that people don't satiate. Many people have thought that if
we got rich enough and peaceful enough and the world got better enough, that
people would get enough of what they had previously wanted, and then their
life would be a world of ease and peace where, because they had enough of what
they wanted, they could feel secure and comfortable and enjoy life. The
economists suggest that instead, as we get more and more opportunities and
more options, we just raise our standards. And then the key question is, where
do we raise our standards more? Right. So a thing we can notice that in our
world, we have decided that we're going to put more weight on romance. And
we're going to put more rate on these features of romance, the intense
personal connection, the open and vulnerable, you know, very lively,
spontaneous, strong emotional connection. And that's what we're valuing.
That's what makes our lives seem valuable more than it was in the past and
more than other societies. And then, but because it's such a volatile thing.
Um, and, you know, intrinsically hard to achieve just as with acting or music
or comics, right? Having the magical performance is just harder to reliably
produce and more going to fluctuate with context. Uh, then that's, that's what
we're trying to produce in romance. And it's just going to be painful because.
We put everything that we are on stake, that's kind of the norm, and we're
supposed to, emotionally, everything's at stake, and it's just intrinsically
unreliable. It's, by its nature, volatile and random, but we've decided that's
what we value. Maybe we value it because, exactly, it's the sort of thing
that's still hard when you're rich and peaceful.
Agnes:
I'm just trying to imagine another version of this and how crazy it would look
to us. Imagine if you got all your status from whether or not a newborn baby,
say between zero and six months, smiles at you. And, you know, they smile at
you that day, you have a good day, and if they don't, you have a bad day. And
once the baby is more than six months old, it doesn't count anymore, so you
need to have another baby and still check whether that one smiles at you.
First of all, we'd end up with so many babies, right? And second of all, you'd
be hostage to this, like, tyrannical idiot, which is what a baby basically is,
who doesn't know anything about what's good about you. And that that's what
you were getting all your worth from. Robin, are you still there?
Robin:
Yeah, last thing I heard was you need another baby.
Agnes:
Okay, nice. you're getting all your worth from this tyrannical idiot is what
I'm saying. And that seems obviously dumb because the baby doesn't know
anything about what makes you valuable. So it's a bad signal. And so what I'm
saying is like, it's just, this just seems crazy to me. Uh, that would seem
crazy because it seems like you could point out to them, but these babies
don't actually know what makes you valuable. And it sort of seems like we
could say the same thing about love. And I'm just don't quite get why that
doesn't correct the whole thing.
Robin:
Well, fundamentally, cultural choices of norms and status markers just don't
typically respond to arguments about why they're bad. That's not how cultural
evolution works. So, you know, all these years of celebrating romantic stories
and romantic songs helped elevate the status of romance. And, you know, that
just isn't going to take a while to respond to your arguments. Arguing that
status markers are stupid is just, hasn't been very effective in history.
Agnes:
I mean, it seems like somewhat it has. That is, people have argued that class
and wealth shouldn't be status markers because they don't actually track
virtue.
Robin:
But I don't believe those arguments were causally I mean, so just in general,
when cultures change, whoever had been arguing for that change will say, yay,
my arguments caused the change, but in fact, you know, they're just claiming
credit for something they didn't cause. But anyway, thanks for talking with me
about romantic pain, perhaps, is the title. I'll think about it. Okay. Take
care.