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.