Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hi, Robin.

Robin:

What should we talk about tonight?

Agnes:

I thought we are going to talk about erotic desire.

Robin:

Or romantic desire.

Agnes:

Or romantic desire, yeah. We want to talk about desire but we wanted to separate out the species of desire that’s relevant in context like crushes and dating and breakups and marriage. The kind of desires that we can put into longing, that’s what it’s about.

Robin:

You and I have talked a little bit about this recently outside of the podcast and one of the things that struck us both as interesting was that we had come across a bit of a, not paradox, but a conflict, a common conflict with respect to at least the most stereotypical descriptions of desires. So to be concrete like I did a poll based on something you had told me from, was it Aristotle, about the hypothetical where someone on the one hand say is attracted to someone and could on the one hand maybe have sex with them but they weren’t that into it. And on the other hand, this other person might really want it but it never happens. And we ask which scenario would you prefer and there was a strong preference for the second scenario. And so, a lesson we could draw from this is that people have a substantial and strong preference for the other person’s desire of them even over and above what they might otherwise be thought to want to get directly out of the relationship. So wanting them to want you is a big part of it. And what we have realized is that there is a bit of an incompatibility there, or at least apparent one, that we have two people, each of whom wants the other one to want them. But the question is, what exactly do they want them for? So if I wanted you to want me for concrete features like my height or intelligence or wealth even, and you wanted me to want you for your concrete features, your compassion, your charisma, then that doesn’t work as a match because we aren’t actually getting what we want from the other person. Whereas if you had an asymmetric relation perhaps, just one person wants the other one for their body and the second one just wants to be wanted for their body. Well, now, we have a match but this is asymmetric and perhaps in many ways unsatisfactory. And this was an interesting conflict that we came across and that made us both interested in thinking more about, well, what exactly do we want someone to want us for? Did I summarize that well?

Agnes:

I want to clarify something that just because when you first presented it, you used a bunch of pronouns and it might not have been clear who you are referring to so I’m going to just use like A and B.

Robin:

OK. Sure.

Agnes:

Because you state like the first thing, right? So the Aristotle thing is supposed A can choose between two different lovers, B1 and B2, so B1 is passionately, amorously interested in having sex with A but is prevented from doing so. And B2 is willing to have sex with A but would do so sort of reluctantly but B will actually get to have sex with B2. Does A prefer B1 or B2? And Aristotle says that the erotic preferences for B1 for no sex but for the person who is passionately interested in you. OK. That’s just same thing you said but you just said he or she or they and that wasn’t clear. I guess I would put the paradox slightly differently. Like I would say even if we are not very specific about what it is that we want to be wanted for, if you assume that the characteristic erotic desire is wanting to be wanted, if my erotic like erotic relation to you is wanting you to want me and your erotic relation to me is wanting me to want you, it looks like even if we don’t specify what it is that we want to be wanted for, in some way, each of us is selfish. And if those are our only erotic desires then we are not able to give the other person what they want because we are both takers, let’s say.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

We are both – if eroticism is fundamentally being a taker then it’s like two opposing magnets that would never attract to each other.

Robin:

So I did a follow-up poll I guess to that first poll where I asked people what do you want to be wanted for and I gave them like some features like their body or their wealth or their smarts or compassion or the option of wanting to be wanted for the fact that you want them. And people did not like that second option. Almost all the answers were wanting to be wanted for particular features. So that seems to more limit the possibility of finding a match between some just merely being happy with the fact that the other person wants you because you want them.

Agnes:

Right. So if – you might think like the option they are rejecting is that what would satisfy me is your erotic desire which is to say, your desire to be wanted by me. Right? Ultimately, I think we have that actually I guess the option we go with. But before we get there, just in terms of the other ones where people are like, “No, no, no, I want to be wanted for my body or my wittiness or my personality or my moral virtue or whatever.” The interesting thing there is that people don’t seem to be very particular about which of those things.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Right? Like wanting to be wanted, even wanting to be wanted for your body, which features of your body would you like to be wanted for? Is it the shape of your eyes or is it the scent of your neck? And if the person is like, “Oh!” it turns out it’s the scent of your neck, maybe you are happy with that and you didn’t antecedently specify it had to be the neck thing and not the eyes thing, right?

Robin:

Right. It looks suspiciously like there are these various sorts of shame scenarios where people don’t want to associate with those scenarios because those have been criticized as bad. Like it has been criticized as bad to let somebody wants you only for your money or only for your body or something. So everybody has to say, “No, that’s not – that couldn’t be what’s going on or at least can’t be the main thing that’s going on.” But then once they’ve excluded the shame scenarios that they’re not supposed to want, they’re not actually very particular about which other scenarios they want, as long as that they aren’t the shame scenarios, they are OK. So which I suspect is more about the shaming than about what they actually want.

Agnes:

So, right. So I guess the first thing I was trying to point out is that even if people are sort of in some sense know what they want in the sense of not wanting merely that the other person wants to be wanted by them, they really don’t know what they want in a sense. So there is a big variety of ways that they would accept being wanted and it’s suspicious that they are not particular among those …

Robin:

Yes, I agree.

Agnes:

… variety of choices. Now, you’re pointing out, yeah, but there are still some that they reject. And so they might reject just being wanted for their body or just being wanted for their money. And I suspect that you’re right that like the reason why you don’t want to be wanted just for your body or just for your money, the one way to put that is there is a social disapproval of that. But I think it goes a lot – we can go one step deeper. I think that we sort of want to be wanted for features of ourselves that have symbolic potential like if you are like, “I want you for the smell of your neck,” that sounds a little bit like romantic, right? Whereas if you are like even if you were to say something like, “Well, you have very symmetrical features,” or something, that’s sound a little clinical like maybe I don’t like that one. And then I would much rather you like me for let’s say, my charming idiosyncratic personality than for like how I’m really good at predicting what’s going to happen or something.

Robin:

You are reminding me that like years ago, I remember discussing with these people and I remember two kinds of theories people liked but at the moment, I am not that big on them. But that it’s worth mentioning. So one theory people liked was well, you want to be liked for permanent not temporary features because if they like you for a temporary feature then that means your relationship could go away. So if they like you for looks, that might go away. But if they like you for your compassion, that could be permanent or something. Or if they like you for your money, that might be temporary I guess. And then I guess another way to – another sort of framing is liking you for a commodity versus liking you for some very unique feature. If they like you for a commodity, then you could be easily replaced for somebody else who has the same commodity and so you would not feel very secure. Whereas if they like you for some very unique feature that only you have, then you might think then that this will assure a longer-lasting relationship. So I think there are some truths to those things. But again, I’m more doubtful because it looks like the whole thing is a bit of a pretense.

Agnes:

I mean I’m also doubtful. I’m not sure I’m quite easy with the pretense. But I think that I might not want you to like me for my aristocratic background or something where I’m not – it’s not very temporary, right?

Robin:

And it could be very unique.

Agnes:

It could be very unique like I could be like the Queen of England or I’m about to become the Queen of England and I don’t want you to just want me because I’m going to be Queen. I want you to – and maybe I’m the only one who could be Queen unless I die then it would be the next person. But still, unless I die, I’m not going to be replaced, right? So in that case, it’s not temporary and I wouldn’t be replaced but I don’t – so I’m inclined to think that there are certain features of a person that have symbolic potential, that is, they have the potential to symbolize some other kind of desire relation that we are looking for and which we choose to have symbolic potential is going to be very culturally specific. Like in ancient Greece, it was ankles that were really big. I mean just having the right turned ankle. They must have constantly been paying attention to people’s – women’s ankles.

Robin:

OK. Yeah.

Agnes:

And so then being attracted to someone for their ankles would be sort of romantic. Whereas like nowadays, even – if you think of different body parts, like being attracted to someone for the size of their breasts, that’s like probably not considered very romantic, right? Whereas the shape of their ankles maybe are of ancient Greece, maybe. So even just different body parts, some of them are going to so to speak, have symbolic potential. And I could even imagine like in our world where aristocratic titles are no longer really a thing. You could romanticize someone’s – oh, their great grandparents were – great, great grandparents were rich and nobility or whatever.

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

So anyway, that’s my thought is that it’s actually relatively open which properties of a person have romantic potential, not to suggest that we have to go – move over to OK, what is it for something to have romantic potential? It’s not the property itself that signifies that somebody …

Robin:

So it’s open relative to a culture but given a culture is no longer so open.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

So it seems like we should go there in terms of thinking of a more socially constructed story which is what you’re leaning toward here and let’s at least explore that. And so, I would speak of it in terms like this is a very important thing to us all and so we all need to talk as if we were somewhat in control of it and somewhat like managing it consciously. And so, we have to talk as if we are somewhat aware of what we want and we have some standards and we are being somewhat picky. But that may be much of a pretense in the sense that the process that makes us be attracted to some people or not or feel satisfied or not with some relationships may just be very subconscious and out of our control and even out of our vision such that it just tells us who we like and whether it’s a good match or whether it feels like full enough, and that’s just true in all cultures. But we feel out of control to just admit that, to just say, “Who knows.” And so we have to sort of make up these stories that we are in more control because we have these descriptions of what we want even if these descriptions have some correlation to what we end up choosing, it doesn’t mean that a process and a choice has much to do with our conscious analysis and categorization of it and that may not just have much effect on the actual choices.

Agnes:

Well, if I’m right and these properties have kind of symbolic relevance then there is more work to be done in saying, what is it that they symbolize? So what is it that the woman’s ankle symbolize for Homeric Greeks or whatever. That is, you are right that there’s a level of pretense in that you think it’s the ankles but really it’s not about the ankles. It’s about something else. And that thing is being kept hidden from your view but we ought to be able to theorize that thing even if – once we’ve theorized it, that doesn’t mean we are going to be able to choose who fall in love with based on this property, right? But I think that the reason why it’s important to recognize the symbolic character is that it actually puts pressure on original paradox. Our original paradox which we still haven’t solved is that each person’s erotic desire is fundamentally a desire about wanting to be wanted. And if everyone just wants to be wanted then nobody wants anybody else. Everyone just wants the wanting to come to them. So wanting to be wanted is egocentric or selfish. And so it looks like there should be no matches between people if this were true. We could imagine maybe it’s not true and everyone has like two desires. They have – they wanted to be wanted and they also want other people and then we sort of match up by each person gets the satisfaction of their desire to be wanted from the other person’s wanting and vice versa. That will be a system that worked. But then we have to posit that there’s that additional erotic desire, the wanting that’s separate from the wanting to be wanted. And I suspect there maybe there is. But maybe there’s just the wanting to be wanted and then we get the problem.

Robin:

Well, there is a wanting to be wanted by qualified wanters. Right. So …

Agnes:

Sure.

Robin:

So that’s definitely part of the structure.

Agnes:

But none of the – nothing we add there is relevant to the paradox. That is, it doesn’t matter why you want to be wanted, who you want to be wanted by. If what you want is to be wanted then you’re not going to match with anyone else who also what they want is to be wanted. Unless we have the one scenario that was ruled up by your poll which is that the way in which you want to be wanted is by another person’s wanting to be wanted then you’d get a match.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

Right. And so, I’m willing to posit that in fact, people aren’t being very honest there. That in fact, they do accept that somebody else wants them primarily because of their ability to be wanting. But what they tell themselves truthfully is yes, but this is a person with these other features who wants me for wanting them and I am sort of happy with the fact that I didn’t just get anybody to want me to want them. That I got somebody who had had these features I wanted that makes them especially desirable.

Agnes:

So I think that I interpret this – the features as having a slightly different psychological bearing on the person than you do. So you are saying, somehow they use the features to convince themselves that they are being selective and then that seems OK and so they can maintain their pride or something. And I think that the features symbolize some kind of a match between my wanting to be wanted and your wanting to be wanted. And in some way, they distract us from the underlying paradox that we are in a situation where we shouldn’t match. And so, we – it’s not so much – it’s like these desires can’t match in reality. That it seems like they can only match in like some kind of symbol space.

Robin:

Well, I mean what – I’m not sure how them being a symbol of something else helps unless there’s some forgiveness in the degree of matching. That is, if we had an ideal relationship that was fully fleshed out in full detail and we were going to say the symbol is a symbol that we achieved that ideal thing then it’s going to be a problem because we don’t have that ideal thing. So there has to be a sense in which the symbol is forgiving, that once we have something in the direction of right sort of symbols, we are going to be more forgiving about whatever it is we end up with.

Agnes:

Yeah. So like I guess my thought is that there are other phenomena of this kind where we have to have an interaction. We want to know things about each other that are very difficult to know. And so, we have like a practice that symbolizes or having that knowledge. And then because it’s sort of we are not solving the problem, we are sort of managing the problem, we have to keep doing the practice over and over again. And you might think that’s part of what a ritual is. It’s a kind of bad solution to a problem that you have to keep repeating. And so like if you say, “Suppose we want to know we trust each other and that we both understand the deal that we have just made in exactly the same terms and we both know that we are going to follow through and we know that the other person knows that we are going to follow through and like out to infinity, right?” and so we shake hands. And the shaking of the hands sort of symbolizes that we have this knowledge. I know that you know that I know that you know that I know that you know that we are both going to follow through, etc. Right? Now, does the shaking of the hands actually mean we have enough? No, it’s just handshaking, right? It’s just a symbol. But we do have this kind of gesture or language that makes it possible for us to like somehow perform this shared knowledge. And I think we have a kind of gesture or language that helps us perform the I want you to want me and I want you to want me to want you and etc. And we have certain symbols of properties or people that you are allowed to fasten on to and also have symbolic activities like sex that are supposed to express that mutual wanting.

Robin:

Good. So this – we can integrate this with other sorts of social framings which might be thought of more in terms of social construction or convention and we can explore how much they are the same thing as the kind of symbolism you are thinking of. So if we think about the shaking of hands for a contract, say, we could think – in the terms you are describing, we can say, “Well, a contract is some set of expectations that I will do something and you will do something and I expect you to expect me to do it, etc.” And each of these expectations could be wrong and it’s very complicated so we would have to do a lot of research on each other to figure out when the other person thinks another person might not do something and so they might not do it and all those sorts of complicated thing. Or you might …

Agnes:

An infinity amount of research.

Robin:

Right. Exactly.

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

Right. Or you could say that we create this convention of a contract and we have certain sort of ways in which a contract is declared to have happened and then we have various social norms about how you are supposed to act in the context of a contract such as those norms will encourage you to not break the contract too easily. And so, we replace the reasoning about meta levels of who believes what about who, etc., with a social construct which we reified through a ritual. That is, we say that a certain kind of behavior is treated as us having done a thing that creates a certain kind of social situation where we now are supposed to treat it a certain way. And the shaking hand that’s a contract and then the romantic case, you say we have a relation of a certain type. And so then the work is being done by a society who has a menu of kinds of relations. And then when you grow up, you’re supposed to learn the menu. And now, there are different actions that indicate which kind of relation you’re in and now, you’re supposed to be watching carefully to see which actions are taken so you can say, “Aha! We are now boyfriend/girlfriend.” Or now whatever it is because it’s a complicated world and you’re trying to interpret that. And that all makes sense except that in some more past more traditional worlds, there was a relatively limited menu of relationships. There’s a relatively clear sort of translation guide book to tell you which kind of relations corresponded to which kinds of actions. And then in the modern world, we are proud of ourselves for allowing just a flowering of a much wider space of relations which then is going to have to put us at a disadvantage in figuring out what the other person thinks about our relation because we aren’t just shaking hands and doing the standard thing. We are – there are maybe dozens or thousands of different possible things we could be creating here.

Agnes:

Right. So I think that in the case of let’s say contracts, there are variety of relatively well-known rituals that symbolize like you could be signing your name or shaking hands or smoking a pipe together or in what is it? In Tom Sawyer, it’s like blood brothers, like they each prick their fingers.

Robin:

Right. Right.

Agnes:

Right. And so that’s variety, right?

Robin:

But those aren’t necessary indicating different relationships. That is, each of those rituals could pretty much produce the same kind of relationship.

Agnes:

I mean I think they don’t in practice. Like being blood brothers for Huck and Tom isn’t quite different than smoking a piece of pipe with someone or signing a contract or a handshake or business deal. Those all seem like different relations. I think that it’s more like – I would sort of say the problem in the romantic case is we have – there’s sort of one ritual that is – and so if we think of these – each of these as different languages and they are culturally-specific languages for expressing this content where if you try to express it by way of propositions like, “I trust that you trust that I trust that you trust,” we would not get anywhere so we want to express it like non-propositionally. And so, we do with the handshake. And so if you think about what we are trying to express in the erotic case, I want you to want me, I want you to want me to want you, I want you to want me to want you to want, etc., ad infinitum, I think there is one kind of lone ritual that we’ve all converged upon that expresses that, which is sex. To say that one lone ritual is not …

Robin:

It’s an especially highlighted important one. There are others of course.

Agnes:

There absolutely are others. I just mean the degree of convergence is surprising.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

Right? And to say that is a little bit misleading because of course sex itself can happen in a pretty big variety of different ways and if you consider homosexual sex and then just like multiple partners, there are just a lot of variety within sex, right? So to say sex is a ritual that we’ve all converged on, that’s still just saying there’s a big variety within the ritual. Still, I think we kind of – there’s this kind of interesting fact which is that we sort of keep trying to innovate new rituals as a romantic ritual and then – or the erotic ritual. You could think of romanticism, the whole romantic movement as like let’s have this new arena for eroticism that’s going to be more about emotion and passion and not just about sex. And I feel like it’s a little harder to get a kind of stable and shared language of eroticism or the signal of wanting to be wanted outside of sex. And to me, that itself is kind of interesting.

Robin:

So what I recall from some evolutionary psychology literatures is they often distinguish three key stages of relationships where they talk about limerence, lust, and attachment and that these are separate sort of stages because they are separate kinds of attraction. And you might think they have somewhat separate rituals of things that show that we are in that kind of relationship. And so, that seems at least one kind of complexity to add here that now you can have various mixtures of these things and you can be doing things that symbolize this. Now, I would – you said we couldn’t express in language the sort of all the meta levels. I think in fact, there is a formal way to do that in the world of say, common knowledge and common belief, we actually have simple finite statements that represent all these meta levels at once. But – so what we might say is, we have common belief that and that could just be true. But there is a sort of element of social construction even so where say, by saying we have common belief that if you don’t contradict me then we now get to believe that we have common belief. But that’s the nature of language. Language can be – language can create things by saying things. Language can be performative and there are ways to do that. But still, language isn’t the only way. In many ways of course, we often want what are costly signals, instead of cheap signals, we want – when you make an important thing through a symbolic act, we want it to be somewhat expensive so that it’s not too easy to do so that we can be more assured that you are really meant it.

Agnes:

I think to give a costly signal is like not so helpful here. That is, I think that – because I think that a signal could be incredibly costly but it’s the wrong kind of cost and then it would not serve the relevant function. So I think it matters to us that the person be engaging, really engaging in the ritual and not just fake engaging in it or something. But they could be faked engaging in it for all sorts of reasons and they could be paying high cost to do so. And we still wouldn’t – like someone could be willing to pay like a massive amount of money to have sex with you, right? And like that is a very costly signal.

Robin:

Right. But that’s not enough. Obviously, we want to …

Agnes:

But it’s not eroticism and actually engaging in the erotic activity might be cheaper and something that might be cheaper. So I don’t think that we want the signals to be costly. I think it’s that we want them to be conveyed in a specific way. And I think that like in the case of common belief, it’s like, “You’re right. Of course, I could just say, let expression acts denote this infinite series.” We can do that with language. But I actually – I think that we want to separate that kind of stipulative power of language with – there’s also a ritual function of language. Of course, words have power and there are certain words that have more power, right? And so sometimes, actually it is by those things like when people say vows or something. It’s like the saying of the vow has a certain kind of ritual force that you couldn’t get if you didn’t actually like have to say them out loud and hear them and be next to the person and all that. So – and it’s in that second case, like if I just say we have common belief, it doesn’t do anything. It doesn’t give you the common belief if I say that. Right? But there are maybe certain words we can go through where I say the words and you say the words and now, we have a feeling of common belief. And I think that it’s interesting to think how general is this as a theory of social construction. That is, I did a bunch of Twitter polls a few months ago that revealed that none of us really know what social construction means. This will be a potential gloss on it, though I don’t that it generalizes, which is that there are certain problems that we have to solve where we are trying to coordinate being in the same mental state at other people and we don’t have direct communicative ways to do this. That is, we can’t do it by way of a straightforward propositional exchange. We have to do it in a symbolic medium. And that’s what we are calling social construction is the use of a symbolic medium to solve a coordination problem that can’t be solved by language directly.

Robin:

So I’d like us to think about and highlight an issue that comes up with this sort of social construction. So, often in many kinds of interactions including especially in romance, we often have say, a standard conflict like in say, Romeo and Juliet, between a menu of relationships available as interpreted by the society and some approved by the society. And then the characters involved are rejecting the menu and saying that, “No, I want this.” And even substantially at odds with this sort of social construction scenario. So if you might think it was just about as I might have said, the pretense of having desires and knowing what they are but not really knowing and then accepting some standard social structure that appeared then you would see less of these perhaps or is this just a way that we can extend the pretense and pretend like we are defying society because we enjoy these stories where one pretends to defy the social conventions about what sort of relationships you should find acceptable.

Agnes:

No. I think it’s a really good point. It’s a good objection to the view that so to speak sex is a social construction. I think it’s true that it is. But there’s a difference between the sex and the handshake, which is that the handshake and with many other social rituals, it seems like we are just totally happy for there to be a ritual and a ritualized form of the expression. And unless something is really going wrong, we sort of stick with it and we are fine. And in the romantic realm, like there’s constant sort of skepticism of like, “But does he really love me? Does she really want me?” I heard a line the pop song, “I need to know you’re thinking of me.” Right? Imagine how insane that would be to say to your co-worker, to your friend.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Even to your mom, right? Like I need to know you’re thinking of me. I don’t need to know my best friend is thinking of me. She doesn’t think about me for a whole month, that’s fine with me, right? But somehow, we need to know that our romantic partners are thinking of us. We have to occupy their mental real estate, right? And that suggests the presence of a kind of anxiety where it’s almost like we are just very aware of the underlying problem. Do you really want me? We are so aware of it that we are dissatisfied with the ritual as a solution to it and there’s a kind of restlessness and constant innovation and always running to up the ante, right? I mean women are famous for this in terms of they are always wanting the relationship to progress to another level, right? You can only – maybe at the next level, you are going to prove that you really want me. I need to see commitment from you. Now, I need to see that you – I’m kind of pushing, I’m pushing on the edge because the ritual and the repetition of the ritual doesn’t satisfy me.

Robin:

So there’s a another whole literature about these things that I think has a lot of truth, which thinks that these things in some sort of relatively simple an evolutionary psychology story or just a story of conflict wherein, if you are in a world where cheating is possible and common, now, people are worried about looking for signs of that and they want people to sort of show them in some various signals including costly signals that they are not inclined to that or that’s not happening. And so even though people are matched, they are worried that the match would not stay and that someone will betray them or leave them. And so, we could then understand a lot of this costly maintenance in terms of this continuous costly possibility of betrayal. So we could think of an analogy say in a legislature where you’re trying to put together a coalition to support a bill and until the vote actually comes up, people will say they support you but they might switch if somebody else offers a better deal. And so then there is – in that environment, a lot of constant maintaining of relationships like are they still talking to me every day? Maybe if they are not talking with me today, maybe they left to another coalition. And apparently there’s a lot of continual reassurance of that you’re still in the same team and you’re still seeing things eye to eye. And that’s also true in office politics, I understand. In a context where alliances or coalitions can be fluid, people will be demanding more constant reaffirmation of relationships and loyalties.

Agnes:

That pushes the question to the next level which is, why is there this – why is there even just a thing as cheating? So you could have imagined that our ancestors were all just like they’re in some group, they also have some sex with each other. Sometimes there are kids and they all just take care of the kids. And instead we have this idea of like, “No, no, no. I own this one and this one has to take care of my kids here.” And so the very – in the context of friendship, even of parenting, that parent relation to child and of work, we just don’t tend to demand exclusivity. And maybe the demand for exclusivity shows up when there is a situation of warfare like – so if it’s like – supposed in the office politics, suppose there’s an office that’s divided into two groups that hate each other, then maybe I need to know that you are not in the other group. I need to know you are thinking about our group.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right? But I wouldn’t say, “Well, you’re only allowed to have lunch with me in the office and not …” I mean that would be like inappropriate. But I would say, “You are not allowed to have lunch with any of the other team.”

Robin:

You have to have lunch with our team to show us that you’re still on our team because if you keep having lunch with both teams and telling both teams you are on their side, both teams might be a little suspicious of your loyalty.

Agnes:

Right. But in the erotic context, we have like one person – a one—person team. That is a two-person team but you said, to join our team is to join me.

Robin:

I mean first of all, we have a vast literature on other nonhuman animals and when they do child-rearing, it tends to be on small groups and so then there is the very real issue of the risk of investing in a child that isn’t yours and that’s – there’s a standard large literature on how animals spend a lot of energy to monitor to prevent that and how that’s a substantial loss for them. And humans hunt gatherer groups, in fact, there is a lot more sharing. But in the first few years of a baby, the caring does predominantly come from that baby’s parents so it’s not a full sharing scenario. So it seems like all the usual biological reasons are there to expect humans as well as other animals to have some reason to want to exclusivity, at least some degree of exclusivity at least so that people can match their investments to the gains. They aren’t – they don’t just uniformly take care of all kids without any distinction and then invest in that. It’s not actually what happens.

Agnes:

OK. You could imagine a situation where you would be inclined to take care of the kids like in proportion to how often you had sex with the person. So like if you had sex with like two people and then they both have kids, you would take care of both but like to a lesser degree than if you had just have sex with one of them.

Robin:

That would make sense if that was the only information you had about whose kid was whose, but in fact, you do tend to get more information than that, a modest amount.

Agnes:

I mean in a society where the women are, if they are having sex with multiple men, you wouldn’t really get much more information than that. Eventually, the kind might look like you.

Robin:

Yeah. And that’s what I was thinking, that you would have similarities between the child and the parents, you’d also have timing information. But I mean again, the key point is just that we have this vast literature about animals and humans aren’t that different from other animals so it seems very plausible that humans have a substantial element of this, explaining a substantial element. But then you might say, “Well, romantic relationships aren’t only about parenting.” And so you might expect other aspects to have other influences to weaken perhaps the exclusivity pressure but there would still be some.

Agnes:

I mean I think there is something right about the thought that the romantic or erotic aspect, the I want you to want me thing, really is focused on the onset of the relationship more than like in a – like a I saw a thing in the New York Times over the summer – maybe it was like four, five months ago, and it was this couple that was in their 80s and they have sex – it was about how they have sex every day. And that was in the New York Times so obviously …

Robin:

Unusual.

Agnes:

… that’s really weird or unusual otherwise, you wouldn’t have – it wouldn’t be news, right? If there was like a couple in their 20s and they had sex every day, that would not be in the news. So clearly, there is this erotic structure, has like – seems to have a kind of place where it then bleeds into something like attachment and becomes more of a bond, like of a family bond, family friendship, whatever type bond. One interesting feature of our society I think and this is related to the thing you meant about the variety of relationships is that we seem to not really want to accept that. Like there’s all this stuff about keeping the spice in your marriage and how to reawaken your whatever. Like as though we wanted to be in perpetual eroticism. We think sex is really important and we think eroticism is really important and we wanted to like keep a role in people – we have New York Times articles about couple that are having sex in their 80s.

Robin:

But this is part of our culture’s ideals which we have to realize like other societies had different ideals. I mean I always find it fascinating to hear that, I mean you might know, more ancient societies often – they had – they knew that sort of romance happened and passions happened and they had a role for marriage and raising children but they were often wary of people falling head over heels in love and that disrupting the rest of their life and they might, if you said, “I’ve fallen in love,” they might say, “I’m so sorry,” because they had a more story that this tends to go badly. And so, is that not true or …?

Agnes:

It is true but I think it’s in very romantically-intense cultures that they have that story. That is the story of it as tending to go badly tends to also be in cultures where there’s a lot of value on – I’ll give you – if you read like Maugham's Of Human Bondage, that’s like a story of like love gone terribly wrong or Proust. But these are in cultures where there’s a lot of value being placed on the erotic relation. In Ancient Greece, Socrates of Athens, there was this – one of the paradigms of eroticism was older men and younger men having these sort of quasi or somewhat regulated erotic relationships and there definitely were stories about it going wrong and ruining people’s lives. But it was also seen as potentially like having this kind of educative value. Obviously, that’s going to be totally different from reproduction.

Robin:

So let me revise and say that it seems that different from other societies, our society often puts these as some of our highest ideals so that other things should be sacrificed for them, whereas other societies saw this as one of many things that were nice and could have benefits but to be traded off against other things that are more in equal basis. You didn’t sacrifice everything for love, whereas, that’s often a sort of stereotypic celebrated attitude is that once you finally find your true love at whatever point in life, whatever, however you have to sacrifice, you have to move to another country, throw your career, never see your children again, whatever it takes. True love is the highest goal, right? And we do sometimes talk in those terms and nod approvingly at movies, etc., that celebrate them and it’s worth pausing and wondering whether we are right to do that.

Agnes:

I mean I guess I’m not sure what you mean that we – if we go to – you can go to the 18th century and hear stories of something like The Sufferings of Young Werther, but that’s kind of the height of romanticism. That’s a long time ago.

Robin:

Well, but I still think that’s in the last few centuries in our sort of culture. But you might think of say, celebrating homosexuality or transgender as sort of invoking this larger norm that these are people in love and if that’s what they love, who should say otherwise? That part of it – sort of the part of the main emotional strength of their pitch is the appeal to our ideals of romantic priorities.

Agnes:

I don’t think that’s true about transgender. That is, I don’t think it has so much to do with sexuality. I mean I might be wrong. But the transgender people I’ve talked to have said, “No, it’s really not about sexuality. It’s about gender.” And I think that that reveals a distinctive preoccupation of our time like really by contrast with a more romantic time where the preoccupation was more with romance. Mainly, a preoccupation with identity categories, right? So it’s like whether you are a man or a woman and that’s an identity category, you have a lot invested in it and then you could be misidentified by your group and then that could be really traumatic for you. And …

Robin:

But I mean, part of the main reasons we care about these identity categories is who can be loved by who?

Agnes:

Right. So I guess I do meant it’s part of the reason but like I think there’s just a lot more to it. I mean like I think that it’s well-known fact that like women dress up for other women because the women are the ones who are going to notice what you’re wearing and men tend to be more oblivious. Right? And so in some ways, women are performing femininity at least in part for other women, not for the men choosing them. And so that performance has some kind of independent importance beyond mating it seems like.

Robin:

If we expand – I mean we could say that the set of identity and mating is near a peak of our sacred categories, that is we prioritize those above others in ways that other societies didn’t. So whether not distinguishing so much within that set but – and we can include the last few centuries but there was somewhat of a romantic revolution in the last thousands years certainly to make a higher priority on romance. And we approve of sacrificing an awful lot for it. That is, so if we think about allowing divorce, allowing polyamory, less punishment for adultery, just a whole wide range of policies, the main justification has been something like the heart wants what the heart wants and that’s just really important and other things should sacrifice to it.

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean it’s interesting because you – I don’t know how to put this – it’s like there’s a weird way in which the accommodation of sexuality just systematically makes things less sexy. So it’s like there is something kind of unsexy about just like casual sex like, “This doesn’t mean anything. No strings attached. I just want to have sex and it doesn’t matter.” Where if the idea, the sort of function of sex is to be this language that conveys this symbolic meaning of we want each other, and then as we like release all the regulations around it, it maybe that sort of perversely, it sort of becomes – like if you imagine being gay before the last 50 years and really giving up all these sacrifices in order to be with the person you love and maybe even being killed for it or something, that’s so romantic, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Whereas now, it’s like, OK, people can be just like the rest of us and we are all free and there’s something kind of flat about that. And so like you could say, it’s like, “Yes, because we value eroticism so much.” Or you could say, “It’s because we are somehow hell-bent on sapping the ritual of all that’s erotic force and just de-eroticizing our world completely.”

Robin:

So I think you’re right that I hadn’t thought about it so much before, recently, at least, but there’s a bit of a paradox of when you have something that’s very sacred and therefore you prioritize it, you increase the quantity of it and then you will make the marginal value go down. So an analogy might be say, religion. So imagine there’s a person on the mountaintop, a religious figure on the mountaintop, and in order to go get some religious advice from this person, you’ll have to climb the mountain you see and go to a whole another country and go up. It’s very rare event. And then you finally get to the top. And now, whatever they tell you will be a precious thing that you got at great expense and then you can really put this as a high thing in your mind like you could spend years getting ready for it and remember it for years afterwards. And if that same person that just like has a website or an 800 number and you could call them at any time, in some sense, you could justify that by saying, “Well, this is so important. We need to make sure it’s available for more people and more times.” But then when it’s so available, each interaction would not actually be valued that much. And you could think similarly about maybe the most romantic stories might be of a very repressive society where it was very hard for two people to meet and they had to go through great troubles to meet and then they finally even got together and saw each other’s ankles and it was just so great.

Agnes:

Yeah, exactly. Like at that moment where they see each other’s ankles like they really know that they want each other in a way where it’s almost like that kind of forceful certainty of knowing is being slowly just withdrawn from you made more and more difficult as we ease up. I mean it might – you could think of the analogy though with handshakes, right? Like suppose that in order to make a deal, at one point in time, you had to get people to like prick their fingers blood and pinch blood and then they are like “Deals are actually so important to us that we are going to make it easier to make deals. We are going to say you have to do a handshake.” And then deals become so important that we are like, “We don’t even have to do the handshake.” It’s like have you actually shown that you really super value deals by making it progressively easier and less ritualistic to do the deals? It’s not clear that that’s what you’ve done. It sort of seems like you’ve done the opposite.

Robin:

If you recall from The Lord of the Rings movie where Saruman had his human loyalists cut their hands with a knife to show their – they are going to swear while they are cutting their hands with a knife on their – that’s even not just pinprick but a full knife cut.

Agnes:

Right. And like there are different aspects of that kind of ritual that we could assess and you are focusing on – like that’s a way costlier signal if you have to cut your whole hand across rather than just prick your finger. I mean once you know about how easy it is to transfer disease and so pricking your finger, that does actually seem like kind of a high cost to do but they sort of – for a lot large history, they didn’t know that so they didn’t realize how a high cost it was.

Robin:

I wonder if – we are university professors and I wonder if the sacredness of education and learning is somewhat degraded by how easily we’ve made it available. Maybe the fact that we let all the journal articles just be online and anybody can look them up, they don’t have to like trek off to a university and get a pass to the library, figure out the coding system, and be there in the back room at night when nobody is watching in order to read these precious articles. It might have at one time, maybe in our youth, given us a higher sense of it all.

Agnes:

Yes, but I think we should not allow ourselves to digress onto the sacred generally. I think we should go back to eroticism because we have like maybe less than 10 minutes within our hour. And so, I still think there’s something interesting about the erotic in the way in which it somehow resists containment by ritual. And maybe one way to think about that is that there’s a kind of – there’s always a kind of – either a kind of escalation or how much is going to be called for in order for you to prove that you really want me or just that it’s always going to sit at the edge of what society accepts so that the cost – in effect, the cost you are paying is like social sanctions. So like you prove that you really love by defying your parents. Where you might say, “Why don’t we just have a comfortable little ritual that we all do whatever like it’s like shaking hands?” because sex isn’t that. I mean sex is very weird and it’s very heterogenous, and it can go badly. Shaking hands never goes badly. No one ever walks away from shaking hands, I mean very rarely let’s just say. The sex often does go badly especially between two people who don’t know each other well and in fact also, between people who know each other. So it looks like we can say and I’ve been saying it and I think it’s true that sex is ritual but it’s a funny ritual where it seems like we are always sort of probing it for is it really giving us the information that we wanted? And that just seems a bit distinctive of eroticism is that we are testing all these social customs and these social forms of sort of constructing knowledge, as if knowledge. And in the space of the erotic, we are testing all of those things.

Robin:

Let me make a comparison to art, like apparently like 500 years ago or longer, the best sculptors, the best musicians, the best painters would paint would do their art in a style very similar to the other best. And so, they sort of – they weren’t distinctive so much as artists but the very best was very distinctive as being better than the rest. And then in the last few centuries, we switched to where the best artists each have a very individual personal style which is what makes them most celebrated and famous. And so, the best artist doesn’t do their art like the other best artists. They do it especially distinctly. And you might say that that’s now true in these kind of relationships, that is we maybe once upon a time, the appropriate way to do those things was just like you the way everybody else did it and if you did the way everybody else did it, you’d be great and maybe we want now in the individual distinctive performance to show somebody that you are part of a distinctive unique relationship and prove that you aren’t interchangeable with others and that you won’t interchange.

Agnes:

I mean that could be an innovation. But like if I’m just thinking about Plato’s Symposium and the speeches on erotic love there, that’s a long time ago.

Robin:

So maybe there always was the sort of thing that we need to do unique, right? So maybe long ago, there were some of kind of things to do the best, you did them the best as the other best. And for other special kinds of things, you did them best by doing them uniquely. And we’ve decided that that’s the thing for everything more now. I mean there are many kinds of professionals like lawyers or something or accounts, right? The best accountant isn’t the accountant who does it in the most unique way. We want accountants to do them in a pretty standard way and certainly, even for lawyers. But for an increasing range of artistic things including maybe starting from this, we want them to be unique.

Agnes:

Right. And so, like I feel like maybe we could say that the kind of striving for uniqueness, it seems to go with the dissatisfaction of ritual or dissatisfaction of this is just how we all do it.

Robin:

It’s never good enough when you need to – when you are trying to be unique, it’s never good enough because somebody else could be unique in a different even more striking way.

Agnes:

But if you want to know why break away from the standard way to the – you and I talked about on a different podcast like professors used to dress a certain way and their offices used to be decorated a certain way like reliably, right? And then now, people like you and me, maybe we dress a little bit and maybe our offices aren’t decorated in the standard way. So it’s like they’re used to be let’s say, more of a ritual of what it is to look and talk like a professor and what it is for the professor’s office to how the professor’s office is supposed to look. And we seem dissatisfied with that ritual. Then the question is, well, what do you do if you don’t do the ritual? And it seems like you’re sort of forced into innovating with like, “Here’s my particular – my own particular way of brand, way of doing it.” But what’s interesting is just to go back or eroticism is that eroticism is like the origin of all.

Robin:

Yes, might be.

Agnes:

It’s a place, right? It seems like it’s the place where this kind of dissatisfaction with the social construction, there is a social construction but there’s a dissatisfaction with it too is most at home where the kind of testing, is this really happening? That testing is very natural to it.

Robin:

So I’ve always been puzzled about why romance seems playful. So the basic concept of play is of a safe space where you can practice where the consequences are lower. But you will stop playing as soon as the consequences get high. And then you go to say, romance, and the consequences are high but we still tend to think of it as a playful thing and have sort of playful norms there. But you might think, well, it’s because we are supposed to have this unique, playful personal construction that we need to invoke the play norms there that the whole point is yeah, on the outside world, I’m a soldier and you’re a mother and a teacher or whatever and we are all taking very standard roles in the outside but inside our little romantic – private romantic sphere, we are playing and part of what we are playing is to just be spontaneous and unique and create our own unique style of personal play.

Agnes:

Yeah. And you could see it in a – look, I think I’m getting this idea from you but maybe you would not avow it in this form. You could see it as like if you think of worth between two groups as sort of like the test of like how well have they been doing to make an army or something? And that like the knowledge that you could be taken over by another group is going to put pressure on you to grow, to be of a certain size so that you can have your army so you can win these battles. That like in a certain way, war is a kind of like a reality check or something on your society, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That that’s an idea I got from you. That the erotic is similar but like at the very inside of it. It’s like yeah, we go through all – we pretend we have all these roles, we have these like this way we do things to reassure one another, we shake hands.” But then at the very inside, there’s just this real part, this part where we are not going to allow ourselves to just like go through the motions. And people do say, like all is fair in love and war, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

In war, you’re just going to do what it takes to win. There’s a kind of a brutalism effect. Right?

Robin:

Right. And so, you might think of that as the – in the competition, your partner actually could leave you and all you really have to do to convince them not to is to be as entertaining and engaging or irresistible as you can and therefore …

Agnes:

Right. Competition. That was the word I was thinking of.

Robin:

Yes.

Agnes:

So these are two spaces of kind of radical competition. OK. We should probably stop there.

Robin:

We should. All right. Nice talking.