From Wellness by Nathan Hill loc 1689:
He says new couples employ basically the same tactics that cults do—they reinforce a collective identity via shared rituals, insider vocabulary, a sense of superiority over the whole outside world—but lack a true cult’s impulse to recruit and brainwash followers.
I know it’s intended as satire. And yet… From Alexandra Stein’s Terror, Love and Brainwashing: Attachment in Cults and Totalitarian Systems loc 1126:
That is, it may involve many cycles of the basic dynamic that includes a progressively more isolating environment, establishing the group as the main (and eventually only) reference point for the individual, and generating levels of fear or stress arousal that cause the person to keep turning toward the group for support.
See also the Lacanian distinction between love and romance: “The soul mate is the commodity in the form of the subject’s complement… the promise of the soul mate is the promise of completion, an object that would complement the lacking subject perfectly and thereby ameliorate its lack” (pg 192). Therein lies the cultic dimension to new couples described above (which I suspect Hill is seriously proposing, given it’s presented in one of the awkward social scientific interludes of clunky exposition which intersperse his otherwise elegant pose). Building a shared identity on the fantasy of filling the void from which the desire to build a shared identity emerged from in the first place.
It’s self-negating at the level of the real which is why it’s so inflationary at the level of the imaginary, until eventually the internal contradictions come to exercise an inevitably destructive weight. The imagined thing crushes the practice which sustains it, or at least creates a perpetual challenge of negotiating its immense weight. Or the imaginary diffuses into the mundane challenge of the practice, collapsing the tension between banal object and desired object, upon which Zupančič argues love depends: to love means to find oneself with a ridiculous object. From The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two by Alenka Zupančič pg 174-175:
To love – that is to say (according to the good old traditional definition), to love someone “for what he is” (i.e. to move directly to the Thing) – always means to find oneself with a “ridiculous object,” an object that sweats, snores, farts, and has strange habits. But it also means to coninue to see in this object the “something more” ….. To love means to perceive this gap or discrepancy, and not so much to be able to laugh at it as to have an irresistible urge to laugh at it. The miracle of love is a funny miracle.
Real love – if I may risk this expression – is not the love that is called sublime, the love in which we let ourselves be completely dazzled or “blinded” by the object so that we no longer see (or can’t bear to see) its ridiculous, banal aspect. This kind of “sublime love” necessitates and generates a radical inaccessibility of the other (which usually takes the form of eternal preliminaries, or the form of an intermittent relationship that enables us to reintroduce the distance that suits the inaccessible, and thereby to “reusblimate” the object after each “use”). But neither is real love the sum of desire and friendship, where friendship is supposed to provide a “bridge” between two awakenings of desire, and to embrace the ridiculous side of the object.
The point is not that, in order for love to “work,” one has to accept the other with all her baggage, to “stand” her banal aspect, to forgive her weakness – in short to tolerate the other when one does not desire her. The true miracle of love – and this is what links love to comedy – consists in preserving the transcendence in the very accessibility of the other.
Well, I have lost my eyesight like I said I would
But I still know
That it's you in front of me
Coming back for even more of exactly the same
Well are you a masochist?
To love a modern leper on his last leg
But you're not ill and I'm not dead
Doesn't that make us the perfect pair?
Just sit with me, we'll start again
And you can tell me all about what you did today
What you did today
From Bruce Fink’s Lacan on Love loc 1,334 to 1,349
The lover, on the other hand, gives what he does not have: in a matter of speaking, he gives his lack of something, something he would be hard-pressed to account for or explain, for he does not know what he is missing (Lacan, 2015, pp. 39–40). He feels a lack or emptiness within himself, and a yearning for something to fill the hollow, to make up for his sense that he is missing something – this is the lack or gap from which desire springs [….] Now this lack is precious to us. What we gave up defines us, we feel. It goes to the heart of our perceived individuality, to the core of our “subjective difference” – that is, to the core of what makes us different from everyone else. Thus, it is not with just anyone we meet that we are willing to say that he or she has something that corresponds to the lack in us! We may be protective, not wishing to show we feel lacking in any way, that we need anybody, that we are castrated. We may prefer to shroud ourselves in an aura of sublime indifference, and in certain cases that may get us loved by others, but it has nothing to do with we ourselves loving someone else. To love someone else is to convey in words to that person that we lack – preferably big time – and that he or she is intimately related to that lack.
Mark Carrigan 