Thoughts on Feelings

While I wait for ever-delayed comics, I'd like to talk a bit about something that is at best pretty tangentially related to MLP (and I won't insult you by pretending that the details of such a justification are in any way relevant): it annoys me when people say "That's not love" to dismiss a dysfunctional relationship. It's overly reductive and it obscures the actual problems.

In Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (and I apologize in advance for everything I leave out from the bit I'm about to summarize; you should really just buy the book) Angela Chen talks briefly about the slogan "Rape is not sex, it's violence." It's a well-intentioned anti-rape statement, of course, and certainly we can all agree that we should be against rape, but that slogan lives in a world where rape is bad, sex is good, and there's a nice solid wall between them. It lives in a world where consent is either enthusiastic or absent.

We don't live in that world. In our world, consent is sometimes complicated; people may give consent out of a sense of duty, or because they're not thinking straight, or because they just want the other person to stop asking, or for a million other questionable but not forcible reasons. In our world, people sometimes do things of their own free will that they don't feel good about doing. And if rape is bad and sex is good and it wasn't rape then that means that it must have been good and there can be no problems to address. If we can't acknowledge bad sex as bad sex then we can't acknowledge questionable sex either, let alone consider solutions. (And of course that's not even getting into the other not-as-problematic exclusions like consensually violent sex or sex that is thoroughly consensual but poorly executed and unpleasant.)

We run into exactly the same sort of problem when we simply call a bad relationship "not love." Love is a widely varied thing—enough so that people normally avoid any attempt to define even any given subset of it and dance around the issue that those few who can come up with a definition tend to disagree—and that includes good parts, bad parts, and all difficult-to-classify parts in between. Simply dismissing the bad parts as "not love" again renders us unable to talk about any of the complexities and what we should do about them. And this is even more of an issue for love, because while sexual encounters are of relatively short duration and tend to admit analysis as a whole, love can last for years or decades and change enough to render all but the most banal of overall statements untrue, and that change is probably the most important complexity that we can't consider from a binary perspective. After all, what question could be more important than the question of why good love turns into bad love and how to prevent it? But if love is good and "not love" is bad then all we can ever say is that things must have been great until the love abruptly vanished and then things must have become terrible.