Beauvoir and the Ethics of Love

2022-10-10 · philosophy

Relationships can be tricky. Many spend their days dreaming about finally meeting that so-and-so who will justify their existence and fill that hole in their heart.

Most of our media is characterized by the romantic pursuit, portraying love as a battleground of risk, hope, and making someone your everything. Much of our free time is filled up with swiping on dating apps, going out, and talking about our romantic interests, all in the openly, cynical, and, yet privately hopeful possibility of finding love.

And then, once you're in, it, at least fifty percent of the time, becomes an uneven affair of hurt feelings and missed expectations.

You engage in the desperate mental gymnastics of someone trying in their earnest to find a reason to stay to somehow turn a blind eye to the possibility that this just isn't working out.

Simone de Beauvoir, the famous existentialist author, wrote extensively about the asymmetrical expectations that characterize many relationships. She believed love to be an inherent component of the human condition. We wish to be with another, to be heard, to be affirmed in who we are, and yet, time and time again, this very desire leads us astray into relationships that scar us and make us forget who we truly are. For Beauvoir, this common occurrence only further justifies the necessity of a sort of Ethics of Love, a project she would pursue throughout her life. To defy the view that love would fulfill the ontological motive of belonging to something more significant.