I haven’t written here on my assigned day of the week because I’ve been out of town (and will be more than not until the last week of August).
Today I was teaching my class at NYU in romantic love and its history and literature. I posed a question to the students: is romantic love caring or selfish? We batted that around, and as usual, I heard that if you love someone, romantically or otherwise, you want them to be happy. So I followed that with a hypothetical: suppose you love A but A loves B (or leaves you for B), do you want A to be happy with B because you love him or her? Everyone replied yes — as with any other kind of love, including friendship, you want that person’s happiness more than your own. Some said they would be upset but could separate that from wanting the best for the hypothetical beloved. The talk then turned to friendship: if your friend got a job you wanted even though she is less qualified than you are, would you be happy for her? Again, everyone said yes, they could separate the feelings out. I usually keep my own feelings out of these discussions, but I had to admit my answer would not be the same. They were shocked. I told them it just means I’m not as nice as they are. But of course I wonder if they really would feel as they claim.
Another interesting topic that came up (after reading Stendhal, who claims in his On Love that women think about love and the details of affairs much more than men do) was whether media addressed to women still emphasize romance more than media addressed to men. I gave the example of movies, books and magazines that sell mainly to women and are centered around the question of how to get and keep a man. One student insisted that men’s and women’s magazines discuss love equally — he mentioned Men’s Health, a magazine I don’t read. Does anyone have an informed opinion about this last idea?
Tags: friendship, gender, love, media
July 24, 2008 at 12:13 pm |
If one looks at television directed at men , at women you see a clear differentiation of interest. Lifetime, Oxygen focus for women and Spike t.v. at men- the gap is huge. Spike is filled with action movies, gaga models, and working out, and the women’s t.v. is largley on romance.
July 24, 2008 at 12:19 pm |
I wonder how many of your students have actually been through the experiences they were talking about. It’s one thing to say, “I would act in a certain way under these circumstances,” and quite another to say, “This is how I felt when my boyfriend left me.” How many of them have actually lost a job they wanted when a friend got it instead? I know I had decidedly mixed feelings when that happened to me once. Yes, I thought my friend deserved the job, but so did I, and I really wanted it. We were still friends, but we’d never been really close friends and we didn’t become close after this.
July 26, 2008 at 9:42 am |
It wasn’t clear to me from posting whether A. disagreed with students in BOTH instances. With woaca I wonder how many of the students had actually been through what they were talking about. I asked my son what he thought, and he said, in a word, “bullshit.” He opined that the students were saying what they thought they ought to say, I have been well and truly in love only twice in my life. The first romance begain when I was in my mid-twenties and lasted (on and off) for 7 years. When we parted, ostensibly because he didn’t want children and I did, it didn’t take him long to find a new lover. I could hardly bear the sigh of them together, and was oh-so-selfishly delighted when he left her.
I am, decades later, in love again, and I would NOT wish him well if he left me for another woman. So much for altruism in romance, at least for me.
July 31, 2008 at 3:00 pm |
Certainly, losing your lover to another is nothing but pain. Seems to me that “true love” is requited love, love shared equally.
Maybe there are some kinds of love where the object of one’s love changes and moves on – like children growing up, falling in love, and marrying, which obviously is a happy turn of events for both parent and child, or is normally seen as such. It is the hoped for result of a nurturer/nurtured relationship.
But wishing your lover well, in the arms of another? K’s son is right. Bullshit.