Reporter | Pan Wenjie
Edit | Yellow Moon
Tomorrow, March 14, 2021, because of its harmonic sound "love you love a lifetime" is regarded by many people as an important day, some netizens even called on the Civil Affairs Bureau to work overtime on this day to register the marriage of the newlyweds. The harmonic sound means a few simple numbers and an ordinary date, which bears people's huge vision of love. However, what has actually happened in the Civil Affairs Bureau is the decline in the marriage rate and the increase in the divorce rate in the past decade or so.
Romantic romance novels and film and television dramas are telling us about eternal and unchanging love, and even "one life" cannot fill the audience's appetite, it may take "three lives and three lifetimes" to make people satisfied. In fact, human beings have not always adhered to this "one life" desire - the early way of marriage was polygamy, and monogamy was the product of the development of human civilization. Even with monogamy, love is not necessary for marriage for a long time. Today, we praise love and thirst for love, and popular culture is full of narratives of bitter love and unswerving love, but at the same time, this seems to be an era of "love trading", fast food love, and flash marriage and divorce. Do we really need long-lasting love vows?
<h3>01 "One lifetime" goes against nature and instinct? </h3>
"When a newlywed gets married, he should not hold the Bible in his hand and say that no matter how poor, rich, healthy, sick, and sick he will accompany him to death, but should put his hand on the Evolutionary Psychology and this book, and swear: I will go against my nature, rebel against my instincts, and love you forever." 」 There is such a short review under the entry of the Chinese edition of Oxford university biologist Richard Dawkins' "Selfish Gene", which received more than 4,000 likes and became a golden sentence on social networks.
In this famous book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins reveals the various reproductive systems that exist in the animal kingdom and sees them as the result of a "war between the sexes." Because both sexes want to maximize the total amount of reproductive outcomes throughout their lives, and sperm and eggs often differ fundamentally in number and size, male individuals generally tend to have promiscuous sex and lack of attention to offspring, while female individuals need to adopt different strategies to deal with this situation.
In most cultures, men are more likely than women to have sex outside of marriage. American biologist and sexologist Alfred Kinsey once concluded: "There is no doubt that without the constraints of social norms, men cannot choose a single sexual partner... Women are much less interested in multiple sexual partners than men. "Evolutionary Psychology" author D. M. Bass sees that most men show a need for diversity in their sexual partners, recognizing that men who are more attractive to the opposite sex are more likely to have short-term relationships, "one explanation for this phenomenon is that men will do so whenever conditions permit"; while women who are more prone to short-term sexual relations are women with lower self-esteem, who have more sexual partners and prefer sexual relationships without dependence and commitment. Bass research argues that, overall, short-term relationships can bring reproductive gains to men, but it is not possible to see how much women can gain from them. If a woman chooses a short-term relationship, it must be because she can get some benefits from it, what are these benefits? Helen Fisher, author of Why We Are Married and Why We Are Unfaithful, notes that these gains are generally "access to additional resources, life security, quality genes, and more diverse DNA for future generations." Of all the gains, the hypothesis that received the most research support was that women needed access to resources. Of course, if we continue to ask why women have to access resources in this way, we can trace it back to the decline of women's social status and gender power, and the reality that economic resources are in the hands of men.
Zheng Yifu, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University, proposed in "Civilization is a by-product" that the early way of marriage between human beings was polygamous, and then became monogamous. He believes that monogamy is a compromise between the chief and the majority of weak men, who can actively cooperate after they have sexual rights and status, and psychological changes. Monogamy is also in line with women's wishes, because in the past women only received the result of the cubs not being killed by the chief, but in monogamy, they were not only able to get rid of the status of concubines, but also to get the help of their biological fathers to raise the cubs.
There are also people who expose the hypocrisy of the so-called "monopoly system". Engels, for example, argued that monopoly originated in property relations and would lead to the domination of men—the husband was dominant in the family, and procreation brought with him his own children who were determined to inherit his property. Monopoly arose because a great deal of wealth was concentrated in the hands of men, so monopoly was only a monopoly on the part of the wife, not on the part of the husband; the monopoly on the part of the wife did not hinder the husband's secret or open polygamy, and prostitution also appeared in this case, becoming a supplement to the monopoly system. All in all, there are two sets of standards in married life: one for men, and one for men to turn a blind eye to adultery; the other for wives, and women who are often condemned for life once they are found to have sex outside of marriage.
<h3>02 Where did love come from and why did it disappear? </h3>
Since the advent of patriarchy, women have become the object of greed, guarding and exploitation by men. But men are not predatory machines without feelings, and men also yearn for love. Helen Fisher argues that while exceptions always exist, monogamy is a natural law. She said that people are gradually learning that men are not all playboys, and men believe in marriage from one end to the other. Fisher, for example, said that it is often men who fall in love at first sight; men also say that they marry for "love"; after a breakup, men are 2.5 times more likely to commit suicide for love than women.
Both men and women are obsessed with love, but love has not been a staple of life since ancient times. For a long time, marriage and love had nothing to do with each other. Stephanie Koontz, author of Marriage for Love: The Past and Present Lives of Marriage and Love, realized that for thousands of years, most societies around the world viewed marriage as a very important economic and political institution, in which the elite consolidated wealth, accumulated resources, and shut out unrelated individuals and "illegitimate" family members; among the lower classes, marriage often became an economic and political transaction. Therefore, marriage cannot be freely decided by two parties, especially if the parties' decisions are based on love, which is both irrational and fleeting.
It was not until the Enlightenment period that people proposed that love was the most fundamental motivation for marriage. The advent of free love has allowed people to strive for happiness in marriage for the next 150 years, and partners have been upgraded from life partners to soul mates. The new concept of male and female is accepted, and the traditional task of women is no longer seen as an important contribution to the sustainability of the family economy, but as an act of love.
In an atomized society, individuals are released onto the streets and sidewalks of the city, and everyone becomes the master of his or her own destiny. The decision on marriage and family life has also fallen, as never before, into the hands of the parties and not society as a whole, which means that the intimate system is fragmented from society. When individuation reaches such a level, people tend to design the world with themselves at the center, and communication partners are reduced to complementary roles. The author of "Love as a Passion" and a German sociologist, Nikolas Luhmann, saw that because the two sides are in two completely different worlds, each has a set of standards, it is difficult for both parties to enter love and maintain love under normal circumstances, because of the existence of this "double contingency", the probability of love realization is very low.
Luhmann pointed out that love is actually a field planned through the imagination of countless people, pre-molded or even prescribed emotions by literature, film and television, and is a mode of behavior, and this mode of behavior can be played. Therefore, every infatuated child can occasionally acquire the appearance of love and live according to this script. So he wrote: "Love is like arose out of thin air, with the help of plagiarized patterns, plagiarized emotions, plagiarized existence." ”
So, will this plagiarized love disappear? According to Luhmann's love semantics (a systematic set of rules of communication), the answer is yes. He felt that love would end when it could no longer provide pleasure—if pleasure dried up, love would become obligatory and powerless to return to heaven. Constancy and serenity are often seen as signs of the consummation of friendship, but Luhmann believes that love is different, love needs to be excessive, and excessiveness can also become the cause of the end of love, after all, it is difficult for people to maintain a state of excess forever. "Love ends in indifference, in the strategic problems of calming down, in the reluctance to sustain compassion."
<h3>03 Do we still need long-lasting vows? </h3>
Under the dual role of the spirit of consumerism and the normalization and legalization of sexual activity, today, the love of a lifetime seems to be more difficult to find. The gender identity of men and women has been transformed into a sexual identity. Sociologist Eva Eilos, author of Love, Why It Hurts, sees that as consumer culture treats beauty and morality separately, sexual desire is autonomousized, sexual competition is universalized, and sexual charisma becomes an independent criterion for dividing classes and hierarchies. Erotic capital can be harnessed as a means of upward mobility, and the "love field" emerges, and in a way, finding a partner becomes a competition with an invisible opponent in a very large market.
As gender relations are marketized, sexual attractiveness, age, education, and income will become the criteria for consideration, and people with more choices have a stronger position in the love field. Yi Luo believes that both men and women may take a series of sexual activities, and the series of sexual activities is one of the attributes that can highlight the status of men, but when women take series of sexual activities, the ultimate purpose is often to achieve a single type of sexual activity - that is, even after a series of sexual adventures, they still have to find the only life partner; in contrast, men are more often and more likely to ignore the issue of commitment.
In the past, keeping promises was a virtue, and people locked in the future at this moment by keeping promises like "I love you for a lifetime", but the future is open, we have no way to predict the future, let alone promise the future to others, how can we ask for eternity in our own words? Today, the core of the gender bond – will and commitment – has changed because gender relations have been marketized and people have more choices. In his book, Elos points out that the main feature of modern intimacy is that it can be interrupted at any time if it can no longer reflect emotion, taste, and will. Today's people believe that the foundation of the formation of love relationships must be sincere emotions, emotions must continue to be part of the relationship, and in the real choice environment, we are faced with so many possibilities that many people simply cannot draw a straight line to the future.
It seems that love may not last a lifetime after all. However, the long-lasting vows, although they only count for a moment, are necessary in this moment. Moments of love are magnified into eternity, and such moments can emphasize a person's sense of self-existence. In Elos's analysis, in pre-modern times, both partners in love derived their sense of personal worth directly from their ability to enforce moral standards and ideals, rather than from the sense of worth that suitors brought to their inner selves. But today, when the ego is essentialized, love is defined as something that points directly to someone's innermost essence, rather than to his class or status, love is equivalent to directly giving value to that person, and rejecting someone's pursuit becomes rejecting someone's self. Because of this, the moment of love has a special charm, because a person's life can be put into such a permanent gaze, and the self can be infinitely enlarged in love. Zhou Zhiqiang, the author of "Criticism of Speech", also realized that the romantic Korean dramas that people love today have a narcissistic cultural meaning. In popular culture, our repeated praises of a lifetime of love also make the self trapped in the arms of romantic love myths, and those romantic imaginations and firm beliefs about love actually tell the despair of people who have no sense of history and no sense of the future in the depths of their spirits.
Zhou Zhiqiang believes that many times, the so-called "one life" commitment is not so much an attempt to cut off time, that is, to let people stay in the sweet moment of the present for a long time. For all meaning is frozen in the present moment, and a moment is eternal. Modernity has no way of giving us other ways of life, and in the love of a lifetime, meaning and value become romantic and one-way. "One can no longer imagine the meaning of any social ethical relationship unless one speaks and imagines the charm of love; there is no way to highlight the value of man unless the infatuation and fidelity of love are used to show the spiritual power of man."
Most of the episodes are about sweet love, popular songs are full of love heartbeats and heartache, and many ordinary days have become love festivals. After all, apart from love, what meaning do we have to pursue?
Resources:
"Love, Why Does It Hurt?" By Eva Illouz, translated by Ye Rong, East China Normal University Press, Six Points Branch, 2015
The Selfish Gene: The 40th Anniversary Edition [English] Richard Dawkins by Lu Yunzhong, Zhang Daiyun, Chen Fujia, Luo Xiaozhou, Ye Sheng, translated into City-State CITIC Publishing Group 2019-6
Evolutionary Psychology (4th Edition): The New Science of Psychology [U.S.] David Bass Daniel Zhang, Jiang Ke, translated by Zhehong Xiong, Reviewed by The Commercial Press, 2015-9
"Marriage for Love: The Past and Present Lives of Marriage and Love" [Beauty] Stephanie Koontz by Liu Junyu Translated by CITIC Publishing Group And See city-state 2020-3-8
Why We Got Married and Why We Were Unfaithful: A Natural History of Sex, Marriage, and Affair by Helen Fisher by Ni Tao, Wang Guoping, and Ye Yang CITIC Publishing Group 2020-2
"Civilization is a by-product", Zheng Yefu, CITIC Publishing House, 2016-1
Love as Passion: On the Code of Intimacy [de] nicholas Luman translated by Fan Jin, East China Normal University Press, 2019-11-28
Fan Jin: Love as a medium of communication - Luman's love phenomenon
Learn https://www.sohu.com/a/337901293_754344