The Deliberately Single Man - Part IV

Love Through a New Lens, Continued

This is the fourth in a series that highlights my framework for well-rounded single manhood that I’ve called “The Deliberately Single Man.” Originally published at Medium on March 7, 2022.

Looking at Love Through a New Lens, Continued

Even in relatively free societies, the ruling political and economic class finds ways to guide the behavior of citizens in the direction they find beneficial. Economically, love is worth billions. Consider diamonds and the SUVs targeted at families as two of many examples of products and entire industries targeted at a few narrow forms of love.

But the economic power brokers want more than just our money. They also want to predict with precision how an entire society will behave. For this, they need legions of “normal,” or as economists would say, rational consumers. We’ve already seen that to avoid the terrible fate of being shut out of love’s good graces, we have to be normal. Again, this linking of love with normality is no coincidence. When enough of the citizenry is normal, the economic models and predictions work. Too much “irrationality” bodes poorly for markets of all kinds.

The political ruling class weaponizes love in a different way. Sometimes this has been done explicitly through legislation, such as the criminalization of homosexual behavior or interracial relationships. But the primary way this happens is simple: by using overwhelming cultural pressure to keep our definitions of love as narrow as possible.

If I had a vested interest in keeping the political order from changing, and couldn’t use the blunt tools of soldiers on the streets or jailing opponents, I could think of no better way than to convince a critical mass of the populace that the most meaningful things that will ever happen to them will occur within the four walls of their private residences. This is epitomized by the spring 2020 TV ad campaign for the University of Phoenix, whose tagline was “Family First. And Second. And Third.”

But more importantly than causing people to focus inward, what makes family and romantic love such powerful political cudgels is that they are exclusionary. Not everyone is guaranteed a spot: you have to earn it. “Earning it,” as we have seen, means being normal and hustling to be “chosen.” If you don’t want to be left out in the cold, you’d better toe the line. What a perfect tool through which to exert political control.

As I mentioned before, the deliberately single man will have to radically overhaul his understanding of love. And this is where it can begin: with the understanding that while the love he and everyone around him has been taught to value most is conditional and exclusionary, many other types of love are neither. They are available to him, regardless of his circumstances, right now. Further, it is within his power to cultivate these forms of love over time on nothing other than his own authority. Asking a question while on one knee and being told “Yes” is not required.

Before I get into these other forms of love, I want to discuss romantic love as the starting point. Because while it may not be a form of love that’s available to everyone this instant, it can and needs to be thought about in ways that no longer make it conditional and exclusionary.

There are two ways I believe this can be done. First, by ceasing all efforts to pursue it. Second, by completely re-framing what the presence of romantic love means for all the other aspects of one’s life.

In our culture, not pursuing romance seems like blasphemy against the very foundation of a fulfilling life; like the ultimate form of giving up. But move beyond these initial gut reactions and you see this course of action is rooted in something else entirely.

Think about the most meaningful, worthwhile things in your life, the things that have evolved over years. On closer inspection, it’s astonishing the degree to which we didn’t “make” any of these things happen. Sure, there are critical junctures where we make choices, and we work to maintain these good things over time. But there is a certain mystery involved, and we know down deep that if the stars had not aligned in this particular way, this person, this work, this experience could easily have not been in our life.

People might call this mystery God, the universe, or something else. I prefer the philosopher Parker Palmer’s statement: “Instead of telling your life what you plan to do with it, ask what it plans to do with you.” Life will continually throw at every one of us challenges and opportunities. Many will be small; a few will be huge. Our task is to make choices around these challenges and opportunities that best resonate with the core of who we are as individuals. I truly believe that we live our best, most authentic lives when we move through the world in this way.

Contrast this with the culturally mandated “search” for romantic love. A cardinal rule of this search is that nothing will happen unless you are continually “putting yourself out there.” “It’s not just going to happen on its own” is another line we’re fed in our younger years. This is a lie, pure and simple. It is going to happen on its own, subject to the same mysterious forces that cause our lives to come together in ways over which we have absolutely no control.

This, of course, is no guarantee of any specific outcome, and I think that’s why, culturally, this is such a difficult argument to make. Since we’ve been so primed to believe that romantic relationships are a necessity for fulfillment, it can’t be left up to these mysterious forces I’ve been describing. We’re instructed to do all we can to guarantee the outcome along a very specific timeline.

It is my belief that much of the time, when two people who are trying to “guarantee the outcome” come together, they start in earnest the construction of the proverbial house built on sand. You’ll know this shaky house when you see it, because an elaborate scaffolding prevents its collapse: “The Rules.” You, I, and everyone else has “The Rules” so thoroughly baked into our consciousness that it’s easy to forget that they are mere cultural dictates and not unbreakable cosmic laws.

“The Rules” are found on TV shows, in movies, in the multi-billion-dollar self-help industry, and in relationship therapists’ offices across the land. They say what men and women “want” and “need”. They prescribe ad nauseum what successful relationships require. Like the United States Code, many people in relationships can describe instances of being told by their partner which section and subsection of “The Rules” they’ve been convicted of violating. The length of their sentence is anyone’s guess…convictions are often re-visited, even years later.

“The Rules” are needed precisely because people pursue these relationships as a cultural mandate. Or because they “need love,” which in my opinion is no better reason. Either way, we’re not asking our lives what they intend to do with us. And when we don’t do that, and instead tell our lives what they are going to be, suddenly the requirement that all that’s needed is for “you to be you” is no longer enough. And when you bring two people together in this state, where parts of their identity have to be bent and others obscured all together, “The Rules” help ensure that they play nice with each other just enough so that house on the sand doesn’t implode.

Need more evidence this is true? Despite all the hype around romantic relationships as the pinnacle of love, it’s astonishing to consider how much of the language around them is couched in terms of failure. It starts in the dating stage, where it’s “common knowledge” that one will likely have to be rejected many times before striking gold. Getting “ghosted” online is just the latest iteration of this. Extensive post-mortems often follow, looking for any glimmer of “what I did wrong,” or its more appealing cousin, “what can I do better?”

In this era of the “all-or-nothing” marriage, commentators have noted that with how people look at these relationships, there is always at least one way their spouse is constantly “letting them down,” or at the very least annoying the bejesus out of them. The term “failed marriage” gets thrown around regardless of the context in which a marriage ends. It seems that everyone, by reports from their partners or their self-reports, is “doing love wrong,” or breaking “The Rules” in some way.

The deliberately single man looks at this landscape and says “no thanks.” His number one priority is listening to his life and taking actions in accordance with, as Parker Palmer says, “the life that wants to live inside him.” He spends no time seeking certain types of relationships based on advertisements of their supposed greatness.

He also believes that being deliberately single and having romance in his life is very well possible. This relates to the second aspect of making romantic love no longer conditional or exclusionary: re-framing what its presence means for all other aspects of life.

In the decades since romantic, companionate marriage became the norm, the act of “falling in love” has served as the cue for two individuals to re-arrange vast parts of their financial, social, and domestic lives. This is, yet again, one of those cultural dictates so baked into our consciousness that it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t have to be this way.

The deliberately single man understands that he can leave his financial, social, and domestic lives intact as they are and still experience romance, and he continues to understand this despite the chorus of voices shouting “Impossible!” Yet again, we all know the script that drives that chorus. It’s the script that would demean such relationships for not being “committed” or being “just a fling.” We all know that pivotal moment in the TV show or movie when a member of the couple says three dreaded words: “Where’s this going?”

The implications of these three words are that unless things get more “serious,” the relationship will be in grave danger as the party asking the question is likely to bail if the wrong answer is given. There seem to be two culturally acceptable responses for the party receiving this question. The first involves breaking things off, and then analyzing why they are riddled with “commitment issues.” The second involves the realization that the withdrawal of love is imminent; therefore, it’s time to dust off “The Rules,” hold your nose, and jump in the deep end.

The deliberately single man looks at these thought processes and choices and finds them absurd. Why should the presence of romance require such severe alterations to the rest of his life? He may encounter another argument to this line of thinking: “You’ll never meet someone who wants that/thinks that way.” The factual basis for this claim is irrelevant, because to him the claim itself is irrelevant. The odds don’t matter; it’s all the same to him if they are 10:1 or 10,000,000:1.

To summarize, if romantic love is not pursued, and, if it is present, re-framing what that presence means for one’s life, it can be made much less conditional and exclusionary. If, through listening to your life and leaning in to the mystery of its unfolding, you stop pursing certain types of relationships because of their supposed “importance,” then the message from society - that you are only worthy of those relationships if a specific set of conditions is met - becomes meaningless to you.

Further, using this approach no longer makes romantic love exclusionary, for the simple fact that you can’t be excluded from an arrangement you are not actively seeking to enter. But much larger than this, when romance is re-framed as described above, it is an additive to life, not the foundation upon which it is built. Being excluded from an additive can be annoying. Being excluded from a foundation can be devastating.