Wednesday, May 13
this is just going to alienate people isn't it
The difference between friendship & the romantic/erotic relationship might be this: Friendships have power dynamics, relationships are power dynamics.
— o —
Let's say you're an American male, and your girl leaves you. In the days, weeks, or months that follow, certain of your male friends or acquaintances will probably say to you "Bitches ain't shit."
They won't say this because they believe it to be true (though some of them may well be bitter misogynists). They will say it because it is so obviously untrue. Because it's a kind of watchword against the power of the person who just rejected you — a power which has become, perhaps, dangerously unmoored, unbound by the conventions and mutual ceasefires which accumulate in any relationship.
(Love and its formal arrangements end badly all the time. Suicide, murder, theft, general disgrace, John Cusack shouting at a closed apartment window through the pouring rain. They write songs about this. Your friends are worried for a reason, though they're also trying to tell you it's nothing that hasn't happened to just about everyone else you know.)
— o —
Eros isn't about kindness, though it might contain or express it. It is usually cruel, turbulent, willful, angry, and selfish. It's a kind of contest and struggle: both the most dramatic expression of ego in many lives, and the purest subjection of it.
You desire someone who has a certain kind of power over you, and you wish to exert a like power over them. The subjection to one another in desire might not be the end of the struggle through eros to mutuality, but it might just be its ground.
— o —
Like the man said, it's hard to love and not be loved.