Schools > Students > Ages 17-18 > Sex and relationshipsSex and Relationships
Intimacy, sex and our sense of lack
An article by Ken Jones of the Network of Engaged Buddhists, UK.
The modern era is marked by an urge for intimacy which has become intense and compulsive. This focuses upon 'relationships', a word which assumed its present meaning only in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the Middle Ages marriage was a means of perpetuating family, inheritance and title, or, for the poor, the production of children to care for their parents in old age. The choice of the marriage partner belonged to the parents, and mutual attraction came low in the considerations governing the match.
It was not until the eighteenth century, and particularly in Protestant Europe, that love, sexuality and marriage came together as modernity's liberative agenda for the newly emergent private life. This was the sphere allotted to well-to-do women largely excluded from public responsibilities. And for many men the calculative rationality of business, administration and the professions was never enough, even with the gutsy selfaffirmations of fame and power. For those yearning for relief from such vanities, and for the absolute gratification of absolute desire (or better still the hope and expectation of it) there was nothing to equal romantic love. And in the adulterous flouting of convention, individualism found its most extreme expression. In the age of Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, romantic love and adultery were celebrated as the great enliveners of personal life and romantic novels were produced in huge quantities until superseded in part by the Hollywood dream factory.
Just as individualism had to be accommodated to the needs of capitalism and the subordination of those without capital, so, in the new middle class marriage, did romantic love have to be accommodated to patriarchal property rights and the subordination of women. The expectations were clear: marriage for life, with the man as breadwinner and the woman as 'the angel of the house'. Divorce was exceptional and stigmatised, and adultery was shocking - certainly in Protestant countries.
In the second half of the twentieth century this model of marriage was substantially disembedded by the needy, restless individualism of high modernity, peeling off another layer of the existential onion in its search for authenticity at the heart. It has been supplanted by 'partnership' (married or not) in a committed relationship. The 'relationship' is a unique phenomenon of high modernity in that, unlike traditional marriage, it is totally disembedded from any external social conditions and exists only for itself. It must therefore accommodate all the emotional, intellectual and existential baggage of both parties, seeking to satisfy in the relationship a range of needs which had previously been met at least in part by a more three dimensional kind of culture than that of high modernity. It requires continual maintenance, sustained commitment and total mutual trust.
Traditionally, matrimony provided a framework of social assumptions which constrained, but which also provided, institutional space and time in which the synergy of a potentially fruitful relationship could work. But the fastfood culture of a high divorce rate and serial marriage gives little encouragement to patient cultivation and slow ripening. Whilst it is true that in earlier times shorter lives and high mortality rates in childbirth produced similar objective conditions, the well established extended family did provide some stability. Nowadays, although child rearing still necessarily moves at a premodern pace, children have to accommodate themselves to the new hyper-individualism as best they can.
Here, as elsewhere in high modernity, the total freedom of a driven individualism comes at a cost of greater insecurity and anxiety. The deluded pursuit of authenticity through ever greater self-fulfillment must often prompt reflection on whether life really has to be a hot griddle, on which the fleas that jump must fall, and the fleas that fall must jump...
The pursuit of erotic novelty is a further destabiliser in a culture in which 'good sex' is widely considered an inalienable human right, essential for self esteem. There is nothing new about instrumental sex, but in the high modernity of mass communication it has been increasingly commodified, and has become for many an addictive fix. The following is from the American business magazine U.S. News & World Report:
In 1996 American spent more than $8 billion on hardcore videos, peep shows, live sex acts, adult cable programming, sexual vices, computer porn, and- sex magazines - an amount mueh larger than Hollywood's domestic box office receipts and larger than all the revenues generated- by rod: and country music recordings. Americans now spend more money at strip clubs than at Broadway, off-Broadway, regional and non-profit theaters, at the e opera. the ballet, and jazz and classical music performances -- combined.
The Guardian journalist reporting the above observed that, according to War on Want, $8 billion is more than enough to provide debt relief for the world's twenty worst affected countries, effectively springing them from the poverty trap.
All that being said, it is not my argument that relationships and eroticism are nothing more than a futile attempt to relieve the sense of emptiness, the precariousness of being human, which high modernity has accentuated. They may also be profound explorations which can give insight into the nature of lack itself. The searcher after self-fulfilment can be educated by love into discovering deepest fulfilment in the well-being of another. Marriage, or any similar long term committed relationship, offers one of the most valuable practices that high modernity has to offer in the art of becoming a fully realised human being. Religions embedded in premodern cultures - and particularly a strongly monastic one like Buddhism - can have little directly to say about this (at least in their original cultural packaging). Yet they do have a potential that could be serviceable in this context. John Welwood explains:
We often feel tremendous resistance to letting love in, because love is a power that. can dissolve the shell of our false ego. We start to think: 'I didn't get into a relationship for this! I didn't bargain on having my most precious strategy for security and survival threatened like this!' At this point, we imagine something is desperately wrong - with ourselves, with our partner, or with the relationship. Yet this is actually a tremendous opportunity to break through to a larger and deeper sense of who we are and what we can be.
This is what I call unconditional presence. The two limbs of unconditional presence are awareness and loving-kindness. In this case awareness means seeing our conditioned structures and inquiring into the unconscious set-ups that are operating.... And lovingkindness involves being willing to make room for the difficult feelings that inevitably come up in relationships. To meet them fully and directly, in a kind and gentle way. This kind of compassion is an absolutely essential element of conscious relationship.
The above quotation is from Love and Awakening: Discovering the Path of Intimate Relationship, by John Welwood (Harper Collins, 1996).