is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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I�m going to go do whatever I want all the time.
Inspiration can come from the strangest places. And now, a story.
Lately, as Evany might say, my boggler has been boggling over what it means to be in a relationship. The other night I watched the Superbowl, and the watching was fun, pleasant, full of yummy snackfoods and beer and wine, and good company. At one point I realized that I was in a room full of couples. Nothing strange about that, not at all. Most of my best friends are in couples! But then I realized that I was in one of the couples. And that made me feel like I had entered into an alternate universe, and not only because I was slightly sedated. I felt this not because I mind being couple-ensconced or feel anything less than happy about the person most likely to be found next to me on a couch. He is, simply put, Best Ever. It�s just that it hasn�t been a huge part of my life for the last, oh, six or seven years, to be anything but singular.
At some point during the Superbowl, CBS played a promo for that new David Spade show that was on last night but which I did not watch because it was on at the same time as Heroes. There�s really nothing very funny about David Spade at all. But the line he drops, and which is featured in the commercial, goes like this: He�s talking to some couples and one of the women accuses him of being jealous of what they have and he says, �Yeah. I�m going to go do whatever I want all the time now,� and then he walks off. Best Ever and I both laughed long and hard at that one. No one else was laughing, but I think that was because no one else was watching, and thus should be taken as no indicator of different ideas about relationships or humor. After all, Best Ever and I are both a bit more attached to television than your average academic type, so of course we were watching even the commercials. It was the SUPERBOWL.
Anyway, it�s a funny, funny joke. But it got me to thinking about something that isn�t new to me as a thought, but which has never before been occasioned by David Spade. It�s the thought about how limited the templates are into which human relationships can fall. The stereotype of the couple is such that it is of course hilarious when the single guys says, �Yeah. And now I�m going to go do whatever I want all the time.� Because of course that is what is lost by anyone in a couple. Or so the story goes.
But does that have to be the case? I refuse to believe it is. Of course it�s always possible that what you �want to do� will be changed by having your desires modified by the presence of someone else. Duh. But that isn�t all that happens with couples who stop doing what they want to do all the time. I am not at all analyzing or accusing any relationship in particular. I�m merely thinking about my own past and loves. It seems to me that the easiest thing anyone can do is accept the status quo, and I am not blameless in this regard. How things are is taken to be how things must be or ought to be. And that is �good enough.� One begins to follow some law of relationships, and loses something of the singularity that drew one into the couple to begin with. But that can be a problem. Security is great, but it�s also, well, very safe. And safety isn�t always very sexy.
Hmm. So it seems like I�m saying there ought to be more ways to be a couple. But perhaps that�s not really want I mean. Perhaps what I want is there to be no way to be a couple. I just want people to love each other or otherwise verb each other and work out for themselves what that means, without having to fall into a template of what is expected of a romantic pairing. Because it seems true to me that too much ease of definition never tends toward what is best in human life.
(As Nietzsche wrote, ��This is my way; where is yours?��thus I answered those who asked me �the way.� For the way�that does not exist.�)
For some reason this runs parallel to something I was teaching today from the legal philosophy of H.L.A. Hart�an unlikely source for tools for romance. However, as I was explaining to students what it means for Hart for a society to make the move from rudimentary law to systematized institutional law, I found myself thinking about David Spade! You see, for Hart, the step from rudimentary to institutionalized law occurs when a society is characterized not only by primary rules of obligation (like things you are forbidden to do and enjoined to do, those things we think of as LAWS) but also secondary rules, rules that declare what a rule is and how a rule can be made, applied, and ascertained as legitimate. For instance: if any of us needs to know what a law is, we know to look in a law book, or ask a lawyer. We know that lawyers and judges understand how laws are made and how they can be applied. We know that only certain things count as laws because they have been promulgated according to agreed upon procedures, etc. And we know that we have certain rights to certain kinds of procedures if we have to deal with law directly.
That seems simple enough. If we are obeying primary rules then we have already accepted secondary rules on some level. That just is how it is.
However, Marianne Constable, a mentor of mine, once wrote a book about the role of popular juries in early modern England (ha! another great tool for romance), which contains a great chapter about how this simple step of Hart's is not so simple. The chapter deals with what happens to a law of convention or custom when it is forced into the propositional language of written law. Constable (who has a great name for a legal philosopher) reminds us that forcing convention into propositional written form also misses something about what conventions are. They are more fluid and, we might say, alive than written rules can be. In his version of the Social Contract, Rousseau says that what is most difficult about giving people law is not what has to be created but what has to be destroyed. He means that in order to create law-abiding people, you have to change them from being people who think and act according to customs and conventions to people who think and act according to rules. These are different kinds of people.
So, on the one hand, one easy way to move from primitive law to a modern legal system is to admit that there are secondary rules whereby law can be recognized and applied legitimately. Everyone knows where to look if they need to find out what the law is or what it demands. Might be a law book. Might be an inscribed monument. Might be the orders of a King. Might be the kingdom�s esteemed sickly cat who sneezes on documents that are to be accepted as law. Anything, as long as those guided by it agree that it is the source of legitimate law. However, we should not underestimate how huge this step is, from conventions to rules. Nor should we think that once you make that step, nothing changes. Everything changes. You�ve changed something living into a system replete with procedures that give or deny legitimacy.
I guess I�m thinking that it�s a bit like what changes, in a relationship, when you move away from those initial moments of excitement and wonder that this person, this amazing singular person, has somehow noticed me. Someone likes ME. And now that someone and me are not exactly the same as we were before. Lives change a bit, but not in a way anyone would mind. You know, crushes, infatuations, romance.
But then it becomes a structure. (Or it ends.) Everyone knows what couples do, and how they act, and what they owe to each other, and what it means for them to live as they do. What is most difficult about giving people law is not what has to be created but what has to be destroyed.
My point is that�while we may need legal institutions to govern large societies�in the world of relationships between two, there is no reason to give yourself this law. There are as many ways to be with people meaningfully as there are people to be with. If you don�t embrace a rulebook, things will be more difficult. You may not always know how things will work out. Other people might not understand what your relationship is, or why it works. You will have to labor to keep valuing what brought you together with this person in the first place. (All three of these things seem to be necessary in any case, but also seem to be what often gets left unattended in an inertial couple.) Without a rule book and a mode of enforcement, all you can rely on is how the participants feel about what happens between them. You will have to live a law of customs or conventions, a living thing, and you�ll have to attend to it constantly, because no one will do the work for you in advance. But isn�t that better, and less bound to fail than the other way? Right now it seems to me to be so.
And now I'm going to go do whatever I want all the time (that sentence being freighted with your knowledge that my intense commitment to an oddly stringent form of ethics already limits what it is I "want to do"... but that does not change my point. You know?).
11:02 p.m. - February 06, 2007
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