Online Date with Fish2Fish: love and affection

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IMAGE: LOVE: BEING CLOSER THAN EVER, OR YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND? (PHOTO: JOE GELONESI)

Five Tips For Relationship Happiness From Existential Philosophers

In the western world, lovers are free from arranged marriages. Yet all too often we bring chains to relationships in the form of misplaced expectations and ideals. Skye Cleary, the author of Existentialism and Romantic Love reaches for her existential classics for help, with five philosophical tips for a happy love life.

Max Stirner, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir all dealt with love and existential themes, but they all had different ideas about romantic love. Yet they all loved loving and sought to explore the sources of frustrations in romantic relationships and how relationships could be more meaningful. Below are five key existential messages for 21st century lovers.

The best love relationships are those where lovers are free and equal

Too often, lovers use relationships as an escape from the world, according to Simone de Beauvoir. The feeling of security is comforting, but it becomes problematic when lovers make the relationship the only source of meaning in their lives. This is a risky way to be in a relationship because love that lasts a lifetime is the exception, not the rule.

Relationships would be better if lovers were stronger-willed, mastered their passions, and were better friends.

SKYE CLEARY, AUTHOR

Instead, de Beauvoir advised lovers not to become so dependent on one another that they can’t exist without each other. Relationships are more interesting and stronger if both lovers pursue rich and diversified lives through their authentic projects. Ideally, adopting common goals shifts lovers’ focus onto something other than themselves, enhancing their understandings of one another.

The best love relationships are those that are free and intimate

De Beauvoir’s lifelong boyfriend Jean-Paul Sartre thought that in order to know ourselves we need to know what other people think of us. Lovers are especially important because the more one cares about another, the more the other’s views matter. The more intimate lovers are, the deeper insights they give each other. Yet lovers can’t know if the other is telling the truth, so they try to capture each other’s freedom to force the truth. This leads to sadomasochistic power games that can’t be won—we can’t possess another’s freedom. This, Sartre thought, is why love is really conflict.

Later Sartre said that an authentic love would not try to rob the other of their freedom. Sartre and de Beauvoir attempted this by giving each other the freedom to fall in love with other people. Although their other lovers knew about the agreement, they were hurt when they realised that their love wouldn’t conquer all. It’s possible to view Sartre and de Beauvoir’s commitment to each another and Sartre’s financial and emotional support of many ex-girlfriends as contradicting their freedom. Sartre explained it philosophically as freely choosing his priorities, and practically as preferring ‘to be a fool than a jerk’. De Beauvoir said that it was his ‘guilty conscience’.

The best love relationships are based on friendship

Life shouldn’t be comfortable; it should be about challenging ourselves to be better people. Friedrich Nietzsche referred to this as striving towards the ideal of the Übermensch. The problem with love is that it all too often manifests as an egoistic desire for power over another and selfishly seeking to be the centre of each other’s attention. Love distracts—or even worse, actively prevents—lovers from achieving great things. Nietzsche described lovers as becoming like dragons guarding treasure or cooping each other up like exotic birds in a cage.

Relationships would be better if lovers were stronger-willed, mastered their passions, and were better friends. Then, lovers could focus their energy on concurrent flourishing and supporting each other’s goals instead of holding each other down with petty power games.

The best love relationships are romantic and secure

Romantic loving is beautiful, extraordinary, and intoxicating—the problem is that it tends to be fleeting. Søren Kierkegaard sought to make love secure and lift it out of the realm of lusty, unrestrained and empty hedonism. Relationships would be deeper and more meaningful if lovers would stop letting themselves be pushed around by their animal instincts. He thought that lovers could turn relationships into something more stable and enduring by owning themselves and making commitments. So he recommended that lovers choose despair and marry.

Nevertheless, Kierkegaard also recognised that marriage is no more secure than romance and risks a boredom ‘worse than death’. This is why he eventually appealed to religious love, that is, to love independently of the object of affection (which isn’t very romantic).

The best love relationships recognise that love is egoistic

Love is a sweet and enjoyable experience that makes life richer. Max Stirner thought lovers should be honest with themselves and realise that love is egoistic because when we love, we actually love loving. While we should relish the frivolity of romance, Stirner thought it a crime to become a slave to love or a lover. There’s no surer way to kill such a beautiful experience than to weigh it down with duties and sacrifices, so he advised not to turn love into an obligation, as Kierkegaard recommended.

Instead of subordinating themselves to external pressures to be in a relationship, get married, and procreate (or risk eternal loneliness, as Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the US Supreme Court opinion on gay marriage recently), Stirner advocated owning and loving ourselves. This means that lovers create relationships that work for them. He thought the best relationships are where lovers become stronger through their union and achieve more than they could have alone.

The existential philosophers proposed that falling in love throws existence into a new light and opens up new dimensions of possibilities and experiences. They suggest that best relationships are likely to be ones where lovers throw themselves wholeheartedly into romantic loving, but also master their passions, and are mature enough to allow each other the freedom to pursue their own goals and interests.

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How To Get Out Of A Sex Rut In A Relationship — And Know When It's Over

If you’ve been in the dating game for a couple of years, your drug of choice may be the rush of oxytocin to your brain when you’re in the throes of an exciting new relationship. But like any chemical substance, once you get too used to it over the course of time, the thrill will lessen and the once-hot-and-heavy relationship will slowly cool off. And after the love drug dissipates, you may discover that you're not having as much sex as you used to and maybe you don’t have as similar sexual appetites as you thought, landing you into a reluctant, unsatisfying sex rut.

But once the sex slows to the point of it becoming almost a rarity, how much of a warning sign is this for things to come for your relationship? I talked with Eric Marlowe Garrison, sex and relationship counselor, and author of the book Mastering Multiple Position Sex, to get a little more perspective on understanding sex ruts and the ways in which we can respectfully navigate out of them. Garrison tells Bustle:

“A relationship is like a bicycle, when one of the wheels is flat, it will still go, but not well. Even if only one partner is in that sex rut, it's going to affect the relationship sexually. When you need something that your partner doesn’t need, it's difficult to understand why they don't need it.”

A sex rut can stem from a lot of outside factors, but it's the fear of the unknown when we don’t communicate with our partner during this time that pushes a resolution off further and further. If the rut is viewed impassively as the inevitable thing that happens once a relationship fizzles, we could be missing out on working through a much deeper sexual understanding of ourselves and our partner. “We don't want fear to be the guiding force of our life. If the bones of the relationship are good, you can ride the ups and downs of your relationship once you’re out of that honeymoon phase,” Garrison says.

Here are a few ways that Garrison recommends opening the conversation with your partner to try getting yourselves out of your sex rut:

Optimize, Not Maximize The Pleasure

There is an awful lot of pressure around sex, even in an established long-term relationship. When you and your partner have had so many mind-blowing experiences in bed, going through a period of lackluster sex can seem like something’s gone horribly wrong. Garrison says, “Sex should be about pleasure, not about orgasms.”

Try taking the focus off of getting off, and pay more attention to having satisfying “outercourse” to recalibrate your sex drives. “Sometimes you do need to go on a sex fast. You can focus on non-penetrative things like showering together or massage, and that will start to build up some anticipation for sex,” he says.

Be Direct About Your Needs

What is it that you really want? Would it scare you to say it out loud to your partner? To get rid of the fear of the unknown while you’re going through a sex rut, your partner needs to hear all of what’s missing from the relationship directly from you.

"Take one day a week, and sit down with each other, and say, ‘I need less of this, I need more of that.’ Go through your own list before they go through theirs, so you're not attacking their points. This helps get to the nitty-gritty of what's going on,” he says. These relationship check-ins don’t always have to be heavy conversations. Once you and your partner are more comfortable talking about where your “needs” line up, you can start making sure that they are addressed, and possibly even lead your discussions into a bit of foreplay.

Go with Option C

If you think that relationships are built on compromise, you may need to rethink that. "Getting out of the sex rut is not about compromising. That doesn’t solve the problem. If what you want and what your partner wants are not the same, there’s always an Option C.”

Letting your partner get their way when you are still unhappy with the situation, builds resentment and can further damage the relationship. You shouldn’t have to walk on eggshells with the person that you love, it’s about finding the third option where nobody misses out and everybody wins.

When The Sex Rut Means It's Over

The sex rut alone should not be the cause of the relationship falling apart. If there is love and affection still there, then there is a way to get back to a happy, stable place together once again. However, if someone’s actions are hindering the relationship, it may be a sign that the relationship needs to end. “If your partner cheats in a moment of passion, that's actually easy to remedy,” Garrison says. “It’s not always easy to forgive, but it can wake them up and make them realize how much they need you. However, if it was an emotional cheat, where they’ve been cultivating a happy relationship with someone else without telling you, that's when you need to reevaluate why you’re still together.”

Falling apart lovingly is about being compassionate, empathetic, and leaving each other in better condition than how you first found them. But it’s also about going through every possible option before it gets to that point. As Garrison says, “Look at the big picture in the relationship, not just the lack of sex. The hard and right thing may be to stay together.”

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Tuesday, 22 March 2016

Five Tips For Relationship Happiness From Existential Philosophers