problems of the Romance myth

Ravenscroft

Banned
I found a poly thread unexpectedly in the discussion area of tvtropes.org, where they're trying to catalogue the recurring rhetorical devices (tropes) that appear in media.

(I first discovered the concept in Carl Jung's archetypes & Campell's study of the hero's journey, so clearly it's MUCH more than gimmicks of melodrama.)

Over there, contributor TheHandle made a pretty good start at unpacking common monogamist tropes.
By the "heteronormative monogamy myth" (we need to find a shorter, snappier version of it), I mean the story that goes so;

"I am alone. This is bad.

"I need to find another person; I cannot be quite happy without someone with whom to share my life.

"This person will be exceptionally unique and special, and it'll be as if they were tailored just for me. They will also have all the traits that I desire, from status to beauty, from smarts to heart.

"And it will be in balance. For example, "he will not be a wimp I can control, but he will not be overbearing" "she will dress sexy to please me, but not too sexy, lest she attract others".

"We will love each other so much, arguments will be unnecessary, even wording our feelings will be unnecessary; we shouldn't have to ask, and we won't have to.

"We will swear to each other to love each other forever and ever, with the same absorbing, all-encompassing intensity that we do now.

"Jealousy is good, jealousy is healthy, in moderation; it is a sign that we care.

"We need each other and cannot properly live without each other. If one of us were to leave, we could never recover, we would be a broken shell, forever incomplete.

"The marriage proposal was dramatic and spectacular and something unforgettable, and the marriage celebration was lavish and as expensive as we could afford; it is, after all, the most important day in our lives.

"Any infidelity is an unforgivable betrayal that can never be truly overcome; continuing a marriage after that is a sham, a joke, deserving of derision.

"A man without a girl might be a loser, a girl without a man might as well have no identity.

"It is better to cheat on one lover with the one you'll leave them for, and risk the resulting drama, rather than risk an interval where you are alone and lover-less."

And so on and so forth.

what I think is bad is to put your beloved on a pedestal, to worship and dehumanize them in, and then lay a fence around them, out of fear that your fetish be taken away.

What I do frown upon is the needy-jealous-mandatory character it takes in our society, which I think causes a lot of unnecessary suffering, even to, no, especially to those who actually want to be with only one person.

notice how it's a very specific, very romanticized kind of monogamy. In other cultures, there isn't so much talk of lovey dovey ness and promises of eternal mutual bliss, only duty and obligation; you're stuck with your partner forever, but you aren't expected to like it. You get your life satisfaction from fulfilling these inherited duties and approving of yourself (and society approving of you), not from fulfilling your desires (whether they're your own, or taught).

...so much of fiction is based upon that monomyth. That bastard is to interpersonal relationships what The Hero's Journey is to overcoming challenges, dangers and the unknown.

Also, the problem with labeling relationships is similar to the one with labeling mental diseases; it's of limited use because of how much variety there is in practice, plus Internalized Categorism causes people to want to follow a script as soon as they know it might apply to them, sometimes with disastrous results.

Here's a very, very harmless example: "We've been dating for a year, where do we go from there? Is it time we started thinking about marriage? Should we make it official?"

Here's a harmful example: "I am polyamourous, therefore I must have more than one partner at a time, at all times."

Here's a very harmful example: "I love my lover, therefore I must be jealous of any competitors that flirt with them." "I am polyamourous, therefore I should feel ashamed of feeling jealousy."
He even proposes revisions to the standard educational curriculum:
Here is the sexual history of Alice: we know that there is x_ij chance of each lover i of having the sexually transmissible disease j, and we know the degree of safety of every type of protections k, in relation to every type of disease j. We also know that Alice has slept n_i times with each lover i.
  • Use Bayes' theorem to predict the chances that Alice has any one of those diseases, at any point during her sexual history.
  • Once these probabilities are known, calculate the expected accuracy of the following tests for the disease, knowing their proportion of false positives and false negatives.
  • For each lover, calculate, assuming that they did not have any of the diseases beforehand, whether Alice has passed them on to them.
And he came up with a snappier term, too, for "the heteronormative monogamy myth."
I just came up with it. It was obvious in retrospect.

The Monogamyth.:D
 
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