21,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
Love is the most important and intense experience of our life. It pushes us to elation, to heartbreak, to sing for joy and sob in disappointment. Connecting in this way to others is an essential quality of being human: without love, we don’t learn and develop properly as children and we don’t flourish as adults – in short, we’re starved of what we need.
But love is on the verge of monumental change. Sex robots are already on the market, polyamory is gaining ground, drugs are being developed that can make you fall in love, and AI and robotics are set to revolutionize how we relate to each other. Debates about whether more than two people should be able legally to get married are heating up; at the same time, an increasing number of people have decided to stay single and who go by the name of sologamists.
The futures anthropologist Roanne van Voorst spent three years researching love’s fluid landscape and immersing herself in today’s latest trends to gain insight into the human of tomorrow. She cultivated a virtual friendship, hired a rentable friend and an erotic masseuse, shared a bed with sex dolls and flirted with artificial intelligence. She dated and danced in a virtual world, spoke to polyamorists, sologamists, sex workers, pansexuals, asexuals, heterosexuals, homosexuals, men, women, and people who don’t accept the binary gender label. She wanted to know how changes to love are changing our species. This book is her brilliantly engaging answer.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Preface
Love is … well, what exactly?
A new definition of love
Changes to love
Seems
Notes
1 Adventures with Sex Dolls
Ideal partners
Sexy Sandy
Fierce debate
Woman on top
My aunt’s house
Dear robot
Happy chat
Meet Nadiah, the asexual sex doll
Notes
2 Six in a Bed
Making a comeback
Non-monogamous waves
Worldwide adultery
Personal research
Trouble in paradise
Compersion
Mess
Organization
Lovebirds
Notes
3 From Digital Cupids to Cheek Cell Samples in an Envelope
Future dating
Toddler matchmakers
Addictive
Hard to choose
Beyond flirting
Unfree love
Artificially matched
Hello love, bye-bye privacy
Conference
Doubt
Notes
4 Quarrelling with Your Lover? Just Take a Relationship Pill
Medicinal faith
Naturally
Love potions old and new
Pathologizing
Experiment
Conditions
Notes
5 In Love with an Avatar
From person to person, from avatar to avatar
Interrealistic
Addicted
Virtual love
Bodily learning
Surprise and vulnerability in friendship
Surprise and vulnerability in love
My experiment
Notes
6 On Unhappy Robots, Programmers in Attic Rooms and Artificial Stupidity
Sexy Alexa (and her creator)
Invisible errors
The experiment
My avatar girlfriend
Notes
7 Rented Friends, Sologamists and Co-Living Spaces
The singles are coming
Happy singles
Paid companionship
Single at heart
Romantic ideals
Notes
8 The Future of Sex Work: Sex Care, Digitalization and Inclusive Pornography
Intimate in a care home
Growing stigma
History and future of sex work
Laugh out loud
Intimate with a sex worker
Digitally intimate?
Noble seal pups
Future concerns
Notes
9 On Sexless Youngsters, Elderly People in Love and Ethical Pornography
Showering in your underpants
More freedom, more obligations, less sex
Yes, I do
There is another way
Later love, and sex in later life
From children’s party to adult party
Notes
10 A Gender Revolution and the End of the Heterosexuals
Accused
Gender in the South, East and West
An interview with them
From label to label
Foucault, the church and your wallet
Notes
Afterword
New human
Natural technology
Cultural and social changes
A future full of love
Notes
References
Preface
Chapter 1 Adventures with Sex Dolls
Chapter 2 Six in a Bed
Chapter 3 From Digital Cupids to Cheek Cell Samples in an Envelope
Chapter 4 Quarrelling with Your Lover?
Chapter 5 In Love with an Avatar
Chapter 6 On Unhappy Robots, Programmers in Attic Rooms and Artificial Stupidity
Chapter 7 Rented Friends, Sologamists and Co-Living Spaces
Chapter 8 The Future of Sex Work
Chapter 9 On Sexless Youngsters, Elderly People in Love and Ethical Pornography
Chapter 10 A Gender Revolution and the End of the Heterosexuals
Afterword
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
iii
iv
v
vi
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
xxii
xxiii
xxiv
xxv
xxvi
xxvii
xxviii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
Six in a Bed
The future of love – from sex dolls and avatars to polyamory
Roanne van Voorst
Translated by Liz Waters
polity
Copyright Page
First published in Dutch as Met z’n zessen in bed. De toekomst van liefde – van polyamorie tot relatiepillen © Roanne van Voorst, 2022. Original Publisher: Uitgeverij Podium, Amsterdam
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Dutch Foundation for Literature.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
111 River Street
Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5842-1 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023945268
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For Michael, who taught me how powerful love can be,
and for Yeva, who is the ultimate proof of it.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to all the people who talked to me for this book about something so personal yet so universal: love. Your stories were sometimes heart-rending, often instructive, and they almost always gave me a sense of deep, human recognition. They enabled me to understand better my own personal experiences of love and to value more highly our shared, social experiences of love.
Special thanks go to those who not only shared their stories with me but read my interpretation of them and corrected it where necessary, thereby guarding me against unnecessary mistakes and unnuanced opinions: Iris, Miriam, Kaylee, Joy, Morten, Lisette, Jacqueline, Jennifer, Lex and all those who for reasons of privacy do not want to be named. Thanks for your attention, your thoughts, the time you put in – you helped me enormously.
Thanks to Iris Heesbeen for the beautiful drawings she originally made for the chapter on polyamory. Thanks to Gabriella van der Linden and Nikki Buijse, who continued my search for sources when – okay, just briefly – I had to take some time off for the birth of my daughter; thanks to Linde Baesjou for bringing order to the ever-expanding endnotes; thanks to Willemijn Lindhout for the reliable, thoughtful editing of the text; to Theo Veenhof for crossing the ‘t’s and dotting the ‘i’s; thanks to Myrthe and Sophie of MVP management for the planning of talks and interviews that I would otherwise have clean forgotten about while writing, and thanks to Joost and Sladjana of Uitgeverij Podium for serving extremely alcoholic mimosas, even though on one occasion it was ten in the morning and I had to teach afterwards.
Thanks, too, to the many authors of books and poems about love – your words kept me awake, hit me below the belt and continually gave me new ideas, far from all of which fitted into this book, although they all fitted into my heart.
My biggest thanks of all go to Michael, for tolerating and even encouraging my sometimes quite challenging fieldwork, which could occasionally be difficult to combine with everyday life, for the never-ending conversations that always took me further in my thinking and for daily celebrating our love with me. Life with you is great, and perhaps the greatest inspiration for this book.
Preface
I must have been about twenty-two that morning when I sat down beside my father at the kitchen table in my childhood home. When he asked if I wanted coffee, I shook my head. When he asked if I wanted to join him for breakfast, I shook my head more vehemently. ‘I just want to be here,’ I mumbled. I’d moved out years before and was living a fairly independent life, but not right then. That night I’d split up with my boyfriend, after four years together.
We were too different, that was clear.
It was the right decision, that was clear.
But that the ending of a love affair could be so horrendous, of that I’d had no idea.
In my late teens I’d fallen head over heels in love, or, rather, into a love ambush. As Dolly Alderton once put it, ‘I didn’t fall in love, love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height.’1 Coming together seemed logical; separating turned out to be profoundly confusing.
The previous night I’d forced myself to end it. I’d felt a pressing need to say out loud what I’d been writing in my journal for months: it’s not working between us any longer; I want to move on.
But when, after hours of talking, crying, hugging, more talking and yet more crying, I watched him walk out onto the street from my student digs, with long, unsteady strides, rubbing one cheek furiously with his sleeve, I wasn’t at all sure it had been the right decision. I only knew that I’d never felt so miserable in my life.
My father asked if I was alright.
I wasn’t. My whole body hurt. I couldn’t even sit up straight; I leaned across the table, resting on my elbows. The inside of my chest seemed to have congealed, making it difficult to breathe. My throat felt raw and my eyes were burning.
My father did something unusual. He stepped out of his parental role and briefly took on that of a psychologist, the profession he’d worked in for decades, and explained to me all about love and happiness, or, rather, about heartbreak and unhappiness. Research had shown, he said, that people often describe the breakdown of a relationship as the roughest time of their lives. They grieve, they feel bereft, they’re continually aware of the absence of the other person and have an intense longing to restore contact. ‘She was gone,’ writes Nicole Krauss about that feeling in her book The History of Love. ‘And all that was left was the space where you’d grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.’
Falling in love again has precisely the opposite effect; most people experience it as the highpoint of their lives. In other words, there’s nothing that can make us so acutely happy or unhappy as love.
His words were a comfort to me, and a source of hope. The relationship had begun in a fog of euphoria, like my earlier relationships. When we were just getting to know each other, my partner and I talked for hours, days, even right through the night – a stream of words that was silenced only by kissing and lovemaking, a perpetual verbal and physical exploration of each other. As time went on, both those streams dried up. Earlier broken relationships had made me cry until my eyes were red. (On this particular occasion I kept it up all the way from Utrecht to Berlin by train, which, when I think about it now, was pretty melodramatic. I’d chosen Berlin because the train tickets were affordable, but in my confused state I forgot to arrange a place to sleep, so eventually I spent the night with a German squatter I’d never met before, who had painted the walls black and, presumably as a form of artistic self-expression, hung a noose from the ceiling. Even amid all my heartache I realized his mood was darker than mine to an impressive degree, and the next morning I was relieved to be able to travel back to my colourful little apartment in Utrecht.)
With every broken relationship, my self-image was dealt a small but stinging blow. Something was lost (naivety and romantic expectations), but at the same time I grew (in realism and self-knowledge, for example). After a while my sorrow became diluted like poison in a barrel of water, until I was barely aware of the loss that lived on in me. Very occasionally, evidence of it might emerge, such as when I moved house and suddenly, while packing, came upon a gift from an ex, or a handwritten note: ‘Can’t wait to see you again this evening!’ Suddenly tears would come to my eyes.
Just as suddenly, a few weeks, months or years after the break-up, I would fall in love again. Another delightful period would dawn, familiar yet totally unexpected, a period in which I never seemed to need sleep, a time of wanting to look attractive and feeling nervous before each encounter, of identifying with every song on the radio, of wanting to sing out loud while cycling.
I’ve been deeply in love several times in my life, and on several occasions I’ve experienced terrible heartache. I’ve had serious relationships and try-outs that soon came to nothing; I’ve moved in with lovers and lived in separate places, sometimes even in different countries; I’ve been married and divorced. I’ve been betrayed by people I trusted and I’ve betrayed people who trusted me; I’ve fallen in love and felt lonely, been head over heels and jealous; I’ve made love and had sex – sometimes all these things at once. I wouldn’t want to have missed any of those moments. They’ve been the most intense periods in my life, the situations from which I learned most, the moments when I was most alive. I might even say that they made me what I am.
Love, I would venture to claim, is life; to love is to be human. Intimacy is anchored in our deepest being. We need it, as humans and as individuals. That’s why the capacity to love others and the urge to love them is laid down in us genetically; that’s why being in love is such a deeply felt experience and why heartache causes us physical pain.2 Love and lust ensure we reproduce, but also that we collaborate, care for each other and help each other – which increases our survival chances as a group. And, because love is crucial for the perpetuation of our species, the experience of love feels profoundly intense for us as individuals.3 It’s just like with hunger and thirst; if we didn’t feel those signals strongly enough at an individual level, then we wouldn’t survive as a species. This applies not just to romantic love but to human intimacy in a broader sense.4 It applies to the affection I can feel for my best friends, and to my love for my daughter, which originated in me during my pregnancy and grew over me like ivy in the weeks after she was born, until it enveloped me completely, from top to toe.
The opposite is no less true. Without love we lose our life force, fail to thrive, fail to grow. Almost everyone will have heard about studies of Romanian orphanages, which prove that young children who are rarely touched or comforted by their carers suffer serious disorders later in life; they are unable to flourish in relationships, or in society in general.5 Far fewer people know that more recent research shows lovelessness in adulthood, something we could call ‘loneliness’, is extremely damaging for the functioning of both individuals and society. People who are often alone for long periods become increasingly awkward in their social interactions. The lonelier you are, the more defensive your attitude to the world and the people around you, and so you get into a vicious circle, because the more distrustfully you interpret the world, the harder it is to connect with others and the more aggressively and inappropriately you behave.6 That is a worrying finding at a time when scientists have determined that loneliness is increasing rapidly among young people in particular, as a result of individualization, technology and lockdowns.7 It’s also a relevant finding for this book, especially if we make a connection with the well-known conclusion of the philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm, who wrote that ‘love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence’ – we search for love as a way to arm ourselves against that horrible but inherently human experience of loneliness.8
Loneliness is increasing, and the human experience of love is not static either – in fact it’s currently changing at considerable speed. Many of us will have noticed the early signs of this in our daily lives, through the dating apps in our phones, the pornography on our computers, or the number of singles or polyamorists among our acquaintances. Over the past few years I’ve started to wonder whether we, as humankind in general, ever stop to think what the consequences will be for our species. Are there others who, as I do, believe that, as love changes, our human experience might be radically transformed, and with it the basic structures of society?
Here are a few examples of the transformations I’ve observed. Experts claim that, by 2050, 10 per cent of young people will not only have had sex with a robot but will want to live with one. There are apps and genetic laboratories that promise to link you up with your ideal partner. Pharmaceuticals currently being produced claim the capacity to keep your relationship exciting, or stable; some are already being tested in therapy sessions, others by couples at home in bed (and others again by me, for this book, but more about that shortly). The number of singles in the Netherlands is growing so quickly that before very long most Dutch people will be single for many years or even their entire lives. In cities such as Amsterdam and Rotterdam, close to half of all residents already live alone and are not in a relationship. It’s expected that, by 2055, half of all Dutch homes will include at least one person who is unattached (not even in an LAT relationship, living apart together). The situation in the United States is not very different. ‘As relationships, living arrangements and family life continue to evolve for American adults, a rising share are not living with a romantic partner. A new Pew Research Center analysis of census data finds that in 2019, roughly four-in-ten adults ages 25 to 54 (38%) were unpartnered – that is, neither married nor living with a partner.’9
At the same time, more people than ever are opting for a polyamorous lifestyle (that’s right, the experimental set-up explored in the 1960s and in many previous episodes of human history). They have several love partners at the same time, live with them, and sometimes raise children in collaboration with three, four or six of those partners. Virtual reality makes it possible to have an online partner, and hundreds of thousands of people are in a relationship with an avatar, having declared their love for it, and say they are so satisfied with virtual love that they’ve no need of partnership with a real person.10 Young people are having less and less sex, elderly people more and more. The online porn industry is so vast that nobody can monitor it any longer, and it’s not clear who is making money from it, although a number of studies suggest that right now there is no economic field where more is being earned; at the same time policymakers and activists are trying to clamp down on sex work on the streets, in brothels or in other workplaces. Gender is increasingly fluid, as is sexual orientation and much more besides. The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has labelled people of the third millennium (that’s you and me) the ‘fluid generation’, in which nothing any longer offers solidity or permanence: neither our work, nor the place where we live, nor the sexual identity we assume, and certainly not love.11
If being in love is inherent to being human, and if the experience of love is changing significantly, there may be consequences for everything that characterizes humankind.12 Change is not necessarily bad, of course, and that certainly includes changes initiated by technological innovation. In fact the outcomes are very often positive. I discuss a number of those in this book. Adaptation is after all a precondition for survival as a species. If we hadn’t changed throughout human history, along with our environment, we would have ceased to exist long ago. We can see most clearly how adaptable we are from the behaviour of young people, such as the students who can work on a split screen more easily than their teachers can, or young people who have already made friends with avatars or become fans of a digital pop musician – and see nothing strange in that. Like everyone else, I’m a child of my time and I’m now comparing the changes in love with what I know from my own life. I believe it’s highly likely that this will sometimes make me rather melancholy, while younger readers will not be troubled by it; they simply have to deal with the future world as they learn to know it, and in their experience of the world there will be no desire for the way things once were – happily enough.
But, in the present day, technological inventions are launched so quickly that we’ve often been using them for ages before we realize what effect they are having on us. There too lurks a danger, because sometimes change takes place without our being aware of it and we saddle future generations with something that, if they’d had a choice, they absolutely wouldn’t have wanted. Sometimes we change in ways that we don’t regard as desirable at all, in retrospect.
Before we look further at all these changes, it might be helpful if I say something about my professional background. I gained my doctorate in anthropology and meanwhile specialized, and received formal training, in exploring the future and in futurology. Although it’s impossible to carry out research in the future, the future can be researched. I’m particularly interested in exploring the impact on humanity of various future scenarios. Over recent years I’ve studied the future of the climate and natural disasters, the future of conflict, the future of food, the future of work and the future of what I call ‘sustainable humanity’.13
I spent more than three years on research for this book. I read hundreds of academic articles and dozens of books about the history and current state of love, attended conferences and interviewed academics, both social scientists and futurologists. I took inspiration from conversations with members of the Dutch Future Society, an organization for those who are professionally engaged in scouting out the future, of which I am chair, and from conversations with my students at the University of Amsterdam, whose fresh, critical viewpoints always challenge my own convictions, and sometimes invalidate them. I also read a lot of literature and poetry about love, watched films and documentaries, went to look at artworks dealing with intimacy and immersed myself in the relevant science fiction.
But my most important means of exploring the future of love – and this goes for all my research and all my books – is anthropological fieldwork, the personal experience of what is now happening on a small scale but may well soon become widespread. I use my body, my mind and my fieldwork journal entries to interpret each theory, to understand better how something may feel to a person and what emotions, thoughts, complexities and joys a specific experience can evoke.
For this book I have taken love pills, cultivated a virtual friendship, hired a rentable friend and an erotic masseuse, shared a bed and a sofa with sex dolls, and flirted with artificial intelligence. I have dated and danced in a virtual world and travelled the real world to visit robot brothels. I have spoken to polyamorists, sologamists, sex workers, pansexuals, asexuals, heterosexuals, homosexuals, men, women, and people who don’t feel at home with a binary gender label and as a result have abandoned, at the same time, the notion of a fixed sexual orientation.
I wanted to know how changes to love change our species. I might have guessed from the start that during my quest I myself would change, yet I underestimated the extent to which that would happen. Some experiences made me – as a researcher but above all as a person – concerned, or downright sorrowful. On one occasion I ultimately decided to call a halt to a small part of my fieldwork; in chapter 8 I explain when that was, and why. At least as many experiences were fascinating, educational and enriching, but they proved far from easy to combine with my own love life. During the research period I fell deeply in love, became pregnant and gave birth to our daughter. That broadened my outlook, because I was experiencing what I was writing about from the inside, but it also placed constraints on my research. Just you try dutifully doing your best to fall in love with an avatar when you’ve lost your heart to a human, or building a friendship with an artificial intelligence that gets the urge to talk mainly in the evenings when you’re trying to convince a human who is just a few months old that mummy really doesn’t spend all her time at the computer.
But still. While writing this book and looking back on all my explorations of modern love, a smile comes to my lips. I’ve gained an insight into what love means to people in the modern day, into what love will mean to you and me in the near future, and even into the role that love is going to play in the lives of the generations to come after us. I have learned, in short, what love is and, above all, what more love could be.
Love is … well, what exactly?
What love is depends on whom you ask.
If I’d been asked before I started to work on this book, I’d probably have told you that love is a universal feeling, an emotion that unites everyone in the world. One thing I now know is: that’s not true. Love is neither an emotion nor something everyone in the world experiences.
Put the question to a biological anthropologist such as Helen Fisher, or a biologist such as Dirk Draulans, or a doctor and sociologist such as Nicholas Christakis, and you’ll be told that love is an ancient, physical system that exists to enable the human species to survive.14 Or, to be precise, that there are three separate systems that sometimes work perfectly well together but at other times obstruct one another with disastrous results: lust, romantic attraction and attachment. You can feel all three simultaneously for a single partner, or you might be lying in bed next to your partner, feeling profound love for them, but also be in love with someone else and have sexual fantasies about a third person. In all three cases, according to those who take this approach to love, what feels to us like an emotion (or like magic) is in fact brutal biology.15 That sense of having butterflies in your stomach is actually caused by neurons and hormones that are fired off by your brain. Although you might imagine you can decide for yourself who is going to become the object of your affections, these scientists say, it’s actually your genes that determine what you feel, and it’s your brain that determines with whom you fall in love or with whom you want to get into bed. The three systems in our brains (lust, romantic attraction and attachment) produce three different urges: to have sex with someone; to look at your phone a thousand times until at last you get a message from that fascinating woman you met in the pub; or to care for your sick or sorrowful partner.
You don’t feel attracted to someone just because love leads to sex and sex to babies, but because that power of attraction leads to long-term, loving relationships with fellow human beings – and this too keeps us, as a species, alive. Biologically speaking we are not made simply to have sex with other people but to love them for years on end, whether romantically or as friends. People have always lived in groups; it increases our chances of survival.16 To be able to collaborate effectively we need to be able to see each other as more than the means of reproduction. We need to be friendly to one another, to have compassion for one another and enjoy spending time together.17 Because of our capacity for love, we concern ourselves in life not just with having sex and fighting off potential sexual rivals but with dinner parties, with helpless laughter, with sharing secrets, with buying flowers or books for someone, and with feeling tenderness or a skin-hungry longing for the arms of a friend around our shoulders. None of this is produced by lust and the desire to procreate – it’s caused by love. Despite the fact that it’s often said that sex is the most powerful motive for human behaviour, it turns out that love is far stronger. After a night of bad sex or a long period without sex you may experience frustration but rarely deep unhappiness; if you desire someone sexually you’re unlikely to commit murder to get them: a ‘booty call’ is probably as far as you’ll go. Crimes passionels, by contrast, are a feature of all human history. Hence the saying ‘All’s fair in love and war.’
Ask a cultural anthropologist or a sociologist what love is and they’ll tell you that, far from being merely a product of inherited biology, love is created by the contemporary environment in which we grow up and live out our lives. Love is largely culturally determined, these researchers say.18 Which explains why certain forms of love are to be found only in certain parts of the world. Not all forms of love, however. Feelings of lust, as far as we know, occur in all cultures, and it seems that feelings of attachment (between mothers and their children, for example) can be observed wherever you look, but not romantic attraction, which we generally call ‘falling in love’. Anthropological and sociological theories about love tell us that passionate love is universal, whereas romantic love is culturally determined. A famous 1992 study, carried out by Jankowiak and Fisher in 166 cultures, showed that romantic feelings are recognized in more than 88 per cent of them. In the remaining cultures (of which there were nineteen) the researchers found not one signal, behaviour or statement that pointed to the existence of romantic attraction.19 There were no stories about falling in love, no love songs, and young people when asked had nothing to say about an experience that, in the West at least, we generally associate with being in love: a longing for that one, special other. (Kissing is far from universal too, incidentally. A large-scale international study from 2015 reveals that romantic kissing, with or without tongues, of the kind in which people in the West are used to engaging with lovers, happens in less than half the world’s cultures.20 So it seems French kissing is not natural but learned behaviour. When the Mehinaku, an indigenous people in Brazil, heard about our kissing custom, they told the researchers they found it ‘disgusting’.)
Ask historians what love is, and they’ll tell you that love, or at any rate romantic love, is determined not only by the norms, values and customs of your immediate social environment but by the zeitgeist as well. They dismiss our enthusiasm for ‘true love’ in romcoms, and indeed the anguish I describe in this Preface, as a modern, Western invention, something that – like kissing – we have invented in this period of individualism and now stubbornly use to torment ourselves, thereby preserving the myth that falling in love is inherently human. No, say the historians, in earlier times marriage had nothing to do with romance; it was all about the transfer of property. Partners did not indulge the expectation that they would find each other attractive or even pleasant, let alone want to be each other’s soulmates. A marriage was successful if a man and a woman managed to run a household together and produce a batch of healthy children. You might find yourself desiring someone outside of your marriage, but you would have to indulge that feeling from a distance, and if a relationship arose it was platonic. This was typical of courtly love, a phenomenon found only among the higher classes that could include admiration on the part of a nobleman or knight for an unattainable, usually married woman. For feelings of lust, a feature not only of all cultures and social classes but of all historical periods, a man would go to a sex worker, while a woman would get together with a fellow villager who felt like having sex with her.
Ask the same question of a psychologist such as the Dane Svend Brinkmann and you’ll be told that love isn’t a feeling at all.21 Rather, it’s a relationship with someone which might in turn lead to feelings of affection, happiness, anger and jealousy. Ask other modern psychologists, such as Ad Verbrugge, Paul Verhaeghe or Dirk De Wachter, and they’ll tell you that love is in fact a longing for your mother at the time when you were a baby, or even still living in her womb, when you always got what you needed – food, comfort, warmth: a form of care and attention for which throughout your life, mostly unconsciously, you’ll continue to search but that later loves rarely give you, which is why these psychologists so often see you or your loved ones in their treatment rooms.22
If you’d asked the ancient Greeks, they’d have told you that love is indeed a search – for your other half, which you once lost and now want back. According to the ancient myth in Plato’s Symposium, humans used to have four legs, four arms and a head with two faces, which enabled us to look both forwards and backwards. In that mythical past, as well as being quite versatile, we were utterly happy and contented, which the gods found threatening. So Zeus – with his lightning – split humans in two. He expected this to limit the power of humankind, as well as creating twice as many people to pray to the gods, but he failed to predict that something quite different would result: people felt incomplete and began feverishly searching for their other half, as we still do today when we search for our true love, sometimes even calling them our other half.
Coming back to the modern world – although inspired to some degree by that mythical concept of love – a philosopher such as Simon May will tell you that love is a form of ontological homecoming, an experience that makes you feel suddenly complete, and safe, whether in your relationship with your romantic partner or in the connection you may feel for a god, or in a sense of ‘belonging’ to the football club you’ve joined. Other philosophers likewise believe that love is not a feeling but a social experience. Iris Murdoch described how loving means you experience something outside of yourself as ‘real’.23 To be able to talk about love, therefore, it’s always necessary for something of yourself to be carried off; in that sense you cannot love yourself, any more than you can borrow money from yourself. Love is always about something or someone outside of yourself. It means that, in a sense, you forget yourself and surrender to the other. Many philosophers who believe that you need to let go of part of yourself in order to love someone else insist that this is extremely important for a good life. Heidegger appears to have said, ‘Dasein ist mit den anderen sein’, which I interpret as meaning that, in order to exist, you have to exist along with others. Emmanuel Levinas even believed that ‘the other is always more important than me’, that ‘giving’ must be at the centre of a relationship, that humanity ‘resides in the other’ and that the world has meaning only because the other has meaning.24 In a recent podcast, the Belgian philosopher Dirk de Wachter echoed that sentiment by claiming that people need each other’s physical touch. ‘We exist as speaking bodies, and both that speaking and that bodiliness are essential.’25
A new definition of love
Ask me again what love is after I’ve spent years reading, thinking and writing about it, and I’ll give you a personal and deliberately vague, incomplete definition.
It’s a definition inspired by all those ways of thinking mentioned above and by a great many other writings and approaches that didn’t find a place in this book. It’s a definition I’ve put together out of the love stories, ideas and myths that seemed to me the most sound, recognizable and helpful, based on my personal experiences with love and my academic knowledge. As an anthropologist I’m interested in the diversity of ways of thinking, the different experiences of cultures and subcultures, or of groups of people through time. As an anthropologist of the future, I always try to take account of what is not yet but might come to be.
I learned a lot from a description by Carrie Jenkins, a British philosopher who, like me, believes that love is partly determined by biology and partly by culture.26 She therefore calls love dual, or hybrid. I would not categorize Jenkins as holding to any of the approaches to love that I’ve summed up so far, because she has a striking, contentious opinion. She regards almost all beliefs about love familiar to us in the academic world (both in the social sciences and in philosophy) as too narrow, because they contain the implicit assumption of a monogamous, heteronormative situation, along with the idea that romantic love is important to everyone in the world. There are some scholars, for example, who have written that it’s precisely the romantic, heterosexual love that we may feel for one other person (the One, the True, the Special) that makes us human, because it leads to human reproduction. But what of people of the same sex who fall in love with each other, or people who have never fallen in love in their lives and never will (and the anthropological studies I referred to above suggest there are a considerable number of those)? It’s also quite insulting to people who are certain they want a lifelong partner but not children, and to people who are unable or unwilling to be with one person but feel love for several people at once. They are not essentially or biologically different from heterosexual, monogamous parental couples. If, for example, you were to make a brain scan of polyamorous lovers, you would see the same hormones circulating and the same activity as in the brains of people who prefer to keep their relationships exclusive. In the popular, normative definition of love that Jenkins is reacting against, this is denied, in most cases implicitly.
I agree with her that a better definition of love needs to be broader and more inclusive. Perhaps so inclusive that it has room for the experience of a non-human being. Looking back on all the experiments I carried out for this book with algorithms, avatars and robots, I do not believe that they currently experience love. But who knows what the future will bring? If what the programmers of artificial intelligences promised me is true, or if what film makers such as Spike Jonze have already portrayed in the beautiful Her is realistic, then it will soon be possible for non-human, digital or virtual creatures to experience something resembling love. In a book about the future of love it therefore seems to me less than logical to make the concept accessible only to human experience. It’s more useful to shape the definition of love in such a way that it can help us to solve a problem that’s crucial for humankind: how do we want to experience love in ten or twenty or fifty years from now?
I would put it this way. Love is a biological, cultural and social phenomenon experienced at an emotional level by conscious beings. It can express itself in sexual desire, in romantic attraction or in attachment. It is relational (and not focused on oneself) because it always contains an element of surprise or surrender. It expresses itself in an intense experience of a longing to be close to one or more specific others and to be physically and/or mentally intimate with them.
I don’t have a neater definition than that, and I certainly have no desire to formulate one. Love is essentially messy. Carrie Jenkins put it rather well: ‘Trying to state the nature of romantic love with precision is like trying to nail some Jell-O to a wall made of Jell-O, using a Jell-O nail.’ It can’t be done. Nor does it need to be. Love is easier to feel than to analyse.27 It’s a conscious experience that’s imponderable and as yet largely incomprehensible to our human intelligence, and at the same time love is of vital importance to humans. It’s far from always present in our lives, but, if it is, then it’s everything. That phenomenon, that overpowering experience that puts the rest of the world into a different perspective, caused Leo Tolstoy to remark that ‘Love is life … everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.’28 Thirty years after Tolstoy’s death in 1910, Nat ‘King’ Cole claimed that ‘the greatest thing you’ll ever learn is to love and to be loved in return.’29 It’s a feeling that may soon be changed for ever. And ourselves with it.
Changes to love
At this point, for the first time in the existence of our species, we are dealing with a type of technology that we know is going to transform not just our behaviour but our skills as human beings. I’m referring to skills that have always been crucial for humans to function: intuition, empathy, interhuman communication, the ability to connect with others. Without them, we as people cannot love, cannot care for each other or collaborate. Without these skills we lose our humanity.
Many studies indicate that we are becoming less good at the most important human skills, with inevitable consequences for the wellbeing of individuals and of society. This is happening not because technology has become so clever in its operations and strategies that it manipulates us, but because we are already adjusting our behaviour to suit the robots, algorithms and artificial intelligence with which we increasingly live and work, even though their functionality is as yet underwhelming. The best-known – although far from isolated – examples come from studies by Sherry Turkle, a professor of social sciences who has spent decades researching the influence of technology on human beings. In her work she shows that the more often we meet via a screen rather than in the flesh, or converse in brief chats instead of fuller exchanges, the worse we get at reading facial expressions and holding complex conversations. In her essay ‘We’re breaking up’, cultural critic Rebecca Solnit gives a similar example of how technology influences our behaviour and emotions. Earlier technology multiplied and increased the possibilities of communication, she claims, but the latest technology actually limits it.30
The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.
It seems more than plausible to me that new trends and innovations influence our experience of love. To enter into loving relationships, we need to be able to communicate effectively with other people and empathize with them – which it seems we’re becoming less good at doing. But far from everyone believes that new technology will change our experience of love, let alone our deepest being. The biological anthropologist Helen Fisher, for example, disagrees with me, and her opinion needs to be taken seriously, because she is probably the best-known social scientist in the world to focus on love. According to Fisher, new love trends, which are often driven by innovative technology, do not change the experience of love and will not do so in the future.
The systems in the brain that regulate love lie far below the cortex (where your thought processes and emotional systems are located) and just below, or actually more or less beside, the limbic system, the most primitive part of the brain (in the midbrain and the brain stem). This is where the hormone dopamine is manufactured, the bodily stimulus that provides us with human motivation and focus, enabling us to get what we want – a specific bed partner, for instance. This area of the brain, as Fisher explains in dozens of books and talks, lies roughly adjacent to the area where the brain experiences and deals with hunger and thirst. She deduces from this that love is so crucial to our survival, and the systems concerned with it came into being so very long ago, that recent developments cannot simply erode them. In a popular TED talk, Fisher says:
Millions of years ago, the trees began to disappear, and we had to get out. … With the beginning of standing came walking. And with that, women had to begin to carry their babies in their arms instead of on their back. So females began to need a partner to help them rear their baby, and we evolved, in the human animal, the brain circuitry for romantic love and for deep, profound attachment to another individual – the very hallmarks of humanity.31
That we currently swipe dozens of photos of potential partners from left to right every day, instead of getting to know each other in a nearby cave, will not diminish our capacity to love. But the way in which we search for love and express it does of course change, as Fisher recognizes. We now app, sext and use emoticons to show our lovers what we feel for them. At the same time there has been a huge increase in opportunities to meet a partner. You can chat with someone who lives on the other side of the world, with whom you nevertheless share a taste in music and a liking for Japanese animated films, and you don’t need to wait until fate causes your paths to cross. Your mobile phone can arrange all of that for you (or you can even, as I describe in chapter 3, get artificial intelligence to act as a matchmaker).
But changes of this sort, Fisher argues, do not affect our deeper experience of love and, with it, our humanity. We have basic survival mechanisms that will still be there in a million years from now; we are built to love. In other words, the algorithm that guides our experience of love does not lie in technology but in our brains. It’s the brain that still persists in telling you, as it always has, to smile sweetly during your first meeting with an attractive Other. It’s the brain that ultimately determines whom you want to see again and whom you do not. To Fisher’s way of thinking, a modern invention such as the dating app is no more than a platform for introductions. Your brain then shapes the rest of the love process, as it has always done. So dating sites, mobile phones and other technologies of love don’t amount to such a dramatic technological change of direction as I suggested above.
Up to a point I agree with Fisher. Just think about it: greater access to cars in the 1950s meant that lovers no longer had to be intimate in the parental home; they could go on a date together, in a bed on wheels. The invention of the pill made it possible for women to have sex without getting pregnant and so to keep more control over their future lives. Another example is the invention of the plough, which according to many scholars took place some 12,000 years ago and which made it easier for ancient humans to produce their food themselves. It triggered the revolution we call agriculture. The formerly nomadic human then began to settle permanently in one place, and scientists increasingly believe that this changed not only the distribution of work between a man and a woman but their power relationship.32 Their stronger physique made it natural for men to do the heavy work with the plough and other machines, while women took on the remaining tasks, mostly in the home – tasks that were less productive and to which less status was attached. When land, livestock, stores and houses became private property, it was necessary to defend what you owned. That task was also mainly a male affair. Ties between men within the family became more important, because sons inherited all property. In the patriarchy that developed, women were exchanged between clans, and later the demand was made of women that they must remain virgins until marriage and stay with the same man for ever. With marriage, therefore, women lost part of their sexual and economic autonomy. These are patterns we still recognize in society today, at least according to popular science. Whether or not it is true has been the subject of recent debate, but, if so, then it does indeed seem correct to argue that the invention of the plough, far more than any recent invention such as an app on your phone, profoundly changed love, and the lives of men and women.33
Seems
Although, like Fisher, I acknowledge that present-day transformations of love are not the first and that there are countless examples of earlier technological innovations that have had an impact on our experience of intimacy, and although I’m also aware that technological advances are often accompanied by distrust and concern – the first train passengers were convinced such a means of travel was dangerous; when newspapers and books found their way to the public, warnings circulated that they would form a worrying distraction for people, ‘addictive as a drug’ – I believe that we will see changes in the years to come the like of which have never been seen before. Because they have the capacity to transform not only love but the entirety of what it means to be human.34
Technology has of course always made us forget how to do certain things, just as it has taught us to do other things – in that sense there’s nothing new. And it’s by no means always a problem if people can no longer perform a certain function; often the advantage outweighs the loss. When the electronic calculator was invented, there was a fear it would make us less good at mental arithmetic. That fear proved well founded. Younger generations are generally less good at mental arithmetic than older generations, but as a society we have benefited greatly from calculators, offline or online, that enable us to solve complex calculations quickly. Before GPS was introduced, many drivers knew their way around or were experts at map reading. Now we meekly obey the robotic voice that tells us where to go. But being less able to calculate quickly or to orientate in space independently does not present insurmountable problems in the modern world or cause our species to lose skills that are of essential importance for our humanity. So these losses have not had a tragic impact on society’s structure and solidarity.
It might be a different story, however, with the transformation of love experiences that we see happening right now, and which may define us in the future. It’s equally possible that new inventions and trends will teach us things that aid interhuman communication, or the development of empathy, or other skills that are useful to society. Perhaps, as their creators claim, robots will give us an opportunity to rehearse our love skills, or perhaps avatars will offer us insights into friendship that prove applicable in real life. The algorithms of dating apps may soon know us better than we know ourselves and therefore help to make our search for love more efficient. Early experiments with relationship pills seem promising; according to the psychologists who are testing them, they teach us to have more empathy for our partners.
‘Love isn’t something natural. Rather it requires discipline, concentration, patience, faith, and the overcoming of narcissism,’ wrote Erich Fromm in his book The Art of Loving. ‘It isn’t a feeling, it is a practice.’ To understand more about love, you don’t need to read, think or talk about it but to experience it in real life. The same goes, I realize, for this investigation into the future of love. Which is why, in order to understand whether, and how, our experience of love is changing, I needed to have a go at engaging in future manifestations of love myself.
Notes
These notes offer tips for further reading or present critical or clarifying remarks that did not fit into the text of the book but were too valuable to leave out. I have indicated the sources as briefly as possible, usually giving just the name of the author and the title of the piece. If you come upon a source you want to consult, you will find the full details in the reference list, again divided by chapter.
1
The full quotation goes, ‘The love I felt was aggressive and fraught – I loved him with panic and passion. I didn’t fall in love, love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height.’ Dolly Alderton,
Everything I Know about Love
.
2
See, for an accessible explanation, ‘The Science of Heartbreak’, an infographic on YouTube:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGglw8eAikY&ab_channel=AsapSCIENCE
.
3
Or ‘has been crucial’, rather than ‘is’. If in the future we become capable of growing a child in an artificial uterus or reproducing outside the body altogether, then there will be no further biological need to form loving couples. Marli Huijer and Klasien Horstman have put together an interesting collection of essays on this subject, called
Factor XX: vrouwen, eicellen en genen
(Factor XX: women, egg-cells and genes).
4
Nevertheless, with each type of love, the experience or feeling that accompanies it differs a great deal. I like to put it this way: when we fall in love, our chest goes all aflutter and we run up stairs that normally seem so steep
because that other person is coming
. With sustained, longer lasting love, we experience a feeling of calm satisfaction, trust and security,
because that other person is still there
. With friendship, we switch between slapping each other on the back and leaning on each other, mixing shared tears of sorrow with tears of laughter, and minor irritations give way to deep gratitude,
because that other person is always there when we need them
. With love for a child or other close family, we care for them when necessary, without questioning our role and no matter how tired or busy we are, because that other person
is
.
5
See my article for
Psychologie Magazine
about styles of attachment, which fortunately turn out to be more dynamic than we previously thought: van Voorst, ‘Gevormd door de liefde’.
6
See Olivia Laing,
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone
. See also an interview by Lisanne van Sadelhoff with the psychologist Gijs Coppens of iPractice Amsterdam who, in
Volkskrant Magazine
(14 May 2021), claimed that ‘severe, long-term social deprivation [can] cause us to withdraw from or even be fearful of “our fellow humans”. After the Covid lockdowns, photos of previous King’s Days and the crowded stalls that last year perhaps still evoked craving and a sense of loss may now cause trembling and abhorrence.’
7
In May 2020,
I&O Research
studied 2,076 representative Dutch people of eighteen or older. See also Noreena Hertz,
The Lonely Century: Coming Together in a World that’s Pulling Apart
.
8
He also says, incidentally, that in order to love others you must first love yourself. See Erich Fromm,
The Art of Love
.
9
Source:
www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/
.
10
See Zygmunt Bauman and Thomas Leoncini,
Born Liquid: Transformations in the Third Millennium
(originally published as
Nati liquidi: transformazioni nel terzo millennio
). Bauman died in 2017, but he remained active as a social scientist almost to the very end of his life. Two years before his death I watched him speak at a philosophy conference in Amsterdam. He undoubtedly sounded a bit more muddled and slow than he had in the past, but he clearly remained an impressive thinker who felt sincere compassion for the human race, the younger generation in particular.
11
In contemporary history the third millennium is the third thousand-year period according to the Gregorian calendar, a time beginning on 1 January 2001 of the Common Era and ending on 31 December 3000. The years of this millennium that have passed are the subject of historical research; future years are the subject of future studies.
12
This change is never homogeneous, incidentally. Certain groups change more quickly; some don’t change at all or change in different directions.
13
On the future of climate and natural disasters, see for example my academic book
Natural Hazards, Risk and Vulnerability: Floods and Slum Life in Indonesia
. Or the more accessible book I wrote about the fieldwork I carried out in flood-threatened slums,
De beste plek ter wereld: leven in de sloppen van Jakarta
. For my work on the future of conflict, see for example ‘Disaster risk governance and humanitarian aid in different conflict scenarios’, contributing paper to GAR 2019. See also
When Disaster Meets Conflict
, at
www.iss.nl/en/research/research-projects/when-disaster-meets-conflict
. On the future of food, see my book
Once Upon a Time We Ate Animals: The Future of Food
. On sustainable humanity, see my work for the University of Amsterdam, where I developed it as a field of study:
https://www.uva.nl/profiel/v/o/r.s.vanvoorst/r.s.van-voorst.html
. For further publications see
www.roannevanvoorst.com
.
14
Helen Fisher has written instructive works on the subject. From her I learned about the three brain regions that together are responsible for different aspects of love: lust, romantic attraction and attachment, this last being the motive for wanting to be with someone and, even more importantly, to stay with them.
15
