Reframe romance with philosophical conceptfrom @glass__museum

Transcript

Don't need a situationship, you need to make art. As the weather gets colder and the air starts to smell like cuffing season, I'm here to remind you that there are other more fulfilling ways to get through the winter. Now there's a viral tweet about how your lack of purpose is causing your romantic obsession, and it reminded me of Audre Lorde's notion of the erotic. In her essay, Uses of the Erotic, the Erotic as Power, Lorde writes about the need for an exploration of the erotic, not merely a sexual pleasure, but as a profound source of knowledge about our capacity to feel, create, and experience satisfaction. We live in a romance centered society where romantic love is treated as one of life's primary pursuits. And from a young age, we learn to treat romance like a hobby. And like, I get it. It's fun to have a crush. I remember in middle school, I'd pick a new crush every single time I was in a new environment. Having a crush lent an undercurrent of excitement that made an otherwise ordinary period of my life feel more cinematic. When life was boring, the fantasy of romance remains a readily available outlet for our need to feel excited, alive, and invested. But what if we took this aliveness, this erotic energy, and directed it somewhere else? We tend to associate this feeling of invigoration, these better, with romantic possibility. But the feeling itself isn't inherently romantic. Romance is just where society encourages us to experience it the most. For Lorde, the erotic is not only a question of what we do, it's a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. The erotic in this sense is a kind of aliveness. It's a deep and irreplaceable knowledge of our capacity for joy that demands we live with an understanding that such fulfillment is possible. When you're able to find the erotic in the everyday, in writing a poem and feeling the sun on your skin, you no longer feel the need to constantly chase the erotic in romance. I feel this energy when I think about learning a new dance or when I'm coming up with a particularly good idea. And what it feels like is like a soul orgasm. I know it sounds stupid, but there's really no better way to describe it. It's the butterflies you feel when you become completely absorbed in a new interest or when you're so excited about a creative project that you can't stop thinking about it. I think we often mistake the butterflies associated with romance as evidence that romance is uniquely capable of producing them. We attribute this feeling to a person or a relationship when it actually just reveals something about our own capacity for wonder. And it's no coincidence that we're encouraged to locate this energy primarily in romance and sex as opposed to other aspects of our lives. As Lorde argues, the erotic is frequently confined to the bedroom because once we begin to feel deeply in all aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life pursuits that they feel in accordance with the joy that we know ourselves capable of. In other words, when we recognize our capacity for aliveness, we begin to question why so much of our waking life feels so far removed from it. Capitalism directs our attention towards romance as one of the most immediately accessible forms of gratification. Gratification. After a long tier day of work, sometimes you just want an escape. The same way you might hit a vape, you might also swipe on dating apps, anticipate a message, and experience a brief rush of excitement without having to fundamentally change your circumstances. And of course, it's understandable. Who needs drugs when you can fantasize about your crush before bed? But perhaps we ought to do the difficult task of working towards our own fulfillment. Romance is used as a ready made answer to temporarily fill a void that is created by society that leaves us alienated and disconnected from the things we find meaningful. Instead of asking why our lives feel so empty, we just find someone to make it full. And don't get me wrong, I love love. But there is a difference between romance as love and romance as an activity that we use to distract ourselves from the dissatisfaction of our own lives. Allowing room for the erotic is about allowing ourselves to live fully. It is ultimately, as Lorde writes, to feel so alive that you need nothing more than your own existence.