![]() Part of it, I think, is that when people hear "in love" they are imagining a romantic fairy-tale story. They say both of those things as if they were almost saying the same thing. But when people hear that you are in a polyamorous relationship, the response that you get is often folks telling you that you couldn't possibly be happy, that there might be something wrong with this - that this couldn't really be love. Jenkins says people tend to listen to happy stories about monogamous relationships, while ignoring happy stories about non-monogamous ones. ![]() Someone can love you even if you're not waking up thinking that the hills are alive with the sound of music every day. You can be sad, you can be depressed even, and you can be in love with someone. What I'm talking about is situations where people are in love and connecting and relating to one another, but they are making space within that for their own emotional range, which includes sadness and includes anger, and happiness, too. The really important distinction here is between an abusive relationship or one where a person is being harmed by their partner or by the relationship itself. Are you saying that we should stay in unhappy relationships? I mean, where do you draw that line? Someone can love you even if you're not waking up thinking that the hills are alive with the sound of music every day. - Carrie Jenkins, philosopher and author What we've sort of put in place, to a large extent, is an emotional dream that no matter who you are or what your situation in life is, you can make yourself an emotional success, make yourself happy. It doesn't matter who they are, start from nothing, work themselves out, or pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and become successful. It became this really clean, excited, super happy idea of what would be the American dream. That in some countries in the world, people have far more sober and even cruel, dark fairy tales for their children. In the book you connected this to the American interpretation of happiness. I learned it's OK to keep secrets for a time It raises all these questions to my mind and those worry me.įirst Person Relationships are complicated. But then when you think about where that leaves everybody else, me included, I'm not happy a lot of the time. We associate being in love as strongly as we do with being happy, and when you say that love makes you happy or that love and happiness are really bound together, it sounds great. A lot of us live most of our days somewhere in the middle of extremely euphoric and extremely miserable. And a lot of us don't live there most of the time. If you're thinking of love, it's always on one of the extremes. Even when that's going well, it tends to be extremely fragile. Carrie Jenkins, philosopher and authorīut you're saying this isn't really the path to happiness? ![]() And when it doesn't work, it's the worst thing ever. When it works, it's just the best thing ever. Or there are songs where we're utterly ecstatic and bouncing off the ceiling because of our joy in the pursuit of love.Įxactly. Of course, there are the songs where we're almost reveling in the suffering. Carrie Jenkins is a philosophy professor at UBC, and author of Sad Love: Romance and the Search for Meaning, published in May 2022 (Submitted by Carrie Jenkins)
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