Access to a certain inner experience of love
March 11, 2023 6:50 PM   Subscribe

“We’ve often had the kind of stress and struggle of, like, is this working?” Rachel Aviv (previously) writes about professor Agnes Callard (previously) and how she integrates philosophy into her marriages.
posted by doctornemo (63 comments total) 10 users marked this as a favorite
 
To change—but also just to be in love, like, to relate in a really loving way to another person. It’s like once you start trying to do that you come up against all of your limits.” In her marriage with Ben, she hadn’t been aspiring toward any particular ideal, so her flaws didn’t feel as painful. “I think I never realized how fundamentally selfish I was before I met Arnold,” she said. “I’m just really not able to be much less selfish than I am.”

I agree that deciding to leave your husband because you want to bang it out with your grad student is kind of selfish.
posted by Going To Maine at 7:03 PM on March 11, 2023 [20 favorites]


This piece was featured in Tabs and there was a nice follow-up collecting the discourse from around the discourseverse. Rusty’s take:
Yes, these people are idiots, of a particular type you mostly find in academia, but the profile itself is a masterpiece which Callard will probably read with enormous satisfaction because she doesn’t seem capable of grasping that everything she does in it is pure horny middle-aged cliché.
posted by chrchr at 7:47 PM on March 11, 2023 [19 favorites]


The idea that there is some deep philosophical insight reflected in a middle-aged person in an apparently loveless marriage's meeting someone younger and upending their life in a matter of days is...well, it's the kind of thing you'd expect a person wholly unfamiliar with the human experience to come up with.

The weird thing is that she is apparently close with Jonathan Lear, who's always worked on the interface between philosophy and psychology. You might think he'd have given her a hint.
posted by praemunire at 7:53 PM on March 11, 2023 [2 favorites]


My other thought reading this was that I would be tired the whole time.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:01 PM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


Same person.
posted by SoundInhabitant at 9:56 PM on March 11, 2023 [10 favorites]


These extraordinary people who resist interpretation of their lives through narrative don’t realise they seem to be trapped in a cursed David Lodge novel
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 10:04 PM on March 11, 2023 [7 favorites]


Okay, so happy cohabitation, fine. Everyone involved says they're fine with the setup, and who am I to gainsay them?

The shit about Really Thinking Deeply, Man, About Love and whatnot, however, needs to get set on fire. Holy living fuck, why does every person think they're the first to think of shit? Everyone has experienced limerence and the fading of passion with time, or someday will. Most of us don't climb entirely inside our own assholes when we do, though.

When I was in college, I invented a superhero called the Troutslapper, who would find people who needed it and slap them upside the head with a wet trout. Perhaps his services were never truly a joke...
posted by Scattercat at 11:33 PM on March 11, 2023 [23 favorites]


I was trying to formulate a nuanced comment here, but . . . yeah, these people are exhausting. I feel for their students and colleagues.
posted by Don.Kinsayder at 11:50 PM on March 11, 2023 [4 favorites]


Met her just before this came out and I will definitely read it. Bunch of people have recommended it to me and they all make this really funny knowing face when they do so I know it's gotta be good.
posted by grobstein at 12:15 AM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]


Same person.

She also deliberately crossed a picket line to teach during a U of C strike in order to interrogate the notion of what it means to cross a picket line. (See the tabs link above.) Going to the bad place, surely.
posted by Going To Maine at 12:46 AM on March 12, 2023 [14 favorites]


She also deliberately crossed a picket line to teach during a U of C strike in order to interrogate the notion of what it means to cross a picket line.

it means you're a bad person, what do I win, do I win one philosophy
posted by taquito sunrise at 12:50 AM on March 12, 2023 [39 favorites]


It’s wild, because the piece seems to be written so sympathetically, and yet it gives me the ick to read about this incredibly smart but emotional dumb people. And I’m not alone; was the piece constructed as to make you feel contempt for the professor, or did the writer mean it as supportive?
posted by The River Ivel at 1:05 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


The River Ivel, I interpret these New Yorker profiles as curios in a cabinet.

They are not exactly repulsed by the platypus skull. They are also not in favor of the platypus skull. The platypus skull merely exists, and has been identified as bizarre, and staged in the cabinet. Now they are going to show you every weird contour of that platypus skull, to admire with mild horror.
posted by desert outpost at 1:43 AM on March 12, 2023 [35 favorites]


Someone one should her and her husband on behalf of their children to force them to establish a trust fund for the lifetime of therapy they'll absolutely require as adults.
posted by jamjam at 3:12 AM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]


Does anyone have a free link?
posted by virago at 3:27 AM on March 12, 2023


Never mind -- found one.
posted by virago at 3:41 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Dana Bell's tweet about Callard's decision to cross the University of Chicago picket line also seems to apply to Callard's decision to exit her first marriage:
wow love to be a 'living embodiment of my philosophical theory' (doing things that are convenient for me and justifying them later)
Mercy.
posted by virago at 4:19 AM on March 12, 2023 [11 favorites]


More commentary, this time by the great Kate Manne, on aspirations more broadly and on Callard more specifically that should vibe with some of you.
posted by bigendian at 4:43 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


love wants to be free
posted by chavenet at 4:46 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Exhausting.
posted by 41swans at 5:46 AM on March 12, 2023


I went into the article thinking she was just doing her own thing; hey, whatever works. But the more I read, and especially after reading in the comments about her crossing a picket line and throwing out her kids’ Halloween candy (WTF!?), the more this sentence seemed to explain her worldview: Sometimes it seemed to Agnes that the universe had been prearranged for her benefit.
posted by TedW at 6:34 AM on March 12, 2023 [6 favorites]


Sometimes it seemed to Agnes that the universe had been prearranged for her benefit.

Doesn't every insane narcissist think this?
posted by freakazoid at 7:02 AM on March 12, 2023 [8 favorites]


Yeah I read this a couple days ago and my immediate takeaway was that everyone quoted in that article is fucking insufferable. Nothing is real until they've constructed a formal model of it, and nothing that isn't prominent in that model is important.
posted by restless_nomad at 7:10 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


Now idly wondering what Callard would make of Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in the Vindication, which is that after the limerence phase, the marriage's passionate aspect ought to die: "Love, the common passion, in which chance and sensation take place of choice and reason, is in some degree, felt by the mass of mankind; for it is not necessary to speak, at present, of the emotions that rise above or sink below love. This passion, naturally increased by suspense and difficulties, draws the mind out of its accustomed state, and exalts the affections; but the security of marriage, allowing the fever of love to subside, a healthy temperature is thought insipid, only by those who have not sufficient intellect to substitute the calm tenderness of friendship, the confidence of respect, instead of blind admiration, and the sensual emotions of fondness." Wollstonecraft's point is that the kind of moral striving that Callard claims to be invested in is actually incompatible with "passion."
posted by thomas j wise at 7:15 AM on March 12, 2023 [14 favorites]


When I was in college, I invented a superhero called the Troutslapper, who would find people who needed it and slap them upside the head with a wet trout.

Wait…When was this? Did you distribute this? ‘Cause I swear to gawd I’ve seen this premise as a comic somewhere in my timeline.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:23 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


I was wondering, early in the Atlantic profile, if Callard perhaps had some aspects of autism. And then it was confirmed. If it works for them, I don’t think there’s anything wrong per se with what she has identified that she wants out of her romantic relationships, aside from the power dynamics around dating a grad student issue. She doesn’t seem to actually think the universe was arranged for her, she was just noting that it felt like there were a bunch of fortuitous coincidences occurring in close proximity. I don’t think she’s an “insane narcissist”. At least she’s not going around calling herself a sapiosexual. The problem, however, comes in the hubris of universalizing her experience and also thinking that she had some special new insight. I suppose that’s a precondition of getting a tenured position at U Chicago, but it’s certainly annoying. And the whole crossing picket lines thing.
posted by eviemath at 8:51 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


Doesn't every insane narcissist think this?

There's an extremely chuunibyou character in Danganronpa 2 who runs around saying things like, "It seems God exists for my benefit!!!" But he's (a) in high school and (b) a pastiche of an anime character.
posted by praemunire at 9:24 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


It’s wild, because the piece seems to be written so sympathetically, and yet it gives me the ick to read about this incredibly smart but emotional dumb people. And I’m not alone; was the piece constructed as to make you feel contempt for the professor, or did the writer mean it as supportive?

I believe it is written “cleanly” - it describes Callard, it describes the author’s engagement with Callard, and it makes few-to-no *overt* judgments. But a truly sympathetic piece would leave most of us feeling more sympathetic, and we don’t.
posted by Going To Maine at 9:29 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


Friends and I cackled over the awfulness of this earnest, thinky, polycule all last week. But i feel some empathy towards Callard, who is a diagnosed person with autism. Neurodivergent response patterns could be at play in terms of how she comes off and how she approaches basic "how do i live" questions.
posted by Morpeth at 9:53 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Corey Robin nails it in his 2018 essay The Erotic Professor:
To paraphrase what Voltaire is supposed to have said when asked by the Marquis de Sade to attend a second orgy: Once is philosophy, twice is exhausting.
(Seriously, everyone, go read the Robin essay, it's brilliant. Archive link if you need it. You're welcome.)

But I wonder if we'd feel differently about Callard if we encountered her, say, in a biography of the Bloomsbury Group. I mean, this is basically what Bloomsbury was all about, right? Disregarding conventional morality, treating their personal relationships as the highest ethical good? And we tend to admire them for it. So while I'm not defending Callard, I think it's worth asking what it is about her that provokes such a strongly hostile reaction.
posted by verstegan at 9:54 AM on March 12, 2023 [7 favorites]


None of this is anything that hasn't been thought by millions of other selfish, middle-aged, insufferably myopic academics--so how is this one getting so much press?
posted by HotToddy at 10:00 AM on March 12, 2023


Okay maybe not millions. But MANY.
posted by HotToddy at 10:01 AM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


But I wonder if we'd feel differently about Callard if we encountered her, say, in a biography of the Bloomsbury Group. I mean, this is basically what Bloomsbury was all about, right? Disregarding conventional morality, treating their personal relationships as the highest ethical good? And we tend to admire them for it.

Do we? I mean I agree that a kind of aspirational glow attends the idea of a group of brilliant people living their ideas together, and people still think Virginia Woolf was a genius. But to the extent "we" remember anything about what the Bloomsburies were specifically up to idk.

My perspective is defined by this retrospective skewering from Keynes (who was part of the group):
Victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accents of infallibility. Moore . . . was a great master of this method--greeting one's remarks with a gasp of incredulity--Do you really think that, an expression of face as if to hear such a thing said reduced him to a state of wonder verging on imbecility, with his mouth wide open and wagging his head in the negative so violently that his hair shook. "Oh!" he would say, goggling at you as if either you or he must be mad; and no reply was possible. Strachey's methods were different; grim silence as if such a dreadful observation was beyond comment and the less said about it the better . . . [Woolf] was better at producing the effect that it was useless to argue with him than at crushing you . . . In practice it was a kind of combat in which strength of character was really much more valuable than subtlety of mind.
(This appears in Liz Anderson, Value in Ethics and Economics, p. 121.)
posted by grobstein at 10:10 AM on March 12, 2023 [11 favorites]


I think there are a lot of people who are easy to regard as geniuses in the abstract but who would have been absolutely insufferable in person, and I think we should kind of all be forced to reckon with that.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:43 AM on March 12, 2023 [11 favorites]


aside from the power dynamics around dating a grad student issue

To put it bluntly: don’t yadda yadda yadda abuse! The power dynamics are extremely important here! They’re the most important thing!
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 10:46 AM on March 12, 2023 [12 favorites]


Oh, and that sometimes the localized problems caused by your insufferableness are net much worse than the gains brought about by your genius
posted by Going To Maine at 10:47 AM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


I don’t love some of her opinions but also sometimes people trying to live deliberately are going to be cringe and that’s still better than the thousands who line up to defend an exploitative staus quo, imho.
posted by dame at 10:56 AM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


But I wonder if we'd feel differently about Callard if we encountered her, say, in a biography of the Bloomsbury Group.

One kind of hopes Deceived with Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood would be on the list, no? Even if it is a bit of a slog. I know that in my 20s I thought the whole thing was romantic but now that I have kids, the David Garnett/Angelica Bell story just turns my stomach inside out.

I'm actually sympathetic to Callard's feelings - not mistaking them for a requirement to end your marriage immediately or a moral imperative to explore them though. I'm a bit bemused at that being taken as living deliberately. And polyamory is fine and I guess the coparenting/cohabitation parts look that way externally.

But what I find really awful is the part where Arnold is just trying to grade and she's all upset that he's not immediately available the way she wants, because for her she can't have thoughts without another person. That to me is not philosophical. Having grown up in a house where one person's feelings/thoughts/feelings-turned-imperatives ruled the home it was really damaging.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:16 AM on March 12, 2023 [12 favorites]


Disregarding conventional morality, treating their personal relationships as the highest ethical good?

You can disregard conventional morality without treating your personal relationships as the highest ethical good, and to the extent there are Bloomsbury people to admire, they took that tack. (In truth, maintaining a good enough relationship with your ex-husband that you can essentially stay together, plus one, for the purposes of giving your kids a stable home is a noble goal, but is not treating your personal relationships as the highest ethical good!)

Trying to live according to one's understanding of philosophy is a sympathetic aim--at least to me. But without a good grasp of the pre/non/irrational side of human nature and of the operation of power dynamics, it's a recipe for catastrophe if you do have any power. Without these, you're just another jerk living blindly and domineering over others, all the while convinced your ability to coerce the outcomes your id has presented to you as the fruit of mature consideration is a reflection of your genius. It feels like Callard stopped growing as a human being some time in college. It's a phenomenon seen much more often in men, so...go modernity?
posted by praemunire at 12:32 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


Where are observations of the actual effects of one’s nonstandard philosophy supposed to feed back in? (Are they? Is that a particular philosophical stance?)
posted by clew at 12:39 PM on March 12, 2023


Where are observations of the actual effects of one’s nonstandard philosophy supposed to feed back in?

Why would they, when you already know what the results should be? Anything different is just user error.
posted by praemunire at 12:43 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


I’m counting my ribs at you.
posted by clew at 12:46 PM on March 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


Being more serious, I know it's red meat, but the Halloween candy trashing illustrates the problem well. She doesn't want her kids gorging on candy for a week: okay, reasonable. But any experience with kids would then lead you to do what I imagine 90% of parents who feel that way do, which is allow some brief period of free rein and then ration out the candy til it's gone. In fact, by trashing the candy overnight, she's just encouraging the kids to completely gorge that one night and/or hide candy from her and lie about it. Which can only do wonders for a child's attitude towards food and their body; in the long run, that's worse for both their mental and physical well-being.

Let's suppose she didn't understand that. When she found out how thrilled her child was that she didn't trash the candy, that should have prompted her to reexamine her thinking. When their child is so completely delighted that they've apparently deviated from a preexisting rule, a conscientious parent not enraptured by their own genius would ask themselves whether the rule was the right one. They might even talk to the child to try to learn what they were thinking and feeling about the rule, to better understand the effects of that particular parenting practice. Nope! Out with the candy!
posted by praemunire at 12:49 PM on March 12, 2023 [5 favorites]


When I was in college, I invented a superhero called the Troutslapper

Your ideas are intriguing to me, and I wish to subscribe to your Patreon.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:57 PM on March 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


When I was in college, I invented a superhero called the Troutslapper, who would find people who needed it and slap them upside the head with a wet trout.

Wait…When was this? Did you distribute this? ‘Cause I swear to gawd I’ve seen this premise as a comic somewhere in my timeline.


Sounds like the Fish Slapping Dance sketch by Monty Python.
posted by donut_princess at 2:11 PM on March 12, 2023 [4 favorites]


I'm sure many people have invented concepts involving striking with fish. I didn't see the fish-slapping dance until later in life, but the sentiment is similar. The Troutslapper's design was more directly influenced by Cloud Strife, as FFVII was new that year. I even outlined his various levels of Limit Break, which concluded with slamming a whale down on the offender.
posted by Scattercat at 3:42 PM on March 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


I'm sure many people have invented concepts involving striking with fish.

On topic? No.

Essential discourse? Absolutely, 100%
posted by billjings at 11:25 PM on March 12, 2023 [6 favorites]


Joyce Carol Oates is one of the few academics on Twitter who's had more bad hot takes than Callard has herself, but ever since her absolutely fire series of anti-transphobia tweets a week or two she has been On One, and it's glorious to behold. Her tweet about the Callard profile is deliciously vicious:
(excerpt from an uncompleted novel of Iris Murdoch focusing intensely, one might say hysterically-minuscule-ly, upon banal-stereotypical notions dressed up in philosophy-speak is no departure for the deceased novelist but her usual fatuous characters are here unleavened by wit.)
I've always been mixed on Oates as a writer but I can sincerely and admiringly say that nobody else on the planet could have devised that particular put-down, or executed it in that precise a manner.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 9:02 AM on March 13, 2023 [2 favorites]


These people need to learn how to feel their feelings rather than just intellectualizing them.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 9:36 AM on March 13, 2023


I wonder about her realtionship to Autism, and how that connects to her rhetoric, she doesn't seem to have seriously interogated it.
posted by PinkMoose at 5:10 PM on March 13, 2023


I read the piece. It's good!

I guess I am more sympathetic to what Agnes is trying to do than some readers? Anyway, I don't read the piece as just an extremely dry skewering. It is inviting us to see some value in what these people are doing together (too).

Certainly it does not say that everything Agnes has thought about what she was doing was correct. There is a kind of naivete that comes from people telling you you're a genius; it makes it harder to learn ordinary things from ordinary people. A lot of what Agnes is learning now seems to be stuff that someone could have easily told her 12 years ago. On the other hand, sometimes you really have to learn something for yourself (even if you're not a genius). On the third hand, sometimes I think philosophy is about being wrong in interesting ways.
posted by grobstein at 7:36 PM on March 13, 2023 [1 favorite]


On the other hand, sometimes you really have to learn something for yourself (even if you're not a genius).

True, but, once you've accustomed yourself to recasting your folly as just another essay in genius, you're liable to miss the actual lesson in your experience. Admittedly, I would almost certainly characterize any major screw-up in my life to the New Yorker as "I meant to do that"; the willingness to front in that way is almost a prerequisite to NYC life; but I suspect she'd condemn such chicanery.
posted by praemunire at 7:55 PM on March 13, 2023


what I imagine 90% of parents who feel that way do, which is allow some brief period of free rein and then ration out the candy til it's gone

slightly off topic-

In the backlash against sugar/almond moms movement there has been the development of the "Halloween Fairy" who comes on an appointed night and takes all the candy that's left, but leaves behind a gift.*

to relate it to the topic -

I mention this because parents who were looking for candy solutions started this tradition in, I want to say, the mid-00s, the same way that people in marriages have coped with many variations on "I met someone else and realized my marriage wasn't good."

* we do not have this tradition.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:06 AM on March 14, 2023


I feel like there's something in here that I recognize about women my age-ish in academia, or actually just women my age-ish with big educations and thinky jobs. I feel like we internalized a lot of really weird shit about love and relationships early on--a conscious and subconscious rejection of romance as any kind of laudable goal or experience because we were INTELLECTUALS and relationships should only be about actualizing our intellects and ambitions--and only much later had the actual experience of, you know, being in love with a person. Some of us were lucky and weren't married with kids yet when it happened, but...most were.

So I didn't hate this; in fact, I feel like it echoes a conversation I've had often over the last 6-10 years. A friend comes to me with all manner of high-minded Thoughts on this Coworker and complex schemes, and I'm like honey you have a crush, this is what a crush is.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:23 AM on March 14, 2023 [6 favorites]


I was prepared to hate this person from the pull quotes alone. And yet, after reading it and reflecting on my own divorce, I see something else. I see proof that identity—self-identity—is maybe made or revealed to be more complicated the more scrutiny we apply to it.

It makes me reflect on how my friends who seem the least reflective or ruminative or prone to navel gazing also seem to have less anguish about their relationships. Maybe less anguish about how those relationships change, or what kind of status quo those relationships are in at any given time. And then you get people like this, people who have made a career of this very esoteric premise that the human condition is being sorted out in some way by reflection. And maybe it is? Maybe it is. It's messy, though. It seems like confidence and hubris are just as present in that world as in the former. It's apparent in this piece, the changes that all these new relationships borne out of opportunities for attempts at self-creation encounter.

“Arnold fundamentally sees life as, like, you’re supposed to find a place of contentment,” she said. “And his way of doing things often shows up to me as: he’s not working hard enough. And my way of doing things often shows up to him as: she’s incapable of being happy.”


I reflect on my own dissolved marriage, my distance from the man I once through of as the closest to me that a human being could be. I reflect on the passage of time, the distance between then and now, what is encapsulated in 27 through 42. I appreciate these people speaking like this, as openly as they can. I'll try to resist the urge to cringe and try to hear the little drum beat in here that's trying to keep time with a rythm that makes sense in the noisy universe or human relationship.
posted by late afternoon dreaming hotel at 4:52 AM on March 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


A friend comes to me with all manner of high-minded Thoughts on this Coworker and complex schemes, and I'm like honey you have a crush, this is what a crush is.

Yeah that was my reaction, too. I always feel a little bad for people who only get crushes occasionally, because they can get really life-destroying if you don't recognize them. (Me, I've had a crush on *someone* since I was about 4, as far as I can tell, and I've pretty much figured out how to cope.)
posted by restless_nomad at 6:50 AM on March 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


I always feel a little bad for people who only get crushes occasionally, because they can get really life-destroying if you don't recognize them

I definitely had to go through some life-destroying crushes before I got a handle on what they were, is the thing, because it just wasn't something I was "supposed" to care about. I was supposed to be a Serious Person with Potential, not someone who could get distracted by like, being human.

The things parents and teachers said about girls who had crushes and dates and did a flirt! They stick with a person. "Boy crazy" (never mind the compulsory heterosexuality involved, yikes) was like, the worst thing to be! Boy crazy girls didn't make it to college; boy crazy girls got knocked up; boy crazy girls didn't get scholarships or awards because they were too busy being boy crazy.

But you couldn't be single because then you might be weird or gay. (Seriously, FUCK the 90s. What a garbage-ass time to be alive.) So you just cram all that crush energy down and date some guy who doesn't prompt any big feels and decide that love is a thinky verb! And then 30 years later you're this lady.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:21 AM on March 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


Yeah, for sure. As a small gay kid with an excess of limerance, I didn't have any relationships that *weren't* crushes, and had to learn how to behave such that my crush never ever EVER figured it out. In exchange, I got to entirely escape all the weird "boy-crazy" judgement. Not sure there's much to prefer in either direction.
posted by restless_nomad at 10:30 AM on March 15, 2023 [1 favorite]


My relationship experience would be a whole different kind of philosophical treatise, but I so relate to the idea that maybe some women who were socialized to be Serious Thinkers do sort of have to link their feelings to purpose in order to experience them as legitimate, or something. Thanks for the insight, it's made me more empathetic towards the profile.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:20 PM on March 15, 2023 [2 favorites]


I definitely had to go through some life-destroying crushes before I got a handle on what they were, is the thing

I sure did, too...but don't we all? The nerdy girls maybe just have to iterate through the experience a few more times to make it clear to themselves. What remains baffling to me in all this is how she could've gotten to her early 40s without this experience, or at least observing this experience in the people she cares about and coming to a second-hand understanding of it, or even reading some twentieth-century novels in which it's a subject. It's not like you need reciprocation to be knocked sideways by a crush, even, and clearly she can pull.

The question of how much she's simply ashamed to speak of an emotional life that isn't driven by Higher Purpose is interesting, but, as she's a successful person in her 40s who seems quite comfortable speaking her mind otherwise, that's got to be a largely self-imposed restriction. Honestly, in some ways she reminds me of me in my late teens, but...I'm not me in my late teens, because I've lived roughly the same amount of time as her since then. I haven't achieved enlightenment, but (I think) I do know what a crush looks like?
posted by praemunire at 3:29 PM on March 15, 2023


What remains baffling to me in all this is how she could've gotten to her early 40s without this experience, or at least observing this experience in the people she cares about and coming to a second-hand understanding of it, or even reading some twentieth-century novels in which it's a subject.

Man I don't know but I do know that at least three women in their 40s, all with Ivy or Ivy-proximate (e.g., University of Chicago) degrees, have come to me in the last couple of years with this perplexing and completely novel, never seen before in all of mankind, experience of actually being super duper big-time interested in and attracted to a human being.

Best I can figure is that it's extremely possible to keep yourself occupied enough to not really live an emotional life, especially if you're young, busy, driven, and very thinky. But then you hit middle age and you're just too fuckin tired to be a worldbeater ...
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 11:55 AM on March 17, 2023 [1 favorite]


It’s such a trope for men that Smart Bitches Trashy Books probably has cute names for it.

Really intense careers often include deep emotional bonds/breakups with colleagues, I wonder if that’s where some of it lurks.
posted by clew at 12:33 PM on March 17, 2023


I also think that for women who date men, the kinds of attention and interaction they get really start to change in their 30s, and can become much more interesting and desirable. Not everyone wants to be a Hot Young Thing, even if they are built such that it's a possibility, and if being evaluated on that basis is a hallmark of your interactions with men, it can really seem like romantic relationships aren't For You. (This is obvs. secondhand reporting - I'd be curious if other folks have experienced this.)
posted by restless_nomad at 12:42 PM on March 17, 2023


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