WHAT IS LOVE?
Author gets philosophical
VANCOUVER WRITERS FESTIVAL PANEL That Thing Called Love Tuesday, 6 p.m. | Revue Stage, Granville Island
Festival info: writersfest. bc.ca
UBC philosophy professor and author Carrie Jenkins has some things to say about love in her new book What Love Is and What It Could Be.
Jenkins, who is openly and happily polyamorous (in love or romantically involved with more than one person at the same time) will appear with Mandy Len Catron at the Vancouver Writers Festival panel That Thing Called Love on Tuesday at the Revue Stage on Granville Island. We tracked down Jenkins and asked her about that crazy four-letter word.
Q The title is pretty big. Was there a moment you thought, “Oh my, this is a big topic”?
A Yes, every moment. It was the only title that stuck. But it’s a really bad description of what I end up doing in the book, because the size of those questions, compared to the size of my book, my little book … those things don’t match at all. If you want a comprehensive answer to the question of what love is and what it could be, this definitely isn’t it ( because nothing is).
The way I try to reason with myself about having kept that title is that it accurately captures my guiding questions. What I am interested in, more than answering the questions myself, is getting more people to work on them with me, to engage in this collaboration. That’s what philosophy is. We have this tendency to think that philosophy is one person sitting down and being a genius in a room by themselves. You know, solving some great problem or coming up with some really good theory or idea. And that person is probably an old, dead white man with a beard in a toga. Or a tweed suit with elbow patches.
That’s not what philosophy really is. Philosophy is a collaborative process. It’s not about one genius in a room, it’s about people having conversations with each other, and being able to move things along on a scale that one person could never achieve by themselves. My real project, and I suppose my life’s work, is to enable those kinds of conversations. To support them, to keep them going.
Q One of your points is about untangling the social and biological aspects of love. Have you untangled it?
A Nooooo. What I am happy about is a lot of the discussion coming out of the book is focused on that tangle. And I think it is one of those things that I think it is important to try but we’re never going to be done. We’re never going to be finished with that question. The process is really complicated, so that’s why I try to separate out those two strands in the nature of what we call romantic love, but they’re very interactive.
Q Men always have the get-outof-free jail card when it comes to not being monogamous and women are all about nesting. Will that ever change?
A The idea that men are like this and women are like that is programmed in very early on and it just becomes self-fulfilling. I think this question of separating out what is really biological and not biological, part of what is so hard is we have never tried the experiment of not programming people with all our social baggage right from the get-go. So I have no idea what would happen if we didn’t do that. There is no control group.
I think when it comes to love it is even worse in some ways to slip into the tendency of, “Oh, it’s natural, it’s just biology, it has always been like this.” No, it really hasn’t. For all we know, biology has very little to do with what we think of as romantic love.
Q Have you experienced backlash for being a polyamorous woman? Have you been slut-shamed?
A I have been called every version of that word. All these words have
no male versions. They are very gendered. We don’t have a word for men who are promiscuous that is used as a derogatory term.
Q What is the No. 1 misconception of a polyamorous person?
A There are two kinds of misconceptions that are really common in my experience. The first one is that you are kind of an immoral person. You are a cheater who is using this label to cover it up, which is horrible and very upsetting. The second one is that people are not always very clear on the distinction between polyamory and other forms of open relationships. So they might think you are a swinger or maybe it means you’re in a general sexual free for all — (an) orgy every weekend.
Q Is the idea or definition of love evolving?
A In a metaphorical sense, yes. The social construct is changing, definitely, and part of why I think it was a bit easier to write this book now than it might have been at some other periods in history is because there has been so much change recently, even over my lifetime. Twenty years ago, my idea of love would have looked really different.
Q Is now the best time to talk about love in all its forms?
A It’s the best time and the worst time. I think a lot of people are feeling more emboldened now to be hateful, to be divisive. In that context, to get out there in the world and try to promote conversations across ideological divides is a very hard thing to do. But it’s even more important to do it. It’s also one of the worst times in the sense that there is just so much going on, politically and morally, and it all feels like it’s immediate and urgent. That can be overwhelming.
But all of these things are interconnected. It’s not like the way we treat people when it comes to love and relationships is separated from how we treat people politically, or from everything else that is happening on the world stage. What we think about women is totally bound up with ideas about “normal” relationships: you know, is the wife the one in charge of the house and kids? Does that mean we can pay women less? Or we could think about trans people being made to feel unsafe in public spaces and how that impacts dating. Or how Tinder and OkCupid are sites of racist objectification.
Love is part of politics: it’s all connected. There’s no mileage in thinking “we need to talk about something else right now and not love.” It just doesn’t work that way.