Love and Couples

We often confuse love and couple, love and sexuality, love and jealousy. Yet love is an immense feeling that largely overflows the framework of the couple and emotional deficiencies.

The original confusion: when love is reduced to the couple

When we speak of love, I observe an almost systematic confusion between love as a feeling and the couple as a social structure. This amalgamation, deeply rooted in our collective representations, perpetuates the myth of fusional complementarity theorized by Aristophanes in The Symposium by Plato: this idea that we would be halves in search of our other half. However, the couple constitutes a modality of social relation that is in no way confused with the romantic relationship itself. Let us observe the symptoms, then explain it.

This confusion between couple and love generates countless sufferings. The members of a couple almost all maintain, during the course of their existence, other romantic experiences, whether they are hidden, fantasized or sublimated. This phenomenon reveals the inadequacy between the social structure of the couple and the expansive nature of love. As Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Second Sex (1949):

“Authentic love should be founded on the reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each would then experience themselves as themselves and as the other: neither one nor the other would abdicate their transcendence, nor mutilate themselves; both would reveal together in the world values and ends. For both, love would be a revelation of oneself through the gift of oneself and enrichment of the universe.”

Serge Chaumier, in Fissional Love: The New Art of Loving (2004), brilliantly analyzes this contemporary mutation:

“The modern couple is worked by a fundamental contradiction: on one side, the fusional aspiration inherited from romanticism that wants to make the couple the place of all accomplishments; on the other, the requirement of individual autonomy that characterizes our societies. This tension produces what I call fissional love: a love that carries within itself the seeds of its own destruction, because it cannot simultaneously satisfy the desire for fusion and the need for independence.”

I also perceive a persistent confusion between love and sexuality. How many people justify parallel relationships by reducing them to their sexual dimension, as if sexuality could be detached from all affect? This artificial compartmentalization testifies to our collective inability to think of love in its complexity and multiplicity.

Love as an expansive force: beyond possession

I deeply adhere to the conception according to which one can love several people simultaneously, not in a logic of division, but of expansion. Love is a force that grows when cultivated, that multiplies without dividing. This vision joins the thought of Bell Hooks in About Love: New Visions (2000), where she defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

Love, unlike time or social frameworks, does not divide: it expands. One can love several people at once, not from lack but from overflow. This is the whole meaning of polyamory, which recognizes that love does not obey the logics of exclusivity imposed by social structures.

Françoise Simpère, in Guide to Plural Loves (2009), defends this multiplicity with eloquence supported by her life experiences:

“Love is not a cake that we share in increasingly smaller parts as the number of guests increases. Love is like a flame: we can light a thousand others without diminishing the first. Each new romantic relationship enriches us, transforms us, makes us more capable of loving still. It is jealousy and possessiveness that shrink the heart, not the multiplicity of loves. Polyamory is not a subtraction but an addition, not a division but a multiplication of possible happiness.”

This expansion of love obviously does not contradict the temporal limits of our existences. Days have only a limited number of hours, certainly, but the love that grows in us knows no borders. The analogy with parental love seems particularly illuminating to me: when a second, a third child arrives, we do not divide our love between them. The second child takes nothing away from the love carried to the first, on the contrary, our capacity to love expands, multiplies.

“Yes, but romantic love is something else!” I am often objected to. I categorically refuse this hierarchization of loves. Love is a unique feeling in its essence, whether it is directed towards oneself, towards nature, towards the divine, towards one’s children, towards one’s friends or towards people for whom one is romantically smitten. The ancient Greeks already distinguished eros (passionate love), philia (friendship love), agape (unconditional love) and storge (familial love), but recognized in each a manifestation of the same fundamental impulse.

The pathologies of attachment: what is not love

What we too often take for love actually stems from our emotional lacks, our emotional deficiencies, our fears of abandonment. In the context of so-called romantic relationships, these flaws manifest as the compulsive need to be reassured by the other, jealousy faced with the fear of losing the object of our attachment, the desire for possession and control, or conversely, total submission to the other.

All these manifestations have strictly nothing to do with authentic love, they even constitute its exact opposite. As Erich Fromm brilliantly analyzed in The Art of Loving (1956):

“Immature love says: ’I love you because I need you.’ Mature love says: ’I need you because I love you.’ Immature love follows the principle: ’I love because I am loved.’ Love maturity follows the principle: ’I am loved because I love.’ Immature love says: ’I love you because you fulfill my needs.’ Mature love says: ’I love you because you are.’ True love is an expression of productivity and implies care, respect, responsibility and knowledge.”

Jealousy is often presented as the ultimate proof of romantic attachment. But in reality, it destroys. It is only a projection of unresolved anxieties. As Spinoza reminded us, “he who lives in fear and hope is a slave” (Ethics, III, 1677): jealousy is therefore not love, but servitude.

Serge Chaumier, in The Amorous Unbinding (1999), deepens this analysis:

“Jealousy is not the guardian of love but its gravedigger. It transforms the relationship into mutual surveillance, affection into permanent suspicion. The jealous person no longer sees the other but only the potential rival that hides behind each social interaction. This obsession with control reveals not the intensity of love but the depth of emotional insecurity. The couple then becomes a besieged fortress where each is both guardian and prisoner.”

The very expression “crime of passion” deeply revolts me. It justifies violence and the destruction of the other in the name of a supposed excess of love, when it is the absolute opposite of love. There is no crime of passion, only crimes committed for bad reasons. When a man kills his partner out of jealousy, he projects onto her his unresolved emotional deficiencies. This act has strictly nothing to do with love, neither with the one he claimed to bear her, nor with the one she could bear him. We have confused, tragically, possession and love, dependency and healthy attachment.

The couple as alliance: a reality distinct from love

The couple, I conceive it as an alliance, life alliance, community alliance, parental alliance, commitment towards the common. This perspective joins the vision of François de Singly in The Self, the Couple and the Family (1996), where he analyzes the contemporary couple as a negotiated construction between two individualities:

“The modern couple is no longer founded on the complementarity of sexual roles but on the permanent negotiation between two individuals who want both to be together and to remain themselves. This tension between the conjugal ’we’ and the individual ’I’s structures all contemporary relational dynamics. The couple becomes a space of perpetual compromises, constant readjustments, where each must learn to compose with the irreducible otherness of the other.”

The two are therefore not opposed. The couple can be a space of romantic fulfillment, but it does not exhaust it. It is complementary, but not exclusive. As Roland Barthes wrote in Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse (1977), love is a language, a subjective experience, while the couple is a form, an organization. Confusing the two is condemning love to shrink into an institution that does not contain it. Françoise Simpère adds in Loving Several Men (2012):

“The couple is only one form among others of organizing our emotional and sexual lives. Sacralizing this form to the detriment of all others is considerably impoverishing the field of romantic possibilities. Why should we choose between the intensity of a new passion and the depth of an old love? Why should tenderness exclude desire, security forbid adventure? The exclusive couple imposes impossible choices where life could offer ’ands’ rather than ’ors’.”

The desire that is shared in a couple is not limited to its romantic dimension; it is a desire for community, a community within which there certainly exists a romantic component, but which largely exceeds it. The community of the couple encompasses multiple dimensions: patrimonial, social, financial, familial, sometimes professional. These dimensions, completely distinct from love, do not necessarily oppose it. They can be complementary, form an enriching diversity, but it would be dangerous to confuse them with love itself. These are distinct elements that cohabit, articulate, negotiate.

Thus, I believe that we must fully recognize the legitimacy of romantic relationships that do not involve a life community. They possess their own importance, their singular beauty, their truth. Love does not need the couple to exist fully, just as the couple can subsist without love, even if this last configuration seems a little sad to me. Distinguishing these two realities would allow us to live more authentic relationships, less charged with contradictory expectations, more respectful of the true nature of our feelings and our commitments.

Towards a renewed relational ethics

This confusion between love and couple constitutes, I am convinced, the source of all the other confusions that poison our relational lives. By untangling these entangled threads, we could finally build more just, freer relationships, more respectful of the multiplicity of our emotional impulses. Love would rediscover its expansive and generous dimension, while the couple would assume its contractual and community nature, without one crushing the other under the weight of impossible expectations.

I invite Serge Chaumier to conclude, with this extract from Fissional Love (2004):

“The challenge is not to destroy the couple but to reinvent it, to free it from the romantic straitjacket that suffocates it. A couple conscious of its limits, assuming its contractual dimension, can paradoxically become the place of a more authentic love because less charged with illusions. It is by accepting that the couple cannot do everything, that it is not the unique and exclusive place of emotional fulfillment, that we will finally be able to inhabit it serenely.”