I think this might be the Objectivist equivalent of the movie trailer I posted last week.
Setting aside the dubious wisdom of getting your romantic advice from a woman whose romantic life was, well, less than ideal, I’ve always felt the Objectivist view of love and sex to be rather problematic. In particular, I think that Rand’s view of ideal romance as a woman engaging in “hero worship” of her male lover to be profoundly mistaken. And her idea that the act of sex between them basically being one where the woman submits herself to “conquest” by a man to be abhorrent.
Love is a partnership. A partnership of equals. It’s not a “mutual trade.” It’s about setting aside your ego for one person to the point where “we” and “I” are, in many ways, the same thing. It’s about building a life together in a manner that’s not possible by yourself. No matter how you define it, selfishness and love are polar opposites.
This is not to say that when you love someone, you give up who you are completely. That’s nonsense. And to be fair, I think there’s no small amount of wisdom in Ayn Rand’s phrase, “To say ‘I love you,’ one must first know how to say the ‘I.’” You do have to have a good measure of virtue and independence before you can give yourself to someone else. The essence of love — moving beyond ego into a true partnership –is only possible from a position of personal strength. Otherwise, you might lose yourself completely to another person, instead of growing to make yourself a part of them — and Ayn Rand did get that right.
But what she missed is that it’s giving up part of your independence for another person and making yourself vulnerable that’s at the very essence of romantic love. Learning how to dismantle that “I” in order to say “we” is an important step in spiritual and romantic growth. You have to move beyond ego to develop the partnership that’s necessary to build a family.
But this is wholly alien to Rand’s conception of love as a “mutual trade” whereby a woman prostrates herself before a superior man.
Alex Knapp writes about pretty much everything under the sun, including politics, art, religion, philosophy, sports, music, culture, and science. He also actively writes about politics at the political blog
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I find that most of Rand’s philosophy makes much more sense if you see what she was doing as reacting to stimuli by recoiling from it.
Objectivism makes sense if you see it as a recoiling from Stalinism.
This romantic idea makes sense if you see it through the prism of her affair. She was married to a good and decent guy but had an affair with someone else. Instead of saying “what I did was wrong” (not that I’m intending to get all monogonormative, of course) she came up with an explanation that her husband should have been happy for her that she found someone worth cheating on him with. (Atlas Shrugged has this going on something awful.)
Submission to conquest is a way to remove agency from something as deliberately done as an extended affair. At least Easton and Liszt had the decency to deal with the hard feelings that nonmonogamy can bring. Rand expected her husband to be happy that something like this happened to her.
Well, the romantic stuff pre-dates her affair by a good long while. You can see shades of it in We the Living and it’s pretty explicit in the Fountainhead. And she didn’t meet Branden until after the Fountainhead. So I think it’s pretty deep-seated.
After the affair ended, she demanded that all future printings of Atlas Shrugged remove the dedication to him from the dedication page.
Somewhere, in the back of her head, I wonder if she was editing other stuff she wrote.
Probably not.
Sounds like a lot of projection of dominance and submission issues. Maybe Rand was really freaky-deaky in bed that way.
*shudders*
My sisters-in-law both expressed great shock when they found out that my wife and I were sharing a bank account. They like me well enough, but they also know that she will always out-earn me to a significant degree and so take the same view that I see a fair number of men make: if I skipped out now, I would get money that she made and stuff bought more with the money she made than the money I did. (This is true regardless of bank accounts – I think they were mentally substituting separate bank accounts with a prenup).
On the other hand, the shared bank account (and lack of prenup) is symbolic of the fact that we’re an “us.” And if we weren’t an us, there is simply no way that I would have left everything behind multiple times to follow her around while she got her medical training. This marriage would not even have occurred in order to collapse if we looked at it from self-interest.
Logistically speaking, I don’t really see how you *can* view marriage from a selfish perspective and have it work unless you’re a DINK like my brother and his wife. Even if you’re both working, sacrifices have to be made. Careers will conflict (“My promotion requires that we move to Buffalo!”). There is simply no score card thorough enough to keep things “even.”
Young people ought to spend some time on their own, learning to manage things by themselves, especially their own finances. But when they’re in a relationship, it’s really useful to see how they’ll manage a joint checking account. It’s a fine test for the validity of any partnership, to see how someone else handles money.
Some people just can’t manage a joint checking account. I suppose the relationship could survive if one person managed the money, but this goes back to life skills learned as a single person. Nothing gets between friends and lovers like money.
Objectivist Love seems like an oxymoron. There’s a certain part of love, especially in sex, where some selfishness is a delightful aspect of the relationship: I would hope everyone wants to be desired, that’s healthy. But a relationship predicated on selfishness seems dreadful. Stories are told of old Hugh Hefner in his musty, decrepit version of Miss Havisham’s mansion, grudgingly doling out a thousand dollars a week to each of his women. He gathers them every night, takes Viagra and they all lay in a big pile. They don’t have to put out for him, but he doesn’t tolerate that for long and out they go. The rooms haven’t been redecorated in decades. The epitome of the sybarite has become a pawky shadow of himself: for all that sex and all those marriages, I’m pretty sure he never once felt he had a partner in life. Can you imagine doling out a grand a week to the person you love for the option to put them out of your life at a moment’s notice?
Young people ought to spend some time on their own, learning to manage things by themselves, especially their own finances.
I go back and forth on that. In some ways, I didn’t become an adult until I got married.
It’s a fine test for the validity of any partnership, to see how someone else handles money.
I used to say of my ex-girlfriend (of four years) that I couldn’t marry her because she got $3,000 in debt buying beanie babies. I stopped saying that because people consider that a frivolous reason. There were other things going on, so I focus on that. Somehow, saying that my feelings had gone cold to her is considered more valid than the fact that she was irresponsible with her money and all of my efforts to help her with this were treated as attempts to “control” her.
Some people just can’t manage a joint checking account. I suppose the relationship could survive if one person managed the money, but this goes back to life skills learned as a single person. Nothing gets between friends and lovers like money.
I would say that some people can’t handle having money in their account. I think that a lot of unmarried people should keep as little money in their checking account as possible. The same pitfalls do occur with join accounts, because you have (in theory) twice the money and twice the expense.
Thanks for the insightful article. I found it really insightful, keep up the good work!