Two conceptions of love
There is a tendency that I notice among certain people where they navigate their personal relationships by using political language. I say tendency, but I really cognize it as an inability to have authentic, personal relationships. This leads them to treat everyone else, regardless of their intimate proximity, as an interlocutor within a political structure.
In traditional, personal relationships, you are defined by the people that you are closest to. You should want to turn the world on its head in order to satisfy some personal loyalty you have to someone. If your girlfriend or your grandma needs something from you, it doesn’t matter how that interferes with your personal interests, boundaries, and needs — that relationship is defined by the sacrifices you are willing to make for them. This means that if you really care about the person, they mean more to you than any single factor of your identity, so you do whatever they need.
With political relationships, this dynamic does not exist. In fact you can see this as a spectrum that is reflected in class. The lower classes will normally do things for people close to them that they would never do for those further away. You can observe the same type of fealty between a young Italian boy and his grandparents that you will see in the romance of two homeless crack addicts. Relationships are navigated by leveraging emotions, problems are solved by reassurance of how much someone is loved and how much they mean to someone else. The entirety of the social fabric lives and dies by the emotional bonds between people.
The upper class, instead, uses a rational and calculated method of navigating personal relationships. On the surface, it makes more sense and, in theory, it should lead to more satisfying relationships and better outcomes for those involved. Everyone understands that everyone else has their own needs, boundaries, and personal aspirations. These relationships operate on an implicit agreement that everyone is rational and willing to understand the viewpoint of the person on the other side. Problems are framed as tradeoffs and jointly navigated through compromises that, ideally, leave both parties satisfied. Communication is key, so everyone is hyper-aware of their own internal world and is expected to constantly make it legible to those around them so that everyone can stay on the same page. Conflict resolution methods which over-leverage emotions are seen as cheap or catty and are generally frowned upon. The locus of meaning for each person is not in any given relationship, but rather in their worth as an individual. Their relationships will, at best, provide companionship along the way on their journey to become the best version of themselves, but they do not constitute any sources of meaning. In theory, any of the members of this system would be able to survive the dropping off of anyone else in the system from their lives by making minimal adjustments on their chess board and continuing on with little interruption.
Intimate Relationships and Political Relationships
I will distinguish between these two types of relationships by referring to the more personal type of relationship as “intimate relationships,” or “IR” and the more measured one as “political relationships,” “PR”.
Interesting and sad things happen when these two worlds collide
The above tweet caused a flame war between what, in my conception, are the two different ways of interpreting love. Many people dunked on this tweet, saying this was sociopathic behavior, while others passionately defended this as effective boundary-setting and something that’s necessary for sound relationships.
The Conceptions from different angles
This difference in approach to personal relationships lends itself to several neat separations that we end up seeing as downstream effects:
Individualism vs collectivism: Cultures that predominantly adopt the PR conception of love place greater emphasis on individualism, independence, and self-reliance. They emphasize the agency of every person and they encourage professional success. These cultures also see higher rates of individualism and place lower emphasis on the nuclear family.
North-european cultures vs south-european cultures: Countries like Spain, Italy, Greece, the Balkans, and, to a large degree, the former soviet bloc have strong cultural lineages that reinforce the IR conception of love. When comparing the social attitudes of these countries to the social attitudes of northern European countries (especially Nordic countries), we see a larger concern with the family at the expense of everyone else in society, and trends of young people leaving their parental homes later in life. (There is also another similar map that I cannot find but it was along the lines of — “if you paid for your friend’s lunch, would you venmo request them to reimburse you immediately after,” and the south of Europe was mostly no and the north mostly yes).
Liberals vs conservatives: One of the most striking personality distinctions between liberals and conservatives is the groups they empathize with. Studies have shown that people with conservative-leaning political beliefs tend to express greater moral concern for those intimately close to them, at the expense of society at large, while people with liberal-leaning political beliefs express the opposite sentiment: more concern with the wellbeing of society at large than that of those personally close to them.
How this affects me
You can probably tell I’m a much bigger fan of intimate relationships than political relationships.
One of the issues I run into when dealing with PR people is that I never feel like I can have authentic, raw relationships with them. I feel that, no matter how long I’ve known them for and how much I’ve shown my character to them, I am always one bad move away from being dinged in the relationship hierarchy (or completely kicked out). Like at any time I could say the wrong string of 20 words and our relationship would never be the same. With IR, this doesn’t really exist, there’s nothing you can say and very little short of heinous, repulsive crimes that you could do that would make those closest to you view you differently.
In my experience, PR people are also strangely stunted in getting a character read on people. The “ready to re-negotiate any relationship at any point” dynamic is probably an effect of this inability. You can have questionable character and motivations, but as long as you signal properly, do favors, and play the political game, you will generally be in the good graces of PR people.