Transactional Love

Bryce LaLiberte is probably the best example of neoreaction's tendency toward enthusiasm over rigor but he makes a good point over at Social Matter:

While in the past one generally had a guarantee that their romantic partner would live and die with them, the breaking up of relationships is now the norm. The effect of this is neither inconsequential nor non-negligible, yet we rarely analyze it as a social ill, practically discounting heartbreak as not a real problem deserving of a solution. Yet the costs of heartbreak are tangible and for a majority of people heartbreak plays a role in the onset of mental disorders, a decreased pleasure from love and romance, and an eternal fear of ever becoming attached and letting someone else have power over your emotional state. As such, we withdraw from each other, pursuing sexual relations as though the emotional element might be sanitized. Recovery from heartbreak changes a person, and while they might come out better for it in certain material ways, there will always linger that unease at being asked to trust someone.

By the time one reaches thirty, most everyone that's single is emotionally damaged. Some have been heartbroken and avoid making emotional attachments the way one learns to avoid touching a hot stove. Others become emotionally callous.

Manosphere writers have lately made a point of highlighting articles in which female writers announce that they're "ready for a nice guy." This is especially sad. Red pill writers point out that the women's sexual market value has expired and that a woman whose body is well-known to a surfeit of men is less than attractive.

But there's also the condition known as being an "alpha widow." Though the woman has settled down--and settled--for the proverbial beta provider, she still dreams of the lotharios of the past. Whether the yearning is sexual or emotional, that circuit has been burned out; it will never fire for the man with whom she condescended to spend her life.

Men do a little better with experience. If the man at the end of his peak decides to settle down, he has a more objective measurement of what will make him happy than a woman's, her preference is for being emotionally overwhelmed. While a man decides that he wants a woman who is, say, attractive, cheerful and loyal, a woman wants to be swept away by her partner. She may find a man that meets her checklist--good job, good with kids--but she'll always be tempted by the possibility of rapture.

Either way, the relationship can shade into becoming transactional, the way thrown ball is drawn towards the ground. Both the over-experienced man and woman become self-centered--the relationship is a method for obtaining what they emotionally desire. The old definitions of marriage and family, of being a part of a whole, of union, are harder to achieve.

That's not to say that the majority of marriages pre-Sexual Revolution were two becoming one, but the culture pointed us in that direction. The message was, if you are unsatisfied, turn toward your relationships. The answer isn't out among the mass of strangers but within yourself and how you relate to those closest to you.

Our current understanding tells us that we are all self-contained objects, extracting our needs from the environment around us, billiard balls bouncing against one another. Two people enter a relationship because it is mutually beneficial; they part when the good feelings dry up.

Each sex is suspicious of the other, and the assumption that the relationship will end, while simultaneously continuing it as though it might end in a lifelong marriage, alienates the self from his most primal urges to belong to another, to have another to protect and call his own.

I touched on that balancing act the other day. The definition of what a sexual relationship is has been thrown away so everyone chases exactly what they want at the moment, just as the alpha widows above say, "I am now officially pursuing a long-term relationship." That one's desires may change from day to day isn't considered.

The old dynamic was that the husband and wife were at the core of the family. Families were at the core of the community. The communities were at the core of the state. Society had a million tiny anchors, as small as the house you grew up in. Now, that house is just the rack from which the balls roll out to bounce against one another.