Training Ourselves To Be Loveless
In conversation with Rusty Reno
Rusty Reno is a theologian, author and the editor of First Things magazine. He is always an arresting writer but at his best, I think, when he talks about taking risks and restoring love.
This conversation is about how to stop being afraid to love. We spoke about therapy culture and the line between healthy introspection and risk-aversion; whether we are ever “ready” for a relationship and what we lose if we wait too long; the fear of choosing the wrong person, and how to know the difference between taking a risk and being reckless. I think there are a lot of young people like me who have grown up surrounded by a fear of love, and by older people anxious for them and traumatised by their own heartbreak. If you are tired of red flags and warning signs, if what you need is the opposite—permission to go for it, to follow your heart—then this is for you.
Here’s our conversation, I’d love to know what you think.
Freya India: Rusty, in Return of the Strong Gods, you argue that the post-war consensus taught us to fear passionate loyalties, and to develop a posture of openness and detachment. Our mutual friend N.S. Lyons wrote earlier this year about the return of American strong gods, a “renewal of strength and vitality”.
But somewhere I don’t see this revival is in relationships. While national loyalties might be returning, interpersonal loyalties seem to be weakening. Among my generation, especially among young women, I think there is a deep fear of wanting too much, of making a mistake, of hurt and heartbreak. And I think a lot of relationships are failing now because of this half-heartedness. We don’t believe love will last, so why take the risk? The pressure today is to pretend we don’t care. Even if we enter into relationships, we are always half-defending against loss, one foot out the door, our hearts never fully in things. Risk-aversion is killing romance.
We are, as you put it, “training ourselves to be loveless.” Yet you warn that “A life without love is a greater evil than a life in which finite loves are made absolute”, and that “We must take the risks of commitment if we’re to revive the greatness of the human spirit.”
So my question is, how can we learn to take risks in this “love-deprived age”? I ask this not as a writer but as someone of this generation who genuinely needs reassurance and consolation. What would you say to young people like me, who have always been taught to play it safe, and are afraid to love?
R. R. Reno: I suppose the first thing to say is that love is always frightening, because it is dangerous. Achilles loved glory, so much so that he was willing to forsake a long life. Oedipus delighted in knowing, which got him into trouble. Romeo longed for Juliet, and we know how that turned out. And at a more quotidian level, love can be misdirected. We can love the wrong things in the wrong way. This is the essence of idolatry.
So, there are lots of reasons to be anxious about love and its disruptive power. “Love cannot be idle in the soul,” writes St. Augustine, “It must necessarily cause movement.” In small things, that’s not a big deal. I love a good cup of coffee, so I rouse myself to go to the kitchen. But in more consequential matters, love moves us toward something unknown. I love my country, so I go into battle, not knowing my fate. Or I fall in love with a woman–or God. Who knows where that will take me?!
In Return of the Strong Gods, I tell a story about the political and cultural anxiety that has shaped so much of our lives. Deeply affected by the unprecedented violence of the two world wars and fearful of ideological passions that can so easily become deadly, after 1945 leaders of the West counseled a coolness of heart that too easily slides into nihilism. If nothing is worth fighting for, nobody will fight–that’s an alluring promise.
There were other factors as well. Modern science and technology has given us a sense of mastery over the contingencies of life. Why not extend this mastery and achieve control over society and our turbulent inner lives? In the United States, the 1950s was a time of great confidence in the power of social science to deliver new and effective methods for organizing and managing society. It was hoped that this would replace the always uncertain (because human) give-and-take of partisan politics. In that decade, Sigmund Freud and other psychological theorists became extremely influential. They promised great advances in the management of our souls.
In this technocratic and therapeutic world, which has only grown more powerful and all-encompassing, love’s uncertainties, its power to propel us toward destinations unknown, can easily seem reckless, foolish, irresponsible. Better to live a carefully “curated” life, or so we imagine.
But there’s something deeper going on. When I was a young college teacher, I pondered the risk-aversion of my students. I read Lucretius and Epictetus. They formulated an ideal for life: ataraxia, which can be translated as “calm”, “peace of mind”, “serenity.” We achieve this condition when we still the impulses that rouse us to pursue ideals, ambitions, and loves.
We should not underestimate the appeal of ataraxia. It allows us to be quiescent and without care (“carefree”!), safe and at peace with our lives. Self-acceptance, self-care, and other therapeutic exhortations aim at this condition. Love, therefore, becomes an enemy, for it dislodges and moves us. Of course, to live is to change. Thus we opt for something akin to peaceful immobility, which is tentative and careful movement through life.
How do we escape this condition? Perhaps the first step is to look around. I live in New York. The city is full of men and women, especially women, who are the age of grandparents, but who glide along the sidewalks dressed like teenagers. Isn’t the sight pathetic? To pretend against the realities of embodied life as we move toward the grave? Or just take in the sadness, the depression, the addiction, the loneliness, the aimless wandering that seems endlessly circular. Do we really want to live this way?
The next step is to venture something for something or someone, which means taking a step away from ourselves. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates describes a “ladder of love.” We can seek the first rung, the music we love, the poem that moves us, the place that tugs at our hearts, the craft or sport or hobby that commands us and demands our free time.
When I was 18-years-old, I went to Yosemite to go rock climbing. It was there that I learned about love, the desire for mountain adventure that dogged me for decades, claimed the lives of some of my friends, and gave me incalculable joy. And while pursuing this passion, even in its first stages, the stern goddess who demanded so much from me–mortal danger!--whispered often, “Love me, yes, but seek more.” She sent me up the ladder of love.
The wounds of the heart cut more deeply than those of the flesh. Loss, abandonment, and betrayal hurt deeply, sometimes more so when we are the ones who abandon and betray. I don’t want to make false promises. But of this I am confident: Love will not leave you alone. It will spur you, drive you, pull you. It delivers you from captivity to yourself. If you wish to go anywhere of consequence for the soul–and I do not mean to Paris or Mallorca–you must risk love.
That’s such a beautiful way of putting it. It also touches on a theme you keep returning to in the book, that risk-aversion is against our nature. That “the deepest failure of the postwar consensus” is that it teaches us to be “something less than human.” That even if we make a mistake, “to love wrongly is dangerous, but however debasing, it is human.”
Something I also find deeply inhuman is the therapeutic culture that has replaced these strong loves. In the book you argue that in place of “passionate loyalties” we developed “a spirit of critical questioning.” Today that spirit is turned inward. We are encouraged to interrogate everything about ourselves: every emotion, thought, memory, decision, personality trait, has to be scrutinised and examined. This is Lasch’s “culture of narcissism” - as the world feels more unstable, and long-term commitments feel out of reach, we retreat inward.
You also write that “Liberalism offers no vigorous language of love.” Into that void, I think, has rushed therapy-speak and psychological jargon. Our commitments and devotions are now framed as pathologies and deficiencies. Strong loves become attachment issues; sacrifice and compromise become “people-pleasing”, “emotional labour”, or evidence of our failure to “set boundaries”. The same way strong loyalties to place and tradition are reflexively labelled as backward and bigoted, strong loyalties in relationships are pathologised as “insecure” or “codependent”.
So, I wonder, do you see the rise of therapy-speak and this constant self-scrutiny as a continuation of the post-war consensus, an attempt to avoid the dangers of strong commitments by turning inward? How much of this therapeutic culture do you think is useful? And where, do you think, is the line between introspection that helps us love better, and introspection that keeps us from loving at all?