Why You Love Who You Love
Marriage used to be based on practical matters (e.g. forging allegiances, economic mergers, etc.), but today, marriage is usually decided by love.
As Klaus Theweleit writes in his book, Object-Choice (All you need is love…), it was only in the 20th century, after the First World War, and the removal of the the ‘militaristic-mornarchic systems’, that there has ‘been something like a mass experiment with love-marriages; [i.e.] marriages based on feelings’.
Before large-scale love-marriages, the notion that ‘all you need is love’ would’ve seemed insane:
a farmer of the last four centuries would have replied : what he needs is a good working wife who will give birth to sturdy children, keeps an eye on the purse and doesn’t spoil the food.
A prince would have answered: he needs a young daughter from another powerful principality; a woman who brings troops and money in her train, guarantees an increase in power and who must naturally also bear heirs to the throne, sons
A merchant’s son from one of the business enterprises of the 19th century could not (and in most cases would not) marry anyone but the daughter of another firm, with the aim of financial fusions
Workers in the 19th century married women who (if possible) could and wanted to sew, cook, get hold of firewood, keep the home free of vermin and the bailiff from the door, etc., not to mention the necessary skills in the case of hunger and cold
The combination of love and marriage transgresses ‘economic reason’, and as with all ‘transgressions against society’, it requires a certain state; ‘a state of intoxication, of exquisite madness, which generates the energy necessary to abandon the traditional bed-rock of behaviour and makes imminent punishment seem insignificant’.
The problem with this sort of love is that it is ‘easily kindled, but has the greatest difficulties in growing and enduring’. But how exactly is it kindled? What are the ‘conditions of love’ (to borrow the title of John Armstrong’s book)?
According to Theweleit, there is often a thunderbolt moment: ‘… there’s a spark … something catches … clicks … snaps into place .. two people get together …’. But what contributes to the intensity ‘with which the moment ignites’ is determined by our earliest attachments. This refers not just to our oedipal-compulsions, but also to what is known as our specific ‘psycho-classes’:
The New York psycho-historian Lloyd de Mause invented the term psycho-classes to denote such differences. Younger siblings belong to a different psycho-class from that of first-born children (just as children who have been beaten form a different psycho-class to those who have been cosseted). They have other patterns of perception and behaviour specific to that class, a different psychic chemistry. The special magnetism of attraction or repulsion that is also between them when forming a couple prompts one to speak of an object- choice according to the dispositions of psycho-classes
The thunderbolt moment — love at first sight — could be the recognition of a corresponding psycho-class.
The skeptic, Michel Houellebecq, who says he doesn’t ‘believe in intuition’, or rather he believes in it absolutely, but sees ‘nothing mysterious or alchemical about it’, argues that ‘moments of intuition are simply unpredictable moments of great tension in the brain, a burst of ultrafast reasoning where nothing has time to skim the conscious mind (neither the proofs nor the premises)’. This, I believe, is true of love at first sight.
