Sometimes I find myself spending a little while sifting through whatever hogwash is clogging up my social media feed. Mixed into the endless sea of news and A.I. generated slop, I occasionally get served up a post about relationships. Usually these are rage-bait, meant to make men around my age feel insecure and upset with the women around them.
Content like this usually has comment sections filled with men decrying the state of modern women and their alleged tendency towards cheating, hypergamy, or whatever else. Sometimes I’ll see the other side of the coin instead, and while women often use different words, they’re usually frustrated by similar things. My girl friends certainly are.
One thing that’s always struck me about these posts is the economic language that gets used, more often by men but sometimes also women. People throw around flawed statistics, decry the modern dating market, and go on and on about concepts like sexual market value. There’s this underlying belief that something has gone so drastically wrong, that the sexes are in horrific conflict, and that if we just returned to a more traditional time, this would all go away.
I find this last part particularly funny. If we returned to a more traditional lifestyle it is true that women wouldn’t be the ones turning those men down.
Their fathers would be turning them down instead.
They’re not about to give their daughters to weak bidders. If anything, those bidders’ chances have increased in this brave new world of ours. And yet, the thing I can’t help but notice more than anything in this new, dowry-less age, is growing pains. Choice in marriage, and therefore the intersection of passion and the long term marital relationship, is fairly new, and we suck at it.
Passion’s Place
Like almost everyone in the first world, I find historical marriage customs incredibly hard to relate to. While these customs were pretty different depending on where you were, a common theme is that passion was either a precursor to evil, or something to be handled completely separately from marriage. That sounds completely ridiculous to anyone that’s done any sort of dating in the modern day. How the hell do you marry someone you don’t have passion for?
Clearly our ancestors figured it out, since humanity survived as long as it did. We know they had kids with their wives… most of the time. I guess sex still isn’t that bad even if you’re not hopelessly in love with your lover. And yet, as much as we hated passion, we loved passion. It was something that our puberty ridden selves were supposed to mature out of, but can we ever really outgrow that attraction? I don’t think so. I just think some of us got better at suppressing it.
Our moral betters didn’t think so either, as we were ever warned against adultery and passion. Women in particular were on the hook for any infidelity, as that would threaten legitimacy and the bloodline. Men were often able to get away with it, especially in societies that saw passion as something separate rather than something evil. Even when a man wasn’t punished for it, it was still something to be ashamed of in many cultures.
And yet, the solution to this seems super obvious, doesn’t it? Just marry someone you have passion for, right? If only it were so simple. Passion is as complex as it is fleeting. Are we passionate for the chase, the romance, the fulfillment of being married, or for our partner themselves? Are we still going to be passionate towards our partner 10 years down the line, when they’ve gotten a little wrinklier and fatter?
Our ancestors had the good sense to shyly avoid the question of passion, and we’ve been handed the bill. How the hell do we find someone, marry someone, have passion for someone, and keep that passion going strong forever? We could try to separate our Eros and Ludus from our Pragma, but then we’d just be doing what our ancestors were doing; admitting we couldn’t figure out how to sustain both in one relationship. Can passion be sustained forever, or should we just accept its fleeting nature?
Spirit Lovers and Passion
When thinking about all of this, I couldn’t help but think of the western succubus. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know I tend to prefer the neutral term ‘spirit lover’, rather than saying succubus, or fairy lover, or whatever other kind of label you can dig up. However, this train of thought brought me to the idea of the succubus specifically, and the real reason why the succubus was seen as an evil being.
The succubus is not an evil and passionate being. The succubus is evil because it is a passionate being. Being sexually passionate is the evil, because at the time that was the accepted truth. Passion itself was seen as a precursor to sexual sin. Mismanaged passion could destroy kingdoms. These supposed agents of evil could be thought of as passion personified.
Stories of mischievous fairy lovers have some similarities. The man is inevitably taken with a young, beautiful, strange woman. This relationship, which starts incredibly passionately, leads to problems, often culminating in the man’s own death. The fairy woman is incompatible with long term marriage because the relationship with her is founded on passion and not practicality.
Spirit lovers are passionate beings. That is undeniable, and that is why we want them. With them we can attempt to answer the question; can passion last forever? Can it live alongside an enduring, committed love? TC, going a decade and a half strong, certainly thinks so. As much as I love to argue with him, I’ll have to give him this one.
The spirit lover is radical. She doesn’t come with a dowry. She isn’t offered up by her dad, and she certainly doesn’t care about bloodlines, legitimacy, status, wealth, or anything else of the sort. The spirit lover’s passion is for us. She forces us to answer a question that we’ve done our best to ignore for millennia: Can we create and sustain a healthy romantic passion?
I Say Yes.
The spirit lover stays with us, engages with us romantically, sexually, spiritually, and practically. She offers advice and supports us as a partner as readily as she climbs into bed and makes us her lover. The fire never burns out, growing ever stronger. All of her interactions are steeped in her passion for us as a person, a partner, and a bedmate. She will ask us for the same transcendental passion she gives to us when we’re ready to give it back.
I’d like to think that we’re braving the frontier here; not just for others who will be interested in these relationships, but for all of those modern day men and women trying to reconcile passion with commitment. If we can figure it out, one day society will too. I hope we can pave the way for humanity at large to start to understand that we’ve spent thousands of years thinking about passion all wrong.
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