Cuffing season is not the cure
Why do we treat lovers like subjects of romantic fantasies?
The fall semester is approaching, and you start feeling the itch in your mind imagining how you’re going to meet your destined soulmate. Maybe at an orientation event? Or in a class where you arrive astonishingly late? Totally not fake scenarios that I have dwelled on. But, we call this renewed hope of finding love that we face every year The Cuffing Season. The act of getting into a relationship is often compared to being handcuffed—hence the name—but, I will not dwell on that name in this article.
Love, in our society, is a milestone. It is a project on a goal board rather than the voluntary surrender of control by one’s self. Byung Chul-Han, a theologian and cultural theorist, analyzed the “decay” of love in his book The Agony of Eros and argued about the existence of an atopic Other—someone who is completely external to us and can not be fully defined or understood; someone like a romantic partner. This Other can bring negativity into our lives, which in Han’s vision, is a good thing. To Han, our societies correlate positivity with efficiency, optimization, and productivity. But, in a world overstuffed with the positive, the negative forces the self to dismiss the ego and reanimate.
We feel the urge to get in a relationship because the year is starting, holidays are coming, and who doesn’t want to cuddle under a blanket while the snow falls outside? But, these reasons are all rooted in the single area that the subject of our love—the Other— does not have access to, which is the self. The Other is not an object that we can style, manipulate or edit. We will never know them completely and there will always be conflict because “if one could possess, grasp, and know the other, it would not be the Other,” but the self. The true presence of them implicates the rejection of sameness. Everyone loves the phrase “if we were all the same the world would be boring”, but in reality we want people to fit into our own ideas. I think that if Han could edit this phrase he would make it “No one can be the same. And because we want them to be, love is agonizing”.
There is another theory as to why we are so hyperfixated on acquiring a romantic partner: redemption through love. It’s a theme that has been constantly reiterated in our childhood Disney movies—in Beauty and the Beast (1991), a witch’s curse is broken by love; in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), evil is undone by a true love’s kiss. So, when we find ourselves in a situation where Millennials and Gen Z are reporting higher levels of stress compared to older generations, for example, feeling the need to have a significant other becomes a beacon of light. Having a romantic partner turned out to be our way of redeeming and saving ourselves from our own perished minds and the evil of the world.
But, while the illusion of romance feels like medicine, it can also corrode. In a world where everything feels doable, everything becomes a possibility and an achievement. You can get into the best Canadian university. You can achieve the highest GPA in your cohort. You can build a successful career. But, romantic love isn’t an achievement or goal. Like Han claims, love “is not due to our initiative… [it is] without reason; it invades and wounds us.” Perhaps we are starting to notice that love is not always a viable solution for our wellbeing, like mental health. Olivia Rodrigo’s new song—“The Cure”— is an explicit example of us waking to this reality: but, it doesn’t matter how your love feels anymore, it’ll never be the cure. Love will never be a cure, because it simply never has been. The Other, your romantic partner, is not an entity to entertain or heal. They simply exist as you do, multi-layered, encompassed by unsettling mysteries and contraries.
So, what do we do now? Do we switch our attention to course readings and looming midterms? Do we evade that responsibility and join our friends every weekend for outings? Running from our minds will not solve our issues. We have to change the way we understand romantic relationships, and that starts with acknowledging the fact that partners are not objects of fantasies. The corrosion of love is a consequence of a rotten structure of society. The problem isn’t Cuffing Season, but what it represents. But, if definition is necessary, I would look to the Portuguese poet Luís de Camões’ notion of a lover: I don’t know what, born I don’t know where | come I don’t know how, nor why it aches so keen.
