Simone de Beauvoir, Self-Love & Loathing
And an embarrassing thing that happened this week.
Monday—No matter what I get up to or how much I distract myself my birthday is always a painful reminder of the passing of time and everything that I once thought I would be and achieve by now and have not. Another lap around the sun is over and I worry that I’m not squeezing enough juice out of these precious days.
Someone I know (Matthew) pretends his birthday isn't happening and goes to great lengths to prevent anyone from knowing about it1. Including hacking into his work database to remove his date of birth. I wouldn’t do this because I want people to know it's my birthday; I want attention, to be lavished with gifts and adored and fed grapes like an emperor.
Perhaps because these are the days when I hate myself the most.
Earlier this year I was writing an essay on self-love but I paused because I felt so unqualified and consumed by self-hate. Ben Aiken said that would probably make the essay more interesting so I should just write it anyway.
Tuesday— I went to a salon on Simone de Beauvoir’s moral vision for loving and being loved and the nature of authentic relationships. The event was hosted by
and Kate Kirkpatrick, author of Becoming Beauvoir (2019) and the most eloquent, lucid and also glamorous academic I have ever met.The pre-reading was Kate’s essay Love is a joint project.
I was captivated by her account of de Beauvoir’s insights on failed love:
In Beauvoir’s student notebooks from 1926, ethical interpersonal love is described in contrast to two forms of failed love. She calls these vices narcissism (or selfishness, or self-interest, in some English translations) and devotion. In their earliest formulations, she defined narcissism as ‘loving oneself and loving in the other, the love he has for you’. The failure of narcissism is that it forgets that there are two in love: the narcissist fails to remember that love must seek the good of the other. Her lover is a minor character in the great plot of her story. Devotion, by contrast, is an ‘absolute gift’ of the lover to the beloved, a ‘self-abnegation’ where the lover’s own consciousness is obliterated for the sake of the other.2
Kate said it is women who are more often devoted lovers.
In Pyrrhus and Cinéas, Kate writes that de Beauvoir claims that:
Boys, generally speaking, were encouraged to have projects for their lives – to see love as part of life, not all of it, and to believe that success was possible in more than one part at once. Girls, by contrast, were encouraged to see love as life itself…
So it makes sense that women would be more likely to be devoted lovers and lose themselves in their love. de Beauvoir wrote Pyrrhus and Cinéas in 1944. Thank God gender roles have come a long way since then… but I still see women losing themselves in love generally more than men do.
There is probably more to this than the way we are taught to see love as children. The devotional love that de Beauvoir describes is what I would associate with a fear of abandonment and anxious attachment. And an anxious attachment style may be the result of narcissistic abuse; being made to feel unlovable. I know for sure that losing myself in love is related to feeling unworthy of receiving love. It is an intoxicating mix of receiving longed-for love, while not believing that it is real.
The solution, I have found over the last two years lies in my relationship with myself. I must perceive myself as being inherently worthy of love and to love myself.
I asked Kate about de Beauvoir’s stance on the relationship with the self. We ended up talking about Rousseau’s concepts of amour de soi and amour propre before Freud slipped into the conversation. I said I thought Freud’s idea of self-love was just “wanting to fuck yourself” (confusing this with his idea of narcissism). I realised this was a really stupid thing to say before Kate said that this was a terrible interpretation of Freud and the conversation promptly ended. I went back to hating myself again. RIP.
It’s 5th June
https://aeon.co/essays/simone-de-beauvoirs-authentic-love-is-a-project-of-equals