https://thepointmag.com/advice/the-holy-evil/
About the question of whether your boyfriend is a misogynist, or whether he loves you as you wish him to, I can’t comment. My first instinct, under the influence of Rose’s “momentary or prolonged refusal to think of another person in terms of power,” is that your boyfriend’s declaration that he’s smarter than you is a violation of the agreement that underlies your love. By thinking of you in comparison to himself, he’s indulging in, rather than refusing, the power he feels he has over you, and puncturing the scenario you imagined you’d agreed on: the scenario of equals. But maybe that wasn’t the scenario you agreed on. Maybe you and your boyfriend share a disinterest in tacit agreements, and the scenario at the heart of your relationship is a willingness to debate anything and everything. If you are largely happy with your boyfriend, and your sparring about your comparable intelligences is proof of great conversational passion of the kind Rothfeld depicts so delightfully, I hope that when your boyfriend insists he is smarter than you, you can take some comfort in one of my favorite characterizations of love, from Milan Kundera’s novel Slowness:
Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.As a culture we have little respect for this sentiment, considering it a sort of paean to abusive lovers; and I had better not tell you to go forth feeling pleased that your boyfriend finds himself unable to stop loving you even though he doesn’t respect your intelligence—as Swann cannot stop loving tasteless Odette. But I am convinced this is the place in which love is actually written on a special page. It’s not because it exists between equals that love is singular, but because it makes us deliciously and maddeningly immeasurable to each other—a state in which the very question of equality is moot. That you and your boyfriend don’t share a definition of intelligence strikes me as a good thing. It prevents you from evaluating each other (and finding each other wanting) on a shared set of terms, which sounds to me like the death of both conversation and love. If your conversation is to go on a long time, you had better not agree on everything.
posted by steph at
5:27:00 PM
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