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From Here Forward shares stories and ideas about amazing things UBC and its alumni are doing around the world. It covers people and places, truths, science, art, and accomplishments with the view that sharing better inspires better. Join hosts Carol Eugene Park and Jeevan Sangha, both UBC grads, in exploring solutions for the negative stuff out there — focussing on the good for a change, from here forward.
[00:00:00] Carol: Hello, friendly alumni. Welcome back to From Here Forward, the funny yet informative UBC podcast network podcast. We're your girls, Carol and Jeevan.
[00:00:12] Jeevan: And since it's February, we're here celebrating the month of love. And I can already feel Carol rolling her eyes. I gotta say I love February. It's cold and crisp out and you can feel the love in the air.
[00:00:24] Carol: I do love February for it's cold because that is what it is like inside my own self. I am a cold woman. But I just, I have a genuine question, Jeevan. Give me two actual solid reasons of why February is a good month of love. Like, why, why do I need to care? Like, what is there to love about love?
[00:00:43] Jeevan: You don't need to care But What is there not to feel about love? I'm not trying to sell you on anything. But I care because I'm like an annoyingly romantic person and annoyingly optimistic person at times. I think I cast my net of love quite widely. Like, I think of it as not just an opportunity to be coupled up and in a romantic relationship, but it's a chance for me to shower some love on my friends, on my family, on the people in my life.
[00:01:10] I think the reason I feel so secure in my love for Valentine's Day and for February is because it's not just a romantic thing, even though the marketing companies will tell you otherwise. Yes, there are couples everywhere, but you know, I don't mind it. I can't be mad.
[00:01:23] Carol: This might be a hot take, but I just feel like Valentine's Day is icky to me. Promised I wouldn't get riled up, but here I am getting riled up. The romantic love and its connection to Valentine's Day is really what pisses me off. I want to love all my friends, platonic or not, but there's no date for that.
[00:01:41] Jeevan: I'd love to introduce you to the concept of Galentine's Day. Have you ever celebrated?
[00:01:46] Carol: I have, but it's always secondary. It's never a priority and it makes me angry, as you could probably tell. I have a lot of soulmates, okay, and I get it. I get it. Love is love. And yes, I would love to love my friends in the same way that people love their romantic partners, but I'm just so tired of romantic love. Divorce rates are 50 percent people.
[00:02:05] Jeevan: I hear you. And I think, actually everything you're touching on transitions perfectly into our conversation today. We had the pleasure of chatting with Carrie Jenkins, a writer and professor of philosophy at UBC.
[00:02:15] Carol: And oh, my goodness, Carrie's work was a breath of fresh air. Speaking to her was so validating, but basically her work unpacks what love is, what love can look like, and what we think our relationships should look like in order to be quote unquote happy.
[00:02:30] Jeevan: Yeah, refreshing is such a great word. It was such a nice way of shifting the perspective on how we've come to understand love. Her books have covered so many subtopics within the umbrella of love from biological versus social theories of love and challenging perceptions that monogamy is like the only kind of romantic relationship that we should be looking towards.
[00:02:50] Carol: Mic drop. This was so fun. So, if you are also a hater of love, let's dive in.
[00:02:56] Carrie: My name is Carrie Jenkins. I work at UBC as a professor of philosophy. I'm also a writer, so in addition to academic writing, I also write fiction and poetry. And nonfiction books on the philosophy of love for public audience.
[00:03:14] Carol: Great. So, this is a February love-based episode. what are some ideas or questions that you've come across that perhaps imply how the Western society views a romantic love?
[00:03:26] Carrie: I think that over the course of the last decade or so, people, maybe the public, the discourse has gotten a lot better at separating out issues that have to do with love, relationships, Structures of families and issues that honestly are quite separate from those things. Not that they don't have some overlap, but sex and sexuality being one of the, one of the big ones. So, I actually wrote an article about 10 years ago.
[00:03:57] And it was, it was called something like Dear Media, polyamory is not all about sex. And it was just an attempt to couple certain images people had. So, the first thing was polyamory, non-monogamy, any kind of non-monogamous or open relationship. And then the second thing was orgies, and like, people having a lot of sex all the time with whoever, promiscuity.
[00:04:22] Those things were very, very closely related in most people's minds, but I think that the conversation has evolved to the point where now people do know to question that assumption, that everybody who is non monogamous is there for. having promiscuous sex, like, all the time. It's actually not the case, and those two things don't necessarily have a lot to do with one another.
[00:04:44] There are plenty of monogamous people who are very promiscuous, there are plenty of non monogamous people who are actually not promiscuous at all, and all of these different combinations of preferences and ways of relating to other people are possible. And I think we have made some progress in at least making the space to question the association.
[00:05:05] Jeevan: That makes perfect sense. Thank you for laying that out I want to take us back to the book you published eight years ago called What Love Is and What It Could Be. If you wrote about how romantic love is both a social construct and biological. Could you expand a bit on what that means?
[00:05:21] Carrie: At the time I was, I was trying to understand the nature of, of love, romantic love in particular. And there were two kinds of very [00:05:30] prominent themes that I was encountering. And one theme was to go super biological and say, it's just this kind of natural drive that all humans have.
[00:05:40] And then various theories about what kind of a drive it is. Like some people really reductively associate it with the sexual drive and go down that route. Other people have tried to distinguish it as a different part of a reproductive drive of a different kind than the sexual drive. And then on the other end of the spectrum, there were theories saying actually Romantic love is entirely a matter of social programming, expectations about how we're going to behave.
[00:06:09] So I can see the merits of going in both of these directions. There are obviously to me, are some socially scripted elements of romantic love that change over time or that vary from culture to culture. And even what we think of as romantic love existing at all isn't really a human universal, right?
[00:06:30] But there are also other things going on because We are biological. organisms with this evolutionary history. So while I wasn't very impressed by existing reductive biological approaches, like I don't necessarily think romantic love is conceptually tied to reproduction, for example, I think there are a lot of other ways of understanding the biological machinery and its origins that talk more about human cooperation and bonding, So, okay, so what I said was, Can romantic love be both biological phenomenon and a social construct? We've got this evolutionary history has created this animal, right? It has these mechanisms, brain chemistry, body chemistry. Things that happen, some of them at levels that we are completely unaware of, but those things are, are very real.
[00:07:25] But then we try to conform or conceptualize those experiences we're having as a result of that biology. We try to conform them to certain scripts and narratives that are the socially constructed element of romantic love. the really pressing and interesting question becomes how good of a fit is this, right, between the biological reality of what we are and the social scripts that we have. So, where I ended up was with a kind of, well, it depends, right? How good of a fit it is depends a lot on who you are. The social [00:08:00] scripts include things like the expectation that you meet someone, that you go through this kind of period of courtship or dating and then you settle down and it becomes permanent monogamous commitment then eventually that you'll get a mortgage and get married and have some children and do laundry forever.
[00:08:17] And those expectations are a really good fit for some people, but human variety being what it is, there, there are plenty of other people for whom they are not a good fit. Um, and that there's a whole bundle of further questions about, well, what should we do about this? where do we go then from here?
[00:08:33] Carol: It just made me think about how sometimes I hear people be like, I could never date more than one person. In one of the chapters, you talk about romantic love as being the thing that structures society into family units. could you walk us through the relationship between romantic love, capitalism, and power?
[00:08:53] Carrie: Yeah, absolutely. When we think about social constructs, there's usually a story. Whether that's gender as a social construct, there's a reason it ends up that gender roles have been the way they are. And often, if you want to understand the reasons behind the roles or the scripts, that we've ended up with you have to understand a lot about the societies that have produced them, especially the power dynamics within those societies.
[00:09:20] In the case of romantic love, what has happened over the last, not very long, like a few hundred years max, is that we've started, and when I'm saying we here, I'm talking about this kind of dominant Western cultural background that I'm writing from. We have started to understand the shape of a good life. It centrally includes that once you hit adulthood, you should be looking for a partner, the, the one, a marriage partner, who you will fall in love with and then do the babies and the mortgage and the laundry and all the [00:10:00] rest. So that kind of idea of a good life replaces earlier ideas whereby say, arranged marriage might be a lot more common, or in families that had wealth and inheritance to think about.
[00:10:12] In Jane Austen, you see these kinds of depictions and sometimes satirizations of that idea, but, romantic love, It's the thing that is supposed to take you from the sort of adolescent or early adult stage where a lot of feelings and passions and drama are going on in a lot of people's lives.
[00:10:32] the dominance of the nuclear family unit is not a coincidence. It is rather something that goes along with capitalism as a means of securing power.
[00:10:45] Okay, so to explain capitalism, firstly, it becomes very important to know who's inheriting your wealth. Okay, so you, you're developing private wealth, who you're passing it to when you are no longer here is very important. The idea of passing it to biological offspring is very important.
[00:11:05] Everybody from Bertrand Russell to Friedrich Engel also said similar things. But the idea that monogamy is closely tied up with capitalistic interests makes a lot of sense. Especially. the imposition of monogamy on women to ensure paternity. The nuclear family unit serves that patriarchal capitalistic structure.
[00:11:27] I think that's, that's why you can hear phrases like family values associated with conservative leaning politics. And that makes a lot of sense in light of this. historical context. But it does also mean that the idea that everybody has to be in that kind of configuration to be socially acceptable or to live what we consider to be a good life, because the nuclear family unit is manageable under capitalism.
[00:11:57] So capitalism doesn't have to be particularly threatened by bonds, interpersonal bonds within the nuclear family unit, but it might be threatened by other kinds of powerful bonds between people. So the kinds that could give rise to community building, resistance, the idea of getting together with other people in a similar social position to yours to undertake radical change of the status quo, those kinds of bonds, that might bring people together in ways that could threaten to undermine [00:12:30] capitalism, those are not coincidentally all the kinds of bonds that are devalued when The nuclear family unit and its central romantic pairing are held up as the only really central, most important goal for living a good life and experiencing good love.
[00:12:49] Jeevan: Thinking about interrogating some of those constructs as well. you mentioned that there was some backlash, which kind of sparked this idea of sad love and interrogating this idea of happiness that we're all constantly chasing. Can you share a bit more about this idea of sad love?
[00:13:06] Carrie: The thought behind sad love, it crystallized. In a time period where, yes, I'd started talking about non monogamy and its connections with feminism and politics. I was a woman with opinions on the internet. There’re certain kinds of feedback that you get if you're one of those and lots of them were not very pleasant. but it was really interesting as well.
[00:13:29] They, they were not the kind of names that anyone calls a man. So that was, yeah, it was, it was really depressing, obviously. I noticed during that period, for the first time, although it wasn't the first time I was depressed, it was the first time I noticed how much emphasis was placed on the idea that love should make you happy, that you're supposed to be happy with someone if they're a good partner for you.
[00:13:52] And so the idea of sad love that came from that's the question, is it possible to be sad and in love? I'm pretty sure the answer is yes, because I think I am. But then what does that mean for that whole bundle of assumptions about love being the thing that will and should make you happy. Does it mean that I'm doing love wrong if I am not happy?
[00:14:15] Can't it be possibly that something else is responsible for my sadness than the love? And so over the course of that book, Sad Love, I tried to unpack what is served by, by this claim that romantic love of the traditional, will make you happy. this really goes back to that, that idea that the status quo is, is preserved.
[00:14:36] So, so the bowling alley metaphor is this thought that you, you picture yourself at the bowling and looking down at the pins in front of you. with the ball in your hand, and the pins represent the sort of, the, the normative nuclear family life. So, you're deciding like, okay, what kind of life am I going to live?
[00:14:54] One kind of gutter on, on one side of the alley is having no romantic partner. And the idea is if your, if your ball rolls off into no romantic partner, you're going to be miserable. And the other gutter is more than one, right? Too many romantic partners. So, polyamory. And the thought again is that if your ball rolls off into that gutter, you're going to be miserable. It's going to be drama and stress. You won't have any real connections or real life, real love. So, the only way to be happy, it's almost like you're just forced to go straight down at the pins and hit the target of the supposedly good life within this normative, romantic nuclear family structure.
[00:15:36] When I was depressed, I did notice it was not at all uncommon for people to say that was because I was in non monogamous relationships. Rather than saying it was because of how people reacted to or treated me on account of those relationships, I noticed that a lot of people who were in monogamous relationships and sad, didn't get told that it was monogamy that was making them sad.
[00:15:58] And so all of these things help to just make it very clear to my mind. The idea of romance is, it's not just accidentally bound up with the idea of happy ever after the fairy tale.
[00:16:10] So, there’s a lot more to the story, but sad love ends up with an attempt to understand what love could be if it was separated from, happiness, like, what could we think the value of love is if it's not supposed to make you happy?
[00:16:27] But there are lots of good reasons for trying to ask that question. including a very old piece of philosophical wisdom, which is that chasing happiness isn't the way to be happy. Chasing after your own happiness potentially could actually lead to the opposite.
[00:16:41] Instead, what tends to be correlated with being happy is, focusing on engaging in meaningful projects in your life. So, then I started to ask, well, is there a way of understanding love that separates it out from happiness and the happy ever after myth, but understands its value in a different way?
[00:17:01] And that's what the rest of the book, Sad Love, is trying to do. It puts the emphasis on eudaimonia, which literally originally meant good spirited. So, I, I try to think about what love could be if it is good spirited. And that has a lot to do with collaboration, cooperation, creativity, um, receptivity and responsiveness to other people and finding meaning in, in those collaborative and creative activities.
[00:17:32] So romantic love aims at happy ever after and it aims at this kind of fixed stationary condition where you are like that forever. eudaimonic love is meant to change, it's meant to be dynamic, it's more active, it's more about what people find meaningful in their relationships with other people, how they can create together and collaborate and sustain one another.
[00:17:55] So while romantic love tends to be focused on the nuclear family unit that goes inside a white picket fence and almost closes out the rest of the world. Eudaimonic love, as an idea, is intentionally outward looking,
[00:18:11] So what is, what is the dynamic between, let's say, a couple in, in their community? How are they impacted by and impacting other people or family members? all of those considerations are in play. So, it goes just so, so much further than the individual emotional states of people in the relationship. And eudaimonic love also has no particular associations with being sexual or reproductive.
[00:18:43] It doesn't constrain us to think of one person as the most important person in the world or downplay other relationships, um, friendships, for example, could consist of eudaimonic loving connection. And whereas the romantic ideology tends to promote the romantic connection over all others. Family. friendships, everything else is devalued, the shadow of the romantic relationship.
[00:19:10] Carol: I just, I wish you had told me that when I was in high school and all my friends were getting in relationships and I was like, why are you leaving me? I've always been the chronically single friend and I've always been happy with it, but I feel like that's just been like, question of my life where I'm like, why are people so consumed?
[00:19:26] Carrie: It was a really good question. The idea that there's, like, the chronically single is a kind of state that people want to avoid, that is one of the problems, I think, right? That that state should be stigmatized or, like, shown as, in some way, undesirable.
[00:19:45] Yeah, that's exactly the right question. Why is this happening? Especially in early adulthood and even the adolescent kind of phase prior to adulthood, that's actually when those social scripts and norms are most keenly felt because people are trying to establish themselves, right? They're trying to establish that they belong to this social group.
[00:20:06] They want to follow, most of them, or many of them all, they want to follow the norms and succeed by the lights of the expectations placed upon them. And it's just, it's really sad. I don't think that's a good way to live that phase of your life, or any phase of your life. But It's what we glamorize. If you go watch a rom com, that's the image of success The great life that you all, you can aspire to is you just are going to have one person that's your, your everything.
[00:20:34] Carol: It's tiring to have that.
[00:20:35] Jeevan: I was going to say there's this like really interesting stigma too that comes when like, let's say you are looking for a romantic partner and you haven't been in a relationship in a while. There's almost this idea of like, oh, that's a red flag because it's this idea that this person doesn't understand what it means to live a loving life. Like they haven't committed to the pursuit of love in their life because they haven't been in a romantic relationship when love can take so many forms and so many different iterations.
[00:21:03] Carrie: one of the, the big figures in Western philosophy, Bertrand Russell, wrote, a book in the 1920s where he was trying to explain that sexual love between a man and a woman is just the best thing life has to offer and anyone who doesn't experience it, is going to be bitter and harmful to society as a result.
[00:21:23] It's just like the, uh, the very purest kind of single shaming that you can imagine. I think we're getting a little bit better at that this over time too, but it's a very sticky assumption. And it will crop up in ways that sometimes you think you're giving someone a compliment, like, oh, how are you still single?
[00:21:42] That is, for all those reasons that you just described, actually a really offensive thing to say to someone, right? what you're saying is like, Oh, you're still single. That must mean something is a bit wrong. So how can that be true? Because you seem okay. It's like, oh, that's a little backhanded actually, isn't it? There could be a million reasons why someone has not been in a romantic relationship. And, and it has nothing to do with a lack of love necessarily in their lives.
[00:22:08] We need to deal with this as a society. It's connected to so many other problematic things,
[00:22:13] Carol: You know, there's a lot of kind of discourse around how Gen Z, young millennials, they are experiencing loneliness at incredibly high rates. For all the amazing insights that you provided us, what kind of questions would you encourage young people who are struggling with chasing happiness and chasing romantic love to ask themselves?
[00:22:33] Carrie: I always encourage people to think about love as a much bigger phenomenon than romantic partnership. for all the reasons we've just been talking about.
[00:22:42] And honestly, if, if one doesn't grasp this, that love is something that comes in a million different forms. then loneliness is very likely, even with a romantic partner, because actually having only one person in your life can [00:23:00] be an extremely lonely state. Even if the relationship's going very well, you don't necessarily share all of the same interests with one person.
[00:23:08] Loneliness is not well combated by focusing on romantic connection. We've devalued all of the kinds of connection, social connection, intergenerational connection, extended family connections and friendships. We've devalued all of those things that really are the safety net against loneliness with or without a romantic partner. I think this is really important.
[00:23:29] The other thing that I find pretty interesting is a rejection of online dating and apps that were for a good like 10 years or so, they were the way that people met and dated potential partners. And it sounds like young people these days are starting to say, actually, this is, not doing what I hope it would do, which I will have been on record for a little while saying this. It's not a surprise It's exactly what you predict under capitalistic market forces. because those apps are motivated to keep people on them rather than finding the romantic relationship that then causes them to leave.
[00:24:10] And so it increases. the, the sense of isolation, of hopelessness, in a group that now is 10 years disconnected from other ways of doing that, right? So before online dating apps were the, the normal and normalized way of dating, there were, there were many other routes open to people who were looking to date.
[00:24:31] I think young people these days are, approaching that problem in new and creative ways. I do actually feel more optimistic now than a few years ago when we were just hitting the peak of despair, I think, in terms of how difficult it is to date.
[00:24:48] Now people are actually having this conversation and saying, the apps don't work. We need to do other things. We need to find other ways of getting out, building community, like meeting people, and doing those things. I think it's a two for one deal because yeah, people will actually probably get better connections, dating opportunities that way.
[00:25:09] Jeevan: I feel more hopeful. So, I think 2025 new year. Are there any areas of interest for you within the philosophy of love that you're thinking about this year or any upcoming research?
[00:25:21] Carrie: I wrote a little, a little book called Non Monogamy and Happiness that came out last year, and it's quite closely related to sad love, obviously with the focus on happiness, but it more specifically hones in on connections between happiness as a romantic goal, and the idea that monogamy is the only way to get there. My current work has blended into fiction writing territory, and I'm writing a second novel manuscript right now.
[00:25:51] Carol: Great. Awesome. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. It was truly a privilege to ask you all these questions and listen to your expertise.
[00:26:01] Carrie: Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
[00:26:03] Jeevan: There was so much to pull from that conversation with Carrie. I feel like I learned so much. But I think if there's one thing that I want to pull out from that conversation was this idea of sad love and questioning happiness as a benchmark I think the idea that love can encompass, like, the kind of totality of human emotions and that it's not just about being happy all the time. Anything that really stuck with you from that conversation today?
[00:26:28] Carol: Having an expert like Carrie talk about how, for so many people, romantic love, the goal of it is a happy ever after and like I feel like for a lot of people we know that it's like an implication that we've grown up with but to have someone say it so plainly was so validating. for so much of my life I've had friends seek romantic relationships. Love that, support you, respect it. But the kind of tone of it was always, if I find someone, partner, husband, whatever, I [00:27:00] will be happy. Like my life will be fulfilled. And like as a young kid, I always thought that was such a flawed logic. I don't know if that's because I've been chronically single forever, but it was just really nice to hear a philosopher talk about the fact that, like, happiness is such a poor measurement of life's success. And also, I will say, Carrie, she is the queen of romance.
[00:27:30] Jeevan: Yeah. Totally. She's like an intelligent queen of romance; she was like quoting philosophers and going back in history and it was so fun to hear like how far back the way that we think about love has gone. And I think now, as Carrie mentioned, People are starting to challenge it. Things are shifting, and so it is really cool to be talking to someone who is contributing to that shift.
[00:27:45] Carol: It takes a village. So, I know at the very beginning of the episode, I was very riled up about romantic love, but I just want to clear the air.
I am so excited to love my people, because although I don't have a romantic [00:28:00] partner or a romantic soulmate, I am my own love. And so, as a result Happy Love Day. Is that a hot take? I don't know. What do you think, Jeevan?
[00:28:10] Jeevan: Not a hot take at all. I was snapping my fingers as you were speaking, and honestly, couldn't have said it better myself.
[00:28:18] Carol: And with that, thanks everyone for listening. Make sure you catch our next episode by subscribing or following our show on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get our podcasts. And if you're feeling your feels, please drop us a review. you can find me on Blue Sky at Carol Eugene Park.
[00:28:33] Jeevan: And me on Twitter at Jeevan K. Sanga. From Here Forward is an alumni UBC podcast produced by Podium Podcast Company.