Hitting the Block Button on the Virtual Translation of My Relationships

“Today’s ego, with its endless capacity to enunciate and refine criteria in mate selection, does not desire”. This quote from The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han has been on my mind recently, as I’ve shifted my focus from my capitalistic meritocracy of a relationship, and my strategically aestheticized boyfriend, to my own feelings regarding my relationship. 

As a hard-core romantic at heart, this concept of “desire” has always been something I’ve been infatuated with since I was a child. We discussed The Agony of Eros in my Contemporary Theory and Criticism class a few weeks ago, and it led to some realizations regarding my relationship and the modern-day approach to love. Han discusses the pre-modern versus modern perception of love, and how pre-modern love was dangerous in the sense that it often involved intense idealization of one’s lover that led to disappointment when they were met with reality. This is something I’m quite guilty of. In contrast to this idealization of one’s already existing lover, modern love tends to “rationalize” love in a way that eliminates desire. 

However, I have some additional thoughts regarding this point. In my experience, being immersed in the modern, very virtual and social-media trend-infected world of dating and relationships, I believe a different kind of idealization is present. As individualism after the pandemic continues to rise, and self-improvement culture, and individualistic “self-care” and dating trends dominate many areas of social media, this has led to increasingly rigid and unrealistic expectations for partners. Instead of idealizing someone who already exists, we are idealizing someone who doesn’t exist, and who will never exist. Han calls this “rationalization” the “death of the other”, meaning the death of romance or the ability to truly love or feeling desire. I think of it more as a death of nuance, one that is leading to the death of desire. 

An article by Jon Berger called “Writing is an off-shoot of something deeper” discusses how virtual translation is a “binary affair”. He states that: “true translation is not a binary affair between two languages but a triangular affair. The third point of the triangle being what lay behind the words of the original text before it was written”, essentially explaining how virtually translated texts lack the exclusively human capability of understanding nuance, or the “preverbal”. As I’ve done some self-reflection amidst the overwhelming doubts surrounding my relationship and really dissected my own approach to relationships, and specifically my relationship with Al, I realize that our relationship is, in fact, a binary affair. There is something missing from our relationship that is eliminating the “desire” that we need; a third corner, if you will, in the form of understanding and communication. I’m guilty of idealizing the real, and the not-real. As much as I idealize the version of Al that exists, there are elements of rigidity within both of our expectations for each other that demonstrate this modern “rationalization”. Maybe turning up the volume on my headphones or running the vacuum or blender when he brings up my concerns isn’t “protecting my peace”, and maybe he can’t read my mind all the time, especially when I’m too busy drowning out his concerns instead of communicating. Yet at the same time, he needs to realize the falsity of “if they wanted to, they would”, and realize that taking a four hour nap after meal prepping for the week and not answering his text doesn’t actually mean I didn’t want to answer it, or that I don’t want him. Maybe our relationship doesn’t emanate “negative energy”; perhaps instead of lying awake at night wondering what each of us “brings to the table”, we’re missing the real problem: what do we feel about each other? I fear that our conformity to modern-day trends of seeking out healthy relationships has only resulted in one that is transactional. Our desire is dead. It is, in fact, a binary affair, and in our fixation on following these rigid virtual rules, our messages to each other continuously fail to send. In the modern-day attempt to understand love, we’ve taken the fun out of it. Social media has led to the death of nuance, and now our relationships are nothing but virtual reality. My professor spoke of Han’s ideas and summarized the focal point of The Agony of Eros to be that love is sustained through an element of “mystery”. To me, this “mystery” is that element of nuance. Real love is love that evolves, and relationships are journeys. One’s own path in life is unpredictable, and this element of mystery in love is found in experiencing this unpredictability with your partner. Evolution is found in simply taking that path of life together. Even if there’s nothing salvageable in my relationship with Al, I still have hope for my own personal love story. It’s time to hit the block button on the virtual translation of my relationships.