According to Simone de Beauvoir, men and women experience, feel, and think about love differently.
In The Second Sex, de Beauvoir says that this difference in the attitudes towards love is because of the dominant gender stereotypes and the economic and social factors shaping and governing the place of women and men in society.
This difference in the attitudes towards love, de Beauvoir says, renders unlikely or perhaps even impossible any possibility of genuine and true love.
How Do Women and Men Experience Love Differently?
The difference in the attitudes towards love, de Beauvoir says, arises because women devote and reserve themselves completely and wholly to the person that they love. De Beauvoir calls this complete and full devotion “love-religion”.
Men, on the other hand, treat their beloved as an object, as a possession and a trophy. This form of love lacks the abandonment, devotion, and openness that characterize and define women’s attitudes towards love.
Another difference in the attitudes towards love, de Beauvoir says, is the way in which men and women treat love itself. Love is merely one aspect of the lives of men, placed over against other aspects; a mere project placed over against other projects.
Men order and integrate love into their lives in such a way that makes love a value among other values, a project among other projects, or an attempt among other attempts.
Women, on the other hand, often totally forget about and completely leave behind their lives to love. This abandoning, de Beauvoir suggests, is first made possible because of different economic and social reasons.
De Beauvoir says that the difference in the attitudes towards love is not natural, but rather social. The values and meanings that women and men attach to love are socially determined; they are governed by the social situations in which men and women find themselves, in which they are found by others and by themselves.
Everything in society lets, helps, or makes men appear as the superior beings, the essential beings, the gods, and that around which everything else must revolve. This way of thinking, this way of seeing the world renders inevitable a certain oppression of women, a certain marginalization of women and their projects.
These forms of oppression shape and define how women love and how women relate to themselves whilst loving, for they often, directly and indirectly, oblige women into abandoning themselves so that they could come together with the god, from out of which meaning and value flow.
The Failure of the Project of “Love-Religion”
De Beauvoir says that, eventually, women realize that men are not gods. The attempts at deifying men will sooner or later fail, according to de Beauvoir. That which surrounds men and lets them appear as gods will eventually fade away and be disrupted. The project of “love-religion” will eventually fail.
But even if the project of “love-religion” eventually fails and disappears, its possibility, happening, and dominance oblige women into abandoning their own projects, their own freedom, and their own transcendence. That is, women sacrifice and abandon their transcendence and projects before realizing that men are not gods and that the project of “love-religion” is groundless.
De Beauvoir says that in this unequal relation, women see themselves in terms of their objectivity and passivity, whereas men see and relate to themselves as subjects, as active subjects. In this unequal relation, women exist for men, for-others, and not for-themselves.
In this unequal relation, women see themselves through men and their projects, they leave behind their own projects, themselves, and their destinies; they become passive.
Is Real Love Possible?
This unequal relation cannot be real and genuine love, according to de Beauvoir, for love occurs and only becomes possible when there is equality.
Real and genuine love happens and becomes possible only when there is strength and reciprocity, not weakness and passivity. This occurs, de Beauvoir says, only when women become independent, economically and culturally.
According to de Beauvoir, “genuine love ought to be founded on the mutual recognition of two liberties”. In genuine and real love, transcendence is never abandoned or sacrificed, for lovers see and relate to themselves as both other and self, as otherness and sameness. Genuine and true love is grounded in reciprocity.
The suggestion that one can relate to oneself as both self and other is repeated in The Ethics of Ambiguity, where de Beauvoir says that women and men should experience themselves simultaneously as both object and subject.
De Beauvoir says that if men and women welcome this ambiguity with a “lucid modesty, correlative to an authentic pride, they would meet each other as fellows and would live the erotic drama in friendship”.
For more articles on de Beauvoir’s philosophy, visit this webpage.