Love, Desire, and Two Guys Named Leo
On older men dating younger women, and love for naturalists
By Zeus, I shall tell you how it looks to me, Socrates,” he said. “Some of us who are about the same age often meet together and keep up the old proverb. Now then, when they meet, most of the members of our group lament, longing for the pleasures of youth and reminscing about sex, about drinking bouts and feasts and all that goes with things of that sort; they take it as hard as though they were deprived of something very important and had then lived well but are now not even alive. Some also bewail the abuse that old age recieves from relatives, and in this key they sing a refrain about all the evils old age has caused them. But, Socrates, in my opinion these men do not put their fingers on the cause. For, if this were the cause, I too would have suffered these same things insofar as they depend on old age and so would everyon else who has come to this point in life. But as it is, I have encountered others for whom it was not so, especially Sophocles. I was once present when the poet was asked by someone ‘Sophocles, how are you in sex? Can you still have intercourse with a woman?’ ‘Silence, man,’ he said. ‘Most joyfully did I escape it, as though I had run away from a sort of frenzied and savage master.’ I thought at that time that he had spoken well and I still do.
-Republic, Book I (329a-d)
Lately, the internet is abuzz with memes and articles about Leonardo DiCaprio and his latest girlfriend, Camilla Morrone, splitting up soon after her 25th birthday, another mark in the long pattern DiCaprio has established of never dating a girl over 25.
Not missing a beat, reports soon followed that DiCaprio and supermodel Gigi Hadid had “hooked up a few times over the summer.” They’re not dating, of course (Hadid is 27, not to mention having a child). The Daily Mail suggested a likelier possibility-22 year old Ukrainian model Maria Beregova.
I’m sure she’s got a great personality. Someone will have to ask her what happened to it in three years.
I’m sorry, it’s fish in a barrel. Now look: I’m sure churning through dozens (Hundreds? Thousands?) of the most beautiful women on earth is far from the most unpleasant way to spend one’s life. DiCaprio’s day-to-day is genuinely every adolescent boy’s fantasy. The problem is that DiCaprio is 47. To most (admittedly plain, admittedly old-fashioned) sensibilities, that’s the age to be driving your kids to school, walking the dog after work, and having sex with your wife with the lights off. It’s an age at which, like Cephalus in Plato’s dialogue quoted above, one ought to have wrestled with one’s desires, made peace with them, and accepted that there’s more to life than the sexual conquests of their youth-that things like love, citizenship, good friendships, and the cultivation of a virtuous life perhaps offer greater rewards than the constant pursuit of even the most choice pleasures.
But it seems as if the alternative of a protracted, utterly indulged adolescence is something of a new American Dream. In our era of fast-paced vapidity, those who can fall back on the only reliable form of (albeit short-term) satisfaction capitalism has to offer-luxury goods, expensive getaways, and purely hedonistic sexual encounters to fill the vacuum left by a genuine human life. People, no less than objects, are to be used and disposed of. I’m sure DiCaprio is a perfect gentleman in his relations with these women, just as sure as I am that he is at least subconsciously aware that he is using them, and when they are used, discarding them-and from then on, anyone he discards has the distinct pleasure of being, to any of the other elite men they court in the future, Leo’s leftovers.
It’s interesting that nothing I’ve said here is likely to sound surprising to anyone. We seem to have hit a grumpy old man stage of radicalism, where, as Jezebel noted, “Together, we’ve put our differences aside and collectively made it uncool and worthy of aggressive mockery for older men to date much younger women!!” Alongside this comment, Jezebel attached a Ben Shapiro tweet, of all things, announcing that DiCaprio couldn’t stay with Morrone because he “had to be present at the birth of his next girlfriend.”
This is perhaps not as fortuitous an overlap of values as one might imagine-Shapiro and the writers at Jezebel align on this question because they are prudes who dislike liberal culture and its insistence that consenting adults can do whatever they want. Jezebel writers are prudish towards male behavior generally (and towards the women who tolerate it), and, for religious reasons, Shapiro is a prude regarding anyone’s sexual behavior, but most especially the behavior of an obnoxious liberal Hollywood celebrity-and there are few Hollywood liberals more obnoxious than DiCaprio. It’s an old trope: the odd bedfellows of radical feminists and conservative traditionalists finding a shared hatred for hypercapitalist hedonism and sexual liberality-typically for all the wrong reasons.
So, what constitutes a genuinely good set of sexual ethics? I’m not sure, but there are some more intriguing stabs at the question. Shapiro is a prude, but his prudishness is nothing compared to another embattled, famous, far left chad named Leo: Tolstoy.
Leo differed from Leo in that he was wracked with guilt about any sexual behavior throughout his life (he ultimately one-upped denominational Christians by embracing total sexual abstinence, even from his wife), but he certainly shared latter-day Leo’s enthusiasm for it. He also married his wife, Sophia, when she was 18 and he was 34-he has the defense that this was if anything rather conservative for his time, but still, those are numbers that would make even our Leo blush.
Tolstoy, while undeniably a genius, was also frankly a rank narcissist-almost everything he ever wrote in some way serves as self-exploration, much of it quite explicitly-and all of his admirable conclusions on moral philosophy seem to stem from his ultimately self-aggrandizing desire to prove himself better than everybody else. That much of that narcissistic self-exploration happens to be the greatest literature ever written is unfortunate in a way-there’s nothing worse than a narcissist who can back it up.
But there are really two Tolstoys-the one before his conversion to Christianity, and the one after. That latter Tolstoy seems to write in a style he explicitly endorses in his treatise What is Art?, which asserts that art which does not serve to improve the moral constitution of a society is worthless. He was no longer interested in writing “great” literature, the sort which one him praise from the intellectual class as the world’s greatest novelist, and which required deep analysis to draw meaning out of and simply took too long for the lower classes, even the literate lower classes, to actually read. He was instead interested in writing “good” literature-stories which could be understood by Russian peasants, and which served to morally uplift their readers with simple, straightforward messages. Art, he asserted, ought to be penetrating, to “infect” those exposed to it-but what they are infected with also matters, and infectious art with a pernicious message could not be called good, even if it were well-crafted.
From this period we don’t get the subtle, brilliant, and lengthy tomes about Russian aristocrats, war, and the search for goodness; instead we get short stories and novellas with characters who are essentially mere props for teaching the reader a lesson-as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, What Men Live By, Resurrection, The Kreutzer Sonata, and many others. While Tolstoy never fully loses his incredible ability to impy extraordinary depth and concreteness to fictional people, the characters in these stories nevertheless almost cease to be characters, and become mere mouthpieces for different human tendencies. It’s thoroughly activist, evangelical literature, and it’s all interesting, even if much of it isn’t very good (certainly Resurrection, Tolstoy’s last novel, is by far his most amateurish-while also being in many respects the most thrilling for the radical reader).
Tolstoy’s attitudes towards sex had always been complicated-Anna Karenina is in large part a quite conservative warning against adultery, but it’s thoughtful, nuanced, and understanding of the mistakes its characters make. Tolstoy was a man who felt immense desire-probably why his wife bore him 13 children-and he hated himself for this lack of self control.
The most dramatic example of this is The Kreutzer Sonata, a story which the post-conversion Tolstoy, world famous even in his lifetime, suffered great abuse for having written (in response to it, Theodore Roosevelt cluelessly described Tolstoy as a “sexual moral pervert”). As in all of Tolstoy’s stories, the main character, Pozdnyshev, is something of a channel for Tolstoy himself. Knowing this, we can only wonder how his wife, Sofia, might have read it-Pozdnyshev hates his wife, who eventually commits adultery, so that he ultimately murders her in a fit of jealousy. Sophia and Tolstoy did, in fact, hate each other, but instead of murdering her, he died of pneumonia after trying to get away from her.
The story was intended to get to the bottom of the distinction between love and lust, the nature of marriage in a secular age, and the role of sex. It does so ferociously. Pozdnyshev, interrogating a naive liberal woman on a train ride, demands of her a definition of love:
“Love . . . love . . . is a preference for one man or one woman to the exclusion of all others. . . .”
“A preference for how long? . . . For a month, two days, or half an hour?” said the nervous gentleman, with special irritation.
“No, permit me, you evidently are not talking of the same thing.”
“Yes, I am talking absolutely of the same thing. Of the preference for one man or one woman to the exclusion of all others. But I ask: a preference for how long?”
“For how long? For a long time, for a life-time sometimes.”
“But that happens only in novels. In life, never. In life this preference for one to the exclusion of all others lasts in rare cases several years, oftener several months, or even weeks, days, hours. . . .”
“Oh, sir. Oh, no, no, permit me,” said all three of us at the same time.
The clerk himself uttered a monosyllable of disapproval.
“Yes, I know,” he said, shouting louder than all of us; “you are talking of what is believed to exist, and I am talking of what is. Every man feels what you call love toward each pretty woman he sees, and very little toward his wife. That is the origin of the proverb,—and it is a true one,—‘Another’s wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.’”
DiCaprio eat your heart out.
This is the truth, though. Our eyes wander, we think about what we might be missing out on, and then we look at our partners and measure them against that. It’s terrible to say it, but it’s also true-it’s why adultery is so common (one survey-of an admittedly small sample of 441 people-found that 46.1% of respondents admitted to having committed infidelity).
For Tolstoy, marriage only made sense if one knew why one was entering into it, if one had a way to do that instinctive calculus and come up with the right answer, every time. Without that, it was a sort of sick joke, one which couldn’t be kept up for long. Pozdnyshev laments:
It is necessary in some way or other to regulate the sexual relations; but there exists no other foundation than the old one, in which nobody longer believes. People marry in the old fashion, without believing in what they do, and the result is falsehood, violence. When it is falsehood alone, it is easily endured. The husband and wife simply deceive the world by professing to live monogamically. If they really are polygamous and polyandrous, it is bad, but acceptable. But when, as often happens, the husband and the wife have taken upon themselves the obligation to live together all their lives (they themselves do not know why), and from the second month have already a desire to separate, but continue to live together just the same, then comes that infernal existence in which they resort to drink, in which they fire revolvers, in which they assassinate each other, in which they poison each other.
In the modern world, lacking the sacred to fall back on, many of us throw up our hands and dismiss monogamy as the problem. We’ll get to that.
A Naturalistic Approach to Romantic Love
Tolstoy was a Christian, and also an avowed anti-naturalist. For him, the material world was on its own cold and void of meaning, and only by belief in God could he imbue it with any. But he saw the DiCaprio inside of him, and he hated it. Unable to distinguish love from desire, one becomes spiteful-one can’t make a genuine commitment to another out of mere convention. What was needed was a higher, transcendant, universal love which bore no relationship to lust.
But what, for naturalists, constitutes a rational approach to relationships? For a naturalist, love is not transcendant-it does not come from God. It’s a natural development in human minds, in this sense no different from lust.
But love and lust have different functions. Lust is certainly useful as a way of ensuring reproduction, which any species after all needs. Love, on the other hand, is a fucking miracle. Love, I would argue, is not merely to care for others as you do for yourself, but to actually care more than for yourself. Love, expressed in compassion and sympathetic happiness in the wellbeing of another person, is what gives a person the capacity to make sacrifices. This can take the form of quite dramatic displays, but it’s also a much more common and everyday part of life: it is, in fact, how many get through the day, allowing them to endure jobs and daily pains of life they would otherwise find intolerable, in the knowledge that their suffering will translate into the wellbeing of someone they love. Thus, their suffering is given meaning, and meaningful suffering is not just easier to bear-it’s something those who don’t experience it actively yearn for.
Love, I have argued before, is what holds societies together, such that they are not mere aggregates of individuals. If virtue, as I have argued, are characteristics developed through habit or education which expand an individual’s freedom from vice, love is what guides free action in ways which create a cohesive whole. An individual may possess the virtue of courage such that they are capable of setting aside their own safety to some other end; love is what ensures that that end is social in nature, that it serves to benefit, rather than harm the community, without which virtuous individuals are impossible.
This is the distinction between friendships of pleasure, and complete friendships, which Aristotle elucidates in the Nicomachean Ethics. Friendships of pleasure have a kind of love, but it is a love one feels
because of what is good or pleasant for themselves, not insofar as the beloved is who he is, but insofar as he is useful or pleasant. Hence these friendships as well <as the friends> are coincidental, since the beloved is love not insofar as he is who he is, but insofar as he provides some good or pleasure.
It is not really love of the person, then, which are loved in these relationships, but of the pleasure the other person offers. A complete friendship could be said to be one of love “in itself.” As Aristotle puts it,
complete friendship is the friendship of good people similar in virtue; for they wish goods in the same way to each other insofar as they are good, and they are good in their own right…Now those who wish goods to their friend for the friend’s own sake are friends most of all; for they have this attitude because of the friend himself, not coincidentally. Hence these people’s friendships last as long as they are good; and virtue is enduring.
Romantic love of this sort is a type of community-the two lovers bear responsibilities to each other to uphold their own virtue, and by loving each other, are thus incentivized to do so, because to cause the other person pain by failing in one’s virtue is to do pain to oneself. When this sort of love works, it creates a relationship which is not just beneficial to both parties, but sustainable, allowing the two to grow with and because of each other.
The question could be asked: is it possible to have a successful polyamorous relationship which still involves this kind of love? The answer, is, of course, that I’m unsure. On the scientific side, there is some research into this subject, and the results are mixed. A study in the journal Frontiers in Psychology asked people who had been in a polyamorous relationship (wherein there are more than two partners in a committed relationship with one another) whether they would be in another one, and if not, gave a couple possible reasons. The results (again, predictably subject to a relatively low sample size) are intriguing:
Only 30.4% of respondents who had tried polyamory were interested in trying it again, but quite a sizable number of respondents found it too difficult for various reasons having to do with the ability to emotionally cope with having multiple partners (or, more likely, with other partners having other partners).
I would be somewhat skeptical towards this methodology (the accusatory flavor of the word “possessive” gives off strange connotations), though it’s understandable for practical reasons-giving such specific options on a multiple choice questionnare seems liable to leading, prompting the respondent to make their experience fit into the answer being offered in a way that differs from what they would say if allowed a free-form response. Anecdotally, though, it does ring true to what I’ve been told by people I have known in polyamorous relationships. Another study found that open relationships also tended to be less satisfying to participants, though the authors acknowledge that other research contradicts this. In an ideal world, it would be best to specifically research an older age cohort which had extensive experience with forms of non-monogamy to see what their satisfaction level was, whether they tended to stay in such relationships or if they were only a phase, and so on. Even expecting someone’s survey response to accurately reflect whether their relationship is indeed satisfactory or not seems suspect to me-some subjects are difficult to encapsulate within scientific research. Love may be one of those things. Probably these options do work for some people, but I do suspect for most they constitute a particular stage in one’s romantic life, and most such people expect to eventually “settle down.”
And I think there’s a reason for that. Monogamous relationships work, in part, because they’re less demanding. A real relationship, cultivated and maintained over years, requires a lot of active effort, and most people do have ambitions beyond their love life. Indeed, if love is indeed about taking joy from the wellbeing of one’s partner, one must have ambitions, for their lovers’ sake.
Perhaps that’s part of what has brought about the millionaire fuckboy, the same way it’s brought about the modern nomad, and for that matter the hikikomori phenomenon in Japan of grown adults who become recluses in their parents’ homes, not working, not making friends, not doing much of anything. All these lifestyles are different (and particularly in the latter case, idiosyncratic cultural differences should not be overlooked), but they bear a profound sameness-overly autonomous individuals, if only in the sense that they have no real connections or organic obligations defined by a role in some sort of organic community. To Aristotle, the political community was necessarily composed of men from households-to have no household was to have no city-state, to be “clanless, lawless, and homeless,” as Aristotle quotes from Iliad. Such a person either had no virtue, or, Aristotle admits with some irony, must have been superhuman. We seem to live in such a world, with supermen of pleasure on the one end, and incels as the “poor specimens” on the other. Both seem to be playing the same game-one where the concept of a good life is obstructed by a ceaseless, ever-escalating hunger.
It’s as if one were trapped on an island with no food, but hundreds of barrels of Domaine Leroy Musigny Grand Cru (averaging $26k a bottle). If one must starve, it would, I suppose, be better to starve in luxury. But I’d still opt for a cheeseburger.