Problematic Relationships

A lot of social theories that you see these days, coming from all sides of the political universe, hinge on the lots-of-good-fish-in-the-sea model of sex and romance.  (Also other kinds of relationships, sometimes, but let’s just talk about sex and romance for now.)  “Having a relationship with someone under $SOME_PARTICULAR_CIRCUMSTANCE poses a bunch of potential problems.  So you should never do it, and we will punish you if you do!  You can just go find a relationship with someone else!”

It turns out that this is a really broken model, especially for people who are not-totally-normal in any serious way.  Humans are not fungible.  When you meet someone, at least on some level, you will never meet anyone like that person again – and while in many cases the relevant differences aren’t very substantial, there are also many cases where they are.  Sometimes staying away from someone means killing a beautiful, totally-irreplaceable thing.  Sometimes one individual is the difference between a life of joy and a life of misery. 

And that’s true even if that person is your boss.  Or your professor.  Or your first cousin.  Or even your sibling, I guess.  There are like a million of these, and they always seem incredibly distasteful and pointless until suddenly the person you love falls into the relevant category.

Now, to be clear: it’s not wrong to say “some circumstances make relationships many times riskier than normal, some circumstances are ripe for abuse and horror.”  This is 100% accurate. 

It is a cost.  It gets weighed against the cost of “society has deemed that your love is A Problem and therefore forbidden regardless of how anyone involved actually feels,” which is a cost whose weight you should understand very well indeed, whatever your particular personal politics happen to be. 

So how do you resolve a balance-of-costs problem?

Well, if you’re a policy-maker or a norm-setter, you can in fact just steamroll any objections and issue a blanket rule.  And maybe the utilitarian calculus would justify that.  Maybe you’re correct that the chances of victimization / cultural disease / birth defects / whatever are so much weightier than whatever-joy-will-come-out-of-these-unions that it makes sense to be the Relationship Police.  But at the very least, this is a thing you should do solemnly, with a keen awareness that you are wrecking actual individual lives – and trampling on normal, culturally-key standards of individual autonomy in the realm of personal satisfaction – in order to achieve your aims.

Or you could try to introduce mitigation protocols.  You could spread memes to the effect that relationships of Type X are minefields of potential disaster, much more so than other relationships on average, and therefore anyone entering into one would be wise to take precautions A B and C for the sake of his own welfare, and that doing so is a sign of love and faith-in-the-relationship rather than the reverse. 

But, y’know, to do that you actually have to be willing to admit that sometimes a relationship of Type X is the right thing.