Mild at Heart: Love, Sex, and Masculinity After Purity Culture: Ep 7
Why does love feel like death? Brad continues to reflect on the soulmate myth and purity culture's vision of love. He analyzes how the model of love in these stories sees it as the end of life--the completion of one's journey, and thus something like death. With help from Plato and the Odyssey he explains why it is such a toxic, and potentially abusive, vision of love within the purity culture context.
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What's up y'all?
Welcome to Mild at Heart, our series here at Straight White American Jesus on love, sex, and masculinity after period culture.
My name is Brad Onishi.
I'm faculty at the University of San Francisco.
I want to talk again today about love and purity culture and how purity culture's vision of love and model of love is really just dysfunctional and misguided at best and toxic at worst.
Last week I talked about the soulmate myth and I talked about how the soulmate myth goes back to Plato.
And I think many of us are familiar with the story of finding the One and finding our other half, and, you know, historians will say that goes—and philosophers will say that goes back to Plato, and Plato has this whole story in the Symposium, and that's where we get that.
Well, my argument is that it goes back further than Plato to Yahweh and the Israelites, because Yahweh enters into a monogamous and monotheistic relationship with the Israelites, and vice versa.
Yahweh promises to fulfill and complete the Israelites, to give them all their desires and to fulfill them and to protect them in ways that sound very much like what is supposed to happen when you meet your soulmate.
I talked about how this is problematic because even if we think that there is an omnipotent God of the universe who is your soulmate, that another human being certainly is not.
And so to place on them the expectation that they would fulfill you and complete you and make you happy is just not a good model.
I want to talk about this a little further because I think there's even more here than we were able to get into last time.
So let's just sort of think about Plato one more time, okay?
And I promise this is going to go somewhere that is very relevant for 2021 and purity culture.
In Plato's story, and it's told through again this comic poet named Aristophanes in the Symposium, you know, Aristophanes in the Symposium stands up at this banquet and he gives a speech about love and soulmates.
And he basically says that each of us has been cast down to earth as a half of ourselves, and we are searching for our missing half.
And that basically the goal of human life is to find our other half, right?
The missing one that will complete us and make us whole.
As I talked about last week, this sets up everyone else that you love before that person as a mistake, right?
There's no recognizing anyone else as helpful or beneficial or constructive.
They are just a mistake on your journey of finding your other half who will complete you.
Well, one of the overlooked aspects of what Aristophanes says is that if somebody actually found their other half, and if they were actually able to complete this mission, to join with that person and reunite into the kind of spherical ball of a matched pair that they were before Zeus cut them apart and sent them down to Earth.
That if this unity were to actually take place, that they would be motionless, right?
That there would be no need any longer for their journey on Earth to continue.
That essentially, the mission of their life would be fulfilled.
And so, they would enter back into this unity with their soulmate, and that would mean that they were complete and fulfilled, and everything would be sort of settled.
In essence, they would stop moving.
They would stop progressing.
They would stop their journey.
There would be no reason to go forward.
There would be no reason to search for anything else.
Life would be, in essence, over.
Now, this again, I think, pertains to period culture because we get a similar story, at least in part, in period culture.
Again, anyone out there who's gone through it knows that you're taught that The goal of any dating relationship, of any romantic relationship, is to get married and to find the one.
And you do so in order to, you know, sort of fulfill your life, and it's all part of God's plan for who you are.
Once you find that person, you are, in essence, complete.
You have found the one who is meant for you, the one that God has planned for you.
And so, yes, There are things to do, right?
You know, God's people have a mission, and they need to evangelize, and they do this, and they need to do that.
But when it comes to thinking of your love life, when it comes to thinking about your relational life, when it comes to thinking about your romantic life, It's kind of mission complete, right?
And there's really no way to go forward.
There's nothing to accomplish further.
I know that some out there listening, and you know, if there's any evangelical counselors or pastors out there, they might be thinking, no, that's not true.
Every marriage can work on greater forms of intimacy and greater forms of togetherness and all that stuff.
Okay, that's fine.
But here's the thing.
Ideologically, conceptually, once you've met the One, it's done.
You're not going to get divorced.
You're doing what God has wanted.
What God has joined, let no person separate.
You've now left your one flesh, Genesis 1, to join together with the person who God has destined you for.
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