Why some girls build their houses and some girls tear theirs down

stop romanticizing emotional pathology

Megha Lillywhite's article, "Why some girls are Adored and some girls are Settled for," has been gaining a lot of traction among my circle. I would like to share my thoughts, earnestly and urgently.

Men and women find ourselves in a crisis. Dating is a nightmare, marriage rates have plunged, our culture is overtly hypersexualized but statistically undersexed, and men and women fear one another with the cold instinctual panic of prey animals eyeing predators. This is a problem I can't personally solve, but it's something I think about often. Megha thinks about it too, and that's why she's written a plea for passion that I both understand and vehemently oppose.

As I've said, our culture is both hypersexualized and undersexed. We're also desperately out of touch with our own souls—our emotions, our thoughts, the ability to form a complete sentence, the sensitivity to articulate a nuanced feeling. I agree that we need to rediscover passion, in a certain sense, but passion is a tricky word. The writers of Scripture explicitly warn us to flee youthful passions.¹ If Scripture isn't your thing, and I understand that not everyone is Christian, the entire body of ancient philosophy would like a word. Megha is right in perceiving that love awakens us to beauty, and in a particular sense of the word, passion is a part of love. That does NOT mean we need to throw off all emotional restraint. Importantly, beauty is part of a triad with goodness and truth. Let's not ditch the other two.

My first response to the article was an unqualified nope. Opposed as I am to materialism, I still couldn’t stop my eyes from rolling at the very first sentence. However, I feel that those who cannot articulate their position have no rationale for maintaining it; plus, I don’t want to be a brute. Eye rolling is a lizard brain response.

Let me add that I don't love reaction posts, yet here I am. Why? Well, frankly, I'm a young woman who's experienced the pain of discovering I've been deceived. If by any means I can spare someone else that pain, be it so.

Having cleared my throat with this dance-y introduction, here are my unfiltered thoughts on "Why some girls are Adored and some girls are Settled for."

what makes women human?

We need to consider the human being as something more than an appetitive creature. Megha seems to believe that “human” is a quality that varies in intensity based on emotion:

Estella, though cruel, is more human. She has weaknesses and passions herself and she is warm one day, cold the next.

The compendium of time-tested thought begs to differ.

Plato wants you to know that the spirited and appetitive parts of a person are, or ought to be, subordinate to the rational part of the human being’s tripartite soul.

Aristotle, despite his renowned misogyny, wants you to know that “of all animals man alone stands erect, in accordance with his god-like nature and substance. For it is the function of the god-like to think and to be wise.”² Moreover, it is reason and not passion that defines the human being as such (see Ethics, especially on akrasia (“incontinence”; literally: “lack of mastery”).

The Bible wants you to know that humans are made of spirit and body, and that the human being who lives forever is one who has died to the passions and lives as a new creature in Christ. St. Paul makes a critical distinction between the many parts of a human being that make up the totality of our experience—sarx, soma, psyche, and pneuma (flesh, body, soul, and spirit) denote four aspects. (Richard Beck has a series on this—I can’t write at length about it, but I got the gist in Theology 200 and I’ll let him do the talking at a higher level.) While St. Paul doesn’t persist in the philosophers’ praise of human rationality, he clearly and repeatedly urges subordination of the lower parts to the higher. Guess which is which.

I’m cutting myself off with those few, but just know that at no time in human history have the wise attributed the quality of humanness to emotional inconstancy. Denying primacy to emotions is not just a materialist thing.

And I know, I know she’s not using “human” as a argument for what exactly makes up a human being. I’m not going to make that full argument either. I realize she is using “human” to mean “genuine, real, authentic, vulnerable, open.” Here’s the thing, though: Our “authentic” selves are going to hell. Our real, raw, and honest selves make catastrophically terrible choices that ruin lives. We have got to stop with this feminine sin of glorifying the emotions.³

Christ did not save us by helping us get in touch with our emotions. He saved us by remaking us.⁴⁵

Megha continues her thought on Estella’s display of “humanity”:

She reveals herself to Pip emotionally in ways that Biddy does not. Where Estella is cruel, at least she is human.

Lots of women reveal themselves emotionally, like a constant dripping on a rainy day. That’s not what makes a woman special or captivating. That’s what makes her, in the final analysis, insufferable.

what makes men heroes?

Men don't fall for disaster women because they want to be heroes. They certainly do fall for disaster women, and in droves, but we've egregiously misidentified the cause of that phenomenon.

In the hero narrative, the princess is not the dragon. The dragon is the dragon. What does the hero want? Not to tame the dragon. He wants to slay the dragon to win the princess. The thrill of the story is the fight and triumph over the beast. When the princess is the beast, something pathological is happening within the hero, the princess, or both. Put simply, when the princess is the dragon, the hero's fight goes internal, as he has to wrestle down the urge to slay the dragon and instead try to tame her. At this point, are we being honest with ourselves in affirming he’s a hero?

An interesting work for comparison, I admit, is Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. Contra the argument I've just made, Petruccio really seems to get a kick out of fixing up Kate. That said, the whole point of that play is in Kate finally getting herself together and ceasing to be the shrew. Petruccio didn't want to be married to a wild animal. He wanted to be married to a grown woman, and he ends up getting one in the matured Kate.

Women should be judiciously vulnerable, emotional, passionate, etc. with the right man at the right time. The assertion that “I don't need no man” is plainly wrong. But there is a critical difference between vulnerability and immaturity, between emotionality and intemperance. Haphazardly grouping those concepts together is flatly incogent. We also need to ask what passion really means, and why the saints and philosophers both had so much to say about the passions.

love: passion or virtue?

Thomas Aquinas sums it up

There’s a great article from The Catholic Thing by Randall Smith on “Love as Passion – and Virtue” that snugly bundles Aquinas’ thoughts on the subject. I’m unlikely to say it better myself, so here’s Smith:

Passions . . . are things that, in a certain sense, just happen to you – which is why the medievals called them “passions” (passiones), to distinguish them from acts. Similarly, we call them “emotions,” because we are “moved by” (e-motus) them.

. . . Virtues, on the other hand, are “habits,” or better yet, settled dispositions, that bear fruit in action. Virtues including things like courage, temperance, honesty, and generosity. They aren’t things that merely happen to you. When you have them, they allow you to do something — sort of like a skill.

When it comes down to it, that emotional obsession we call love is actually baseless, fleeting, and no more significant than other passing emotions like anger, pleasure, or fear.

the telos of passion

In defense of passion, it is preferable to solely determined resignation. It’s special. It’s fun. The warm, fuzzy feeling of love gets us to make commitments that we almost certainly would not make apart from a strict sense of duty which no longer exists in our culture. People in their right minds don’t promise to spend the rest of their lives together in sickness and health, poverty or wealth, etc. People without rose-colored glasses on don’t simply look at other people, who are just as annoyingly flawed, just as capable of evil, just as susceptible to bodily breakdown, and think, “Yeah, I want to be in close quarters with this one particular person forever.” We do not tend to willingly make lifelong commitments without at least a trickle of positive emotion, and usually it takes much more than a trickle. Passion does that for us.⁶

Human beings aren’t naturally loving in the virtuous sense, and I do think passion is the bridge that gets us from self-preoccupation to concern for others. But passion can only take us so far. The honeymoon phase fades after three years max, and virtue has to do the rest. In other words, emotions can be of service to God, but only as conduits, not as ends in themselves. Passionate love must be sublimated into virtuous love. To quote Smith,

Certainly there is love as a passion. . . . But like the other passions, this sort of love has to be disciplined and directed by our wisdom and prudence to serve not only our flourishing, but the good of others.

Love as a virtue, then, is love that has taken root, we might say, in our character – something that has become a settled disposition for willing and doing the good for others.

taking the fight to the enemy

When a man tries to love a woman consumed with her own “immaturity, emotionality, childishness, fear, insecurity,” that woman’s dragonlike character is the enemy. He will be drawn to her because men are drawn to fighting dragons. The reason their “love” won’t last is because she has made herself the very thing he is called upon by duty to kill.

Many a man would tell you he'd prefer to have a prudent wife than to be a “hero” in a marriage characterized by chronic fluctuations of emotional temperature. There are many reasons for the modern divorce rate, but the idea that women should be allowed emotional free rein and that men should love them for it is surely one of them. Men get tired of women who act like children. Let me put a fine point on that. If a man is falling for you because you’re acting like a prepubescent girl . . . disturbing. Pathological, even. Women talk quite a bit about not wanting to be their partner’s mom, so why is it not problematic to be his kid? It comes down to this: if he wants a project, he will find a dragon to fight, and that dragon should not be you.

virtue is lame

So what’s to be done? What if I don’t want to be the woman loved out of duty? What if I don’t want to love someone out of duty? The thing about passion is . . . I want it. And the thing about virtue is, I don’t.

We might find some solace in the Protestants’ favorite saint, C. S. Lewis:

Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their true potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.⁷

Megha is right about one thing: materialism sucks. But you know what else sucks? Relying on passion to do the job that only virtue can do. There has to be some solution where we don’t erase the sweet enchantment of love, but we also don’t enchant ourselves into a stupor. It’s inadvisable to do the Ulysses thing.

But we’re not without options, and we don’t have to stuff our ears with wax and sail on as if passion does not exist. Scripture, literature, and other sources have plenty to say about romance-as-intended.

I’m thinking of Jane Eyre, for starters, as an example of passion tempered by virtue. Drop your reading suggestions in the comments. I’ll be thinking and reading more about how to steal past the watchful dragons in days to come, and I hope to write more on this soon!

1. 2 Timothy 2:22.

2. Aristotle, Parts of Animals 4.10.686a 27-32, rev. Oxford translation.

3. I’m not even going to bring it up—should I bring it up? Okay—companies are manipulating your emotions to sell you things.

4. 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”

5. Ezekiel 36:26: “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.”

6. If I were to take the perspective of evolutionary psychology (which can sometimes be useful despite abundant flaws), I would say that emotional attraction evolved to get us to procreate and ensure optimal outcomes for ourselves and our offspring. You can take that dive if you want, I won’t elaborate on it here. Helen Fisher has done some of the best-known work on the psychology of love, sex, and atraction.

7. “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said,” in On Stories and Other Essays on Literature.