Love will tear us apart … again (… and repeat)

Our last blogger, Supergirl, introduces a related, but different version of “moving on” culture. After traversing between ending her love relationship because “she can’t promise him anything”, then “giving the relationship another go”, and then “starting to feel trapped all over again”, Supergirl decides she must finish the relationship.

She tells her man how “his expectations are too high” and that he “needs a promise” that she “couldn’t give”. Similar to Dolly, Supergirl psychologises the reason for this as some deep-seated aspect of her personality - “its not because of what has happened but because that is who I am … I don’t commit, I can’t commit”.

In AmberFire, Dolly and Supergirl’s worlds, commitment and long-termism look like obstacles blocking more amazing loves, more amazing sex and more amazing connections in the future. The reasoning begins to look like: “while the relationship I’m in might be good, who knows what I might be missing out on” (AmberFire).

We’re left wondering just how “weak”, “strange” or “personality” based these orientations to love and intimacy are? The other question, of course, is whether this is a story solely reflective of young women’s experiences or actually part of a broader societal trend. My research and the social theory suggests the latter.

Arguably, AmberFire, Dolly and Supergirl’s individual stories of commitment-avoidance can be understood in terms of broader life-orientations that have become prevalent in contemporary social conditions.

As Bauman tells us in Life in Fragments (1995:91) “time is no more a river, but a collection of ponds and pools”. In this flattened, non-linear version of time, avoidance of fixation and the ability to keep moving - preferably running - become the rules of the game. In this experience of time, we are bound to what the sociologist Thomas Eriksen (1991) has insightfully dubbed the “tyranny of the moment”. For Eriksen, the moment is tyrannical in the sense that singular points of time have become filled to the brim with possibility and opportunity. The problem is, you just never know when you’ve found that “big bang moment”, that life-changing experience, that “peak experience” (Bauman, 1997) - was it that moment, is it this moment or will it be the moment around the corner?

This compulsive search for that “big bang moment” creates a social world conducive to deleting, forgetting and replacing (Bauman, 1997:2000). In other words, AmberFire, Dolly and Supergirl might be understood as everyday expressions of a culture that encourages a psychological disposition to keep “moving on” - to constantly uproot oneself - in the search for that heavenly, awe-inspiring, life-changing moment.

For these contemporary Australian subjects, love is just another intimation of a social world who’s inhabitants are desperate for connection - ultimate connection - and who are prepared to tear things apart to achieve it.