Long live the Queen!
The noble singer is deeply unhappy. He strides through the ballroom and shares his anguish with the whole world by singing:
»I don’t want my freedom
There’s no reason for living
With a broken heart!
This is a tricky situation
I’ve only got myself to blame
It’s just a simple fact of life
It can happen to any one…
You win, you lose
It’s a chance you have to take with love
Oh, yeah, I fell in love
But now you say it’s over and I’m falling apart
It’s a hard life
To be true lovers together
To love and live forever
In each others hearts
It’s a long hard fight
To learn to care for each other
To trust in one another
Right from the start
When you’re in love
I try and mend the broken pieces
I try to fight back the tears
They say it’s just a state of mind
But it happens to everyone…
How it hurts deep inside
When your love has cut you down to size
Life is tough on your own
Now I’m waiting for something to fall from the skies
I’m waiting for love
Yes, it’s a hard life
True lovers together
To love and live forever
In each others hearts
It’s a long hard fight
To learn to care for each other
To trust in one another
Right from the start
When you’re in love
It’s a hard life
In a world that’s filled with sorrow
There are people searching for love
In every way
It’s a long hard fight
But I’ll always live for tomorrow
I’ll look back at myself and say:
I did it for love…
Yes, I did it for love – for love…
Ooh, I did it for love!«
What you have just read are the lyrics¹ to the ballad “It’s a Hard Life“ by the famous British rock band “Queen“, which was both written and first performed by their brilliant lead singer Freddie Mercury in 1984.
The song packs a lot of features of the “romantic narrative” – from the self-sacrifice (see Entry 34) that one should take upon oneself when entering into a loving relationship, to the utter establishment of meaning through the other beloved person (which then provides a purpose for one’s own life), to the all-consuming pain when this aspiration proves to be in vain. And also the gambling-effect to give “romantic love” just another try for the sake of one’s own fulfillment resonates at the end as well…
In this way, the British poet who was born in Zanzibar has offered us an elegy, a lament, a dirge – and thus actually a kind of prayer for redemption from the pain he has just experienced. And so many of us who have heard it since then and still hear it today can empathize with this grievance and this plea.
Invocations and lamentations about unhappy love seem to have been around since time immemorial – but does this torment still have to hit us so hard and with such force even in the 21st century, which has brought us an increasingly colourful variety of relationship concepts and philosophies? Has the “romantic relationship of two” therefore perhaps outlived its purpose – and would we experience less suffering and more serenity if we were to have more “pragmatic relationships of two” instead? Just more sober, without any romantic entanglements – but at the same time more satisfactory…?
Just a month ago, the grand dame of relationship (dynamics) research, Esther Perel, once again provided a surprisingly fresh explanation of what actually stands in the way of our relationship harmony – and which mental and practical steps would be beneficial to follow in order to enjoy our happiness in love.
Almost as a clear-sighted answer to the “prayer” cast into a song by Freddie Mercury, she explained in a conversation with New York Times author and podcaster Lewis Howes on September 18th, 2024²:
»Your soul mate used to be God, not a person. You know, the „one and only“ was the devine.
And with this „one and only“ today I want to experience wholeness and ecstasy and meaning and transcendence.
And I am going to wait ten more years… We are waiting ten years longer to settle with someone, to make a commitment to someone. For those of us who choose a „someone“… And if I’m going to wait longer and if I’m looking around and if I’m choosing among a thousand people at my fingertips, you bet that the one who is going to capture my attention, (who) is going to make me delete my apps, better be the „one and only“!
So, in aperiod of proliferation of choices, we at the same time have an ascension of expectations about a romantic relationship that is unprecedented. We have never expected so much of our romantic relationships as we do today in the west. It’s an enormous amount of pressure: We crumble under the weight of the expectations because a community cannot become a tribe of two. This (talk here e.g.) is a party of two. And with you (Lewis) and me, together we are going to create best friends, romantic partners, lovers, confidants, parents, intellectual egos, career coaches… I mean – you name it. And I’m like „Seriously!? One person for everything? One person instead of a whole village?“
So that’s the first myth. And the notion of unconditional love that accompanies this, is that when we have that „one and only“, I have what you call „clarity“, but translated into certainty, peace and freedom, you know, or safety. […]
Keep a community around you. Keep a set of deep friendships, really deep friendships, deep intimacies with partners, with friends, with mentors, with family members, with colleagues, you know, that! So that’s the first thing for me in having good relationships is diversify. For some people that will include sexuality – for the vast majority it won’t.
But the notion that there isn’t a „one person“ for everything and that (this) doesn’t mean that there is a problem in your relationship when that happens.
The second thing is stop constantly looking at people as a product, where you evaluate them – and you evaluate yourself. You know, in our market economy everything has become a product, we included. And so, (falling in) „love“ seems to have become the moment that the evaluation of the product stops: You have finally been approved when you have been chosen and when you choose (yourself).«
Wow, Mrs. Perel! These few lines of the interview are almost an oligoamorous revelation for me, as they summarize much of what I myself have compiled in various places on this bLog.
For me, the most important message is that we are creating the “tricky situation” that Freddie Mercury sings about with our expectations on the one hand – but also with our attitude of oblivious dependency on the other. And even Immanuel Kant, the “father of Enlightenment“, would probably be just as stunned, because it is not the ability to use our intellect³ that is supposed to free us from our self-inflicted dependency these days – but rather the “romantic love” for another person.
However, it’s indeed a tricky situation with this “self-inflicted dependency”, because Esther Perel also points out, as I did in several of my oligoamorous reflections as well, that we are currently part of a type of society that very strongly promotes the isolation of the individual and its evaluation according to performance criteria. Thus, the romantic attachment to another person is often encumbered with the further burden of having to serve as proof that, beyond entitlement or achievement, we are still worthy of being loved for our own sake…
Accordingly, if things start to crumble within our relationship – or if we are even faced with the break-up of that relationship (of which, according to the current majority rules, we are only allowed to have “one and only” of the romantic kind!), whether at best because of a “change of affection” or at worst because of past disloyalties – then we fall as deeply as described above in “It’s a Hard Life”: We fall apart inside; our reason for existence, the meaning of our life itself, is called into question.
And Freddie Mercury and Esther Perel agree on one thing: once we have submitted to a system that functions according to these rules, all we can do is hope again for something “that falls from the sky”, like winning the lottery, to which we cannot contribute in any way except by purchasing another ticket… Expectation and dependency – a vicious circle from which we cannot escape.
But neither Freddie Mercury would have been the brilliant songwriter that he was, nor Esther Perel the clever expert on human love psychology, if they hadn’t both packed a lot more message into their contributions.
First Master Mercury, who begins the opening cadence of his song with the first bars of “Ridi, pagliaccio!” by the Italian composer Ruggero Leoncavallos (the melody is often better known in the translated version “Laugh, Pagliaccio!” – from which a kind of catchphrase has arisen, describing a situation in which a person feels like crying and yet has to present a “happy facade” to the outside world instead…):
Although the style of the song and the accompanying video superficially suggest otherwise – the lyrical self has been abandoned, it is suffering, it has high ideals of love that have (once again) been disappointed by another party… – it is in fact trapped in precisely the “self-induced” vicious circle of dependency (“you win – you lose”) that I described earlier. So Freddie Mercury didn’t just want to give the world another melodramatic love ballad – he was obviously very aware of that ambiguous fact within his composition and left some subtle clues as to what his real “theme behind the theme” was.
As the author of this bLog (and a self-confessed romantic), I particularly enjoy the chorus in the Queen song, in which Mr. Mercury nonetheless allows the values that nevertheless really matter to shine through: Being loyal, caring for each other and showing consideration for each other – all based on trust that has been built up with one another (I can hear the scientists Cohen, Underwood and Gottlieb from the last paragraph in Entry 14 – oligoamorous capital stock!).
Which brings us to Esther Perel, whose explanation I particularly liked in that she advised in the best oligo- and polyamorous way to urgently “diversify” one’s own “relationship portfolio” – but did so without the stereotypical reference to personal need satisfaction that is otherwise so often insisted upon in polyamorous networks (By this I mean the pseudo-argument that “only one person can never possibly fulfill all the needs of another” – and that just for this reason alone one would be obliged to maintain several romantic relationships… My explicit criticism thereof see Entry 85). It would also be too easy to (mis)understand her remarks in this way – which would immediately put us in the “self-assessment trap” she herself criticizes – since in that case we would be “in need” of others in order to be allowed to experience ourselves as “whole” (and the message of despair from “It’s a Hard Life” would have triumphed…).
Indeed, that is not what the controversial relationship researcher was getting at with her statement. Esther Perel is concerned with a very important philosophical as well as humanistic, both queer and oligoamorous principle: (self-)empowerment.
And it is precisely this self-empowerment that would be the best remedy for the two disastrous sides of the same unhappy love coin: dependency and expectation.
When it comes to shaping relationships, Ms. Perel therefore calls for conscious proactivity. For me, this also implicitly indicates that we are required to once again re-examine our established and existing relationships in terms of their degree of self-empowerment: In which relationships am I allowed to exist as a whole personality – combined with the flexibility and freedom not to function as a “passe-partout” for every case of doubt and desperation on demand?
However, by adding that for her – despite “diversification” – community, deep friendship and intimate togetherness are the true yardsticks for healthy relationships, Esther Perel picks up on Freddie Mercury’s loyalty, commitment and consideration, which are repeatedly echoed in the chorus of “It’s a Hard Life ” – whereby both the artist and the scientist agree in their understanding of what the “core currency” of genuine relationships at eye level is.
And both also agree that our search for comfort and acceptance can drive us into treacherous shoals such as misunderstandings and seemingly inexplicable despair if we unquestioningly abandon ourselves to normative social expectations, which meanwhile harnesses basically good ideals in front of a strangely garish cart in order to spur us on to unrealistic performances even in our intimate romantic relationships – in return for the promise of gratifications that are impossible to achieve by humble human standards.
So today I sit in awe of both the 40-year-old song lyrics of a genius who died far too early and the life experience of an attentive expert on relationships and people who shared her insights just a few weeks ago.
The oligoamorous universe – it revolves and expands like its great archetype.
Once again, I am grateful to be part of it!
¹ The lyrics of “It’s a Hard Life” HERE on Genius
² Lewis Howes in his series “THE SCHOOL of GREATNESS“ in conversation with Esther Perel on September 18th, 2024: “Relationships Have CHANGED Forever ” as an excerpt in English with German subtitles, e.g. on Facebook.
³ Immanuel Kant in his essay ” Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment? “ from 1784
Thanks to Megan Watson on Unsplash for the photo!