Freedom of choice?
February is traditionally the month of purification – and even the Latin word “februare”, from which it takes its name, means exactly that, namely “to purify oneself” or even “to atone (for) something“.
In addition, February is also a month of extremes. For example, since the Gregorian calendar reform of 1582 at the latest, it is not only rather short – and therefore often passes more quickly than expected – but is also dedicated to the aforementioned “purification” and inner reflection, which is often preceded by debauchery of a bodily nature, which is still recalled today in many places by carnival customs.
Both tendencies – the debauchery and the (sobering) purification – were certainly perfectly plausible in the past, especially when people had to spend long, dark winter months together in their dwellings, predominantly idle and confined to small spaces.
But even these days – hand on heart – we are still far from being completely free of both phenomenons in our relationships – and this is often all the more true for multiple relationships.
Insecurely attached, as many of us unfortunately grew up, we often tumble over each other in this way. Our level of neediness is high – but we keep telling ourselves that it is purely interpersonal magnetism and an expression of our personal freedom. Thus, we may even push aside some of our personal values, for which we would have put both hands and our conscience on the line yesterday, only to feel ashamed of ourselves a short time later – but as David Houston and Barbara Mandrell sang back as early as 1972: “How can it be wrong – when it feels so right?“
In this way, we are our worst prosecutors – and at the same time, when it comes to our own good reasons, our most lenient judges…
Our parents, and in some cases our educators and teachers, picked on us with their own issues at a time when we were far from understanding what was actually going on, where this excessive energy and vehemence came from, which was far too often passed on to us unchecked and unresolved. And if there is a psychic law of conservation of energy, as there is in physics – …and the assumption is likely – then our biography continues to influence all our relationships with ambigious love, suffering and blurry resentments. Still powerful in a way of which astrology says that the stars do not force – but do incline.
As mammals and herd animals, as human beings, we need others; we are dependent on them for our survival, but at least as much for our social well-being.
In this respect, our primate nature allows us to learn primarily through observation, adaptation and imitation – even the dawn of a very intellectualised 21st century in the western world cannot eliminate this from our genes.
And that’s where we stand today, with our limited free will.
And even for that, the benchmark is not that low.
In issue 4|2024¹ of the magazine “Max Planck Research”, Herwig Baier (German-American neurobiologist; Director of the Department Gene-Circuit-Behaviour at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence) states: “Being free” would mean that internal and external influencing factors would trigger behaviours adapted to them in a way that exceeded a simple stimulus-response pattern. In the corresponding article, he specifies that organisms would therefore have to have their individual past, present and future in mind in the truest sense of the word in order to be able to make complex decisions in a meaningful way: They would have to be able to remember past events, focus on current challenges and, if possible, predict what their actions would lead to (and by the way, we’re not talking about extraordinary personalities like Marie Curie or Nelson Mandela – but humble zebrafish!).
It’s a good thing that the aforementioned issue 4|2024 has another article¹ up its sleeve immediately afterwards – which, to the delight of my bLog and its theme, is about our freedom in our “choice of partner”.
There, demographer Julia Leesch concedes that, despite the freedom presented by the media – depicting a supposedly large selection of potentially available, compatible and with just a little initiative accessible candidates – there are clear factors for all of us which determine how we establish our relationships – and that in this regard we are primarily dependent on the people we actually meet (in real life). She adds that it is also crucial, of course, what our own preferences are – but also by whom our interest would ultimately be reciprocated. Many dating platforms and apps, for example, would offer a relatively large age gap with distinctly younger suitors in order to suggest even more “choice”. However, when compared with reality, there would be relatively few actual relationships in “green life” that would have a higher age gap between the parties involved.
The same would apply to the myth of “opposites attracting”, according to research associate Yayouk Willems from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development: Instead, the overwhelming majority of relationships analysed in over 199 studies showed a wide range of similarities: “There were hardly any people in established relationships that were really fundamentally different from one another.” ²
On the contrary. The results of the studies would even indicate that whether we could imagine a relationship with other people would ultimately not be decided primarily by charisma, humour or beautiful eyes, but by comparatively unromantic factors.
Incidentally, these were often: IQ, level of education, as well as (hear, hear!) drinking and smoking behaviour.
Thus, what we have literally already experienced in life – and therefore strive for or rather want to avoid – plays a rather distinct role…
In my view, the studies provided further important findings, particularly for ethical multiple relationships, because – as Yayouk Willems continues: “Personality traits such as whether someone is more introverted or extroverted seemed to matter far less than expected. Although she was also surprised at first glance, she now considered the results to be comprehensible. People apparently paid much more attention to the way they spent time together in a relationship and what values (!) the other person stood for. Differences in specific character traits, on the other hand, were probably more likely to be equalised.”
Which clearly reminds me of my 33rd bLog Entry, in which I introduced the singer “Alice im Griff”, who at that time had written a tragic love song about a destructive discrepancy concerning the basic values between herself and her loved one.
I also quoted the US psychologist Steven Hayes recently in Entry 104, who attested to our inner desires that “Values are the expression of our individual striving for meaning and purpose in our lives. A basic need that would always be in danger if, in trying to fulfil it, we began to give priority to external requirements or socially standardised aspirations at the expense of self-determination and the (self-)chosen quality of our actions.”
So when we choose our loved ones, we are actually on a somewhat chaotic search for a kind of “community of values”.
Another Max Planck demographer, Nicole Hieckel, explains that although we may only have limited biographical freedom in our choice of partners, our external freedom has nevertheless increased significantly – which would have an almost “liberating” effect on the actual shaping of our relationships – with a simultaneous increase in our (oligoamorously so important) personal responsibility: “The importance of relationships for personal fulfilment has become more important nowadays. This also changes our expectations regarding relationships. Do I feel close to my partners? Do I feel valued? The desire for emotional intimacy in particular is much more important today. If this expectation remains unfulfilled, the signs for the survival of a relationship are more unfavourable than they were for past generations.”
She emphasises this change in values and the freedom that comes with it: “Many people today feel more strongly that their own identity has several dimensions. […] Alternative social spaces have opened up in which people can realise themselves. […] For many, the idea of finding emotional closeness is still very important. But nowadays it involves a kind of self-realisation that was not usually available to people in the past.”
The Max Planck journalist Sabine Fischer, who wrote the authoritative article to which I refer here, concludes that this self-realisation would thus lead to its own unique kind of freedom: That relationship models would diversify, allowing them to be renegotiated and personalised – literally: “…from polyamorous relationships, in which the participants have equivalent loving relationships with a number of people, to same-sex and open models, in which people allow each other to have sex with other people outside the relationship.”
To this end, she once again cites the above-mentioned demographer Nicole Hieckel , who very impressively bridges the gap between that new creative leeway, shifting value orientation and personal biographical restrictions:
“This is where great freedom arises, because there is no longer such an established institutional framework and relationships are becoming more based on negotiation processes. […] At the same time, it might also be possible that less conventional ways of life give people more room to define themselves. […] Negotiating a relationship beyond traditional norms and practices, be it in terms of sexual monogamy, a gender-independent division of labour or the demarcation between shared and personal property, requires resources, above all the ability to communicate. This is demanding, and in that respect, people are not equipped with the same competences. Freedom also means that everyone takes on a great responsibility to shape their own relationship in a sustainable way.”
Now that Mrs Hiecke has used several oligoamorous keywords in just one sentence, I (almost) no longer dare to come up with my own summary.
Because when it comes to our relationships in this day and age – and our perspectives on pursuing them with multiple partners – even the verdict of science is somewhat ambivalent.
Especially as we will probably have to perform a balancing act for some time to come between, on the one hand, our will – but tempered by what we are really able to achieve mentally and emotionally – and, on the other hand, the promised possibilities, which are not as unlimited as we might like to imagine.
Like a more or less experienced person on a slackline, we will not only occasionally sway between both poles; we will certainly freeze sometimes because we don’t dare or don’t know the next step – and in extreme cases, we will also simply slip down on one side or the other from time to time. In this way, we will experience feelings of elation, because for a while we will intoxicatingly believe that we have mastered the system – only to succumb on another day to the awful and utterly sobering feeling that we have failed ourselves…
However, neither the one would be a final victory, nor the other a complete setback, as both are part of being human (and not just in February!): passionate exuberance as well as (re)focussing on the essentials.
It seems important to me to keep realising that in both cases we always take ourselves along with us. So that we not only need a strict prosecutor and lenient judges as internal authorities, but above all, so to speak, an understanding (legal) counsellor in the form of a loving (self-)attendance³, who is quite aware of our partly limited, partly generous abilities and resources in our above-mentioned search for emotional closeness.
In her opening remarks, research assistant Yayouk Willems described some of our key reasons for choosing a partner as “almost unromantic”. For me, the most beautiful symbolization of the synthesis that such an embodiment of “unromantic” can come across as utterly and deeply romantic is the following dialogue performed by Susan Sarandon (as Beverly Clark) and Richard Jenkins (as private detective Devine) in the movie “Shall we dance“ (2004). There, the two sit together in a scene and the following dialog ensues [in which you may, of course, replace the words “marry” and “marriage” with any type of relationship you hope for]:
Beverly Clark : “Why ist it, do you think, that people get married?”
Detektiv Devine: “Passion!“
Beverly Clark: “No!“
Detektiv Devine: “It’s interesting. Because I would’ve taken you for a romantic. Why then?“
Beverly Clark: “Because we need a witness to our lives. There’s a billion people on the planet… I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you’re promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things… all of it, all the time, every day. You’re saying ‘Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go unwitnessed because I will be your witness’.”
And in this sense I wish us all that not only public prosecutors, judges and legal counsellors play an important role in our lives, but hopefully above all these good witnesses that our hearts desire.
¹ MPG research magazin 4|2024 currntly still in translation: https://www.mpg.de/mpresearch
² nature human behaviour – T. Horwitz, J. Balbona, K. Paulich, M. Keller: Evidence of correlations between human partners based on systematic reviews and meta-analyses of 22 traits and UK Biobank analysis of 133 traits (Published: 31 August 2023)
Previous version: Correlations between human mating partners: a comprehensive meta-analysis of 22 traits and raw data analysis of 133 traits in the UK Biobank (19 March 2022)
Summary: Opposites don’t actually attract (by Sciencedaily)
³ The trauma therapist Maria Sanchez, for example, points very strongly to the importance of such an “inner self-attendance”. About her approach I wrote a few lines exactly one year ago in Entry 98.
Thanks to Eli Pluma on Unsplash for the photo!