When you’re in love, nothing feels cringe. I mean when you’re in the full flush of first attraction—nothing about the other person can possibly be annoying. Or else, it’s only annoying in the “oh, you” sort of way. “She’s always on me about my old t-shirts.” “He’s the worst at texting back.” You roll your eyes. But you also kind of think it’s adorable.
Then, if the relationship turns sour, something ugly happens. The words stay the same, but the tone transforms. When you fall out of love, the very same quirks that once seemed endearing now fill you with disgust beyond all rational measure. “She’s always on me about my old t-shirts.” “He’s the worst at texting back!”
Today this is called “getting the ick.” In Tom Stoppard’s play The Real Thing, two reckless paramours named Henry and Annie blow up their marriages to be together. Henry keeps finishing Annie’s sentences, which is cute until it’s not. When they finally have each other, the romance curdles into mundanity, and then contempt: “For Christ’s sake, will you stop finishing my sentences for me!” That line, so apparently simple, goes off like a grenade. Once she’s said it out loud, it becomes real: she’s got the ick.
These days, I get the disturbing impression that men and women in the aggregate have the ick for each other.
Everyone can cite some things about the opposite sex that they find mystifying and a little silly. “Is it really so hard for men to pick up after themselves?” “She’ll tell you about her problems, but she doesn’t want you to fix them.” These complaints, when made with affection, are actually part of love. Who are these mad and maddening creatures, we are saying, who complicate and yet complete the world?
But recently those very same sentiments have become bywords of inter-sexual warfare. “Is it really so hard for men to pick up after themselves? They’ve cheated us out of trillions of dollars!” “Women don’t want to fix their problems: they just want to drain men dry.”
This sounds to me like a society-wide case of the ick. A couple weeks ago, basically every single person on the internet watched a young woman explain that after enough minor disappointments, a girl will simply shut down toward her boyfriend overall: “the problem now is that she’s un-attracted to you and just simply does not like you anymore.”
I suspect that video went so astronomically viral because it seems to describe, not simply one failed relationship, but an entire failed social arrangement between the sexes. Online, at least, we have spiraled into making hideous caricatures and impossible demands of one another: never, ever flirt (you slut). Never talk to other women alone (you filthy animal).
Maybe it takes an outsider to see this, or maybe it’s all too easy for a gay guy to diagnose dysfunctions in the straight dating world (we have plenty of our own, I promise). But it does strike me that decades of angry grand pronouncements about “what men are like” and “how women act” have turned charming foibles into bitter accusations. The preposterous excesses of late-20th-century feminism—“a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle!”—and the lock-jawed tradwife/manosphere reaction in this century, have teased men and women apart by stages. Is anybody happy with this state of affairs? It seems not.
In a real-life relationship, I propose, the cure for the ick is as follows. Spend less time grumbling theories about the other person to yourself in the shower, and more time face-to-face with them, listening with charity. Because the secret is that they are neither the unblemished demigod you made of them when you were doe-eyed, nor the incurable reprobate you make of them now that things have gone south. Love—real love, not infatuation—will mellow out slowly in the negotiation between you two as you are: quirky and obnoxious, elegant and strong, trying sincerely to know and be known.
Is it possible that a similar approach might work at a social level? I’m heartened to see people getting sick of capital-T Theorizing about the opposite sex, be it trad or rad. I suspect the remedy lies in turning instead to seek actual community with people of both sexes. As Lane Scott wrote recently, the domestic bliss of the future won’t look exactly like it did before all this Sturm und Drang. Some things really have changed. That’s okay: we’re still the same species we were when we first fell in love. Lay your weapons and your tweet threads down. We can patch things up.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:
On their podcast, Mollie Hemingway and David Harsanyi were talking about the recent We Are The World documentary and how refreshing - and disheartening, when compared to today - it was to see this room full of black and white pop stars spend hours together and never even see a hint of racial consciousness or animus. I remember those days, and I remember the days before Pride month, and I remember the days before all this self-worshipping identity politics bs (for the most part - I’m not old enough that radical feminism hadn’t already begun to spoil the relations between the sexes). It’s just such an avoidable tragedy. The answer, as you know, is in Christ. But the more society turns its back on our universal redeemer, the deeper we descend into our particular hells. Bless you for at least fighting the good fight.
As I get older, I think perfectionism that leads to falling out of love and feeling the ick is a young person's game. I also think that it's part and parcel of the body-denialist and simultaneously materialistic turn that Western societies have increasingly taken.
Fixating on a romantic partner's flaws and felling "the ick" has nested in it the imagination that there's some more perfect partner out there, so one can afford to throw away someone you've already invested time and emotional energy in, because a materialistic society teaches us that everything--and everyone--is disposable; you can just upgrade to someone better, like you would with a new thousand-dollar iPhone. And of course your romantic partner has flaws, just like you do: they're a physical being in a physical (or fallen) world, and entropy (or sin) is real. But the body-denialists pretend that our bodies are infinitely malleable, and perfectable--not something you need to worry about breaking down.
But I'm middle-aged now, and I want someone to love me enough to push my wheelchair when I break my bones, and someone I love enough to nurse through his recovery from surgery. I know my body can be very icky, just like his, and will become more so over time. And that's why we need each others' love.