“Heterosexuality always makes me ashamed of others,” Maggie Nelson wrote in Los argonautas / Els argonautes (Tres Puntos Ediciones / L’Altra), the memorial essay in which she recounted how her pregnancy took place at the same time as the beginning of the transition from gender of your partner. The writer and academic Asa Seresin started from that phrase to define, in a text that she published in 2019 in The New Inquiry, a catchy concept, like songs with a chorus, heteropessimism. This defines the attitude of disappointment, shame and despair before the state of heterosexual relationships, especially the fact of being immersed in one.
The characters of various recent fictions continually put it into practice, this idea that, at this point in the film, being heterosexual, let alone being part of a monogamous couple, is a little ridiculous.
Eloísa, the protagonist of one of the stories in Not Everyone (Sexto Piso), by Marta Jiménez Serrano, goes to a party one day without her boyfriend, Marcelo, “she gets drunk, smokes, dances and makes out with everyone , mainly with friends and with homosexuals”. She flirts a bit with an actor, “unquestionably straight, though he’ll say bi because he sounds hip.” The same is done by Anna and Tom, the characters in Las perfecciones / Les perfecciones (Anagrama), by Vincenzo Latronico. When, somewhat ashamed of their life as a monogamous couple, they end up in a Berlin sex club, they tell everyone that they are bisexual, “despite the fact that he had never been with a man and she had only been with a woman once.” in Tom’s presence.” Polyamory, Latronico also writes, does not go with them “not only because, according to what their friends said, it seemed like a bureaucratic and degrading structure, but also because they, together, were fine (…) they felt a bit pathetic living so taste in a long-term monogamy, but in reality they were only attracted to other people sporadically or temporarily.
At least Celine and Luke, the protagonists of the novel A Happy Couple (Today’s Issues), the second novel by Irish Naoise Dolan, don’t have to lie. They are bisexual. She had a girlfriend before Luke, Maria, who exerts a somewhat harmful influence on the couple, and he was with a boy, Archie, who is still one of her best friends, which throws his girlfriend off, Celine. But even they start the novel by embarking on an exotic project in 2023: preparing a wedding, specifically theirs. A man and a woman born in the mid-nineties putting on heteronormative suits and swearing eternal love.
The characters in these fictions, and in others recently published –Reward System (Random House), by Jem Calder, Consum preferent (Anagrama), by Andrea Genovart– suffer ailments that could be described as generational. They live on an infinite scroll, their lives remain unstable when they might be expected by biological imperative to become solid, they suffer from choice anxiety while being algorithmically conditioned to want certain things. But dissatisfaction with the heterosexual couple model is not even the heritage of twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings in contemporary fiction. The characters of Intimacy (Sixth Floor), by the Japanese-American Katie Kitamura, move through the city of The Hague with more than four and five decades behind them, and yet their love lives continue to be just as fluctuating as those of his hypothetical nephews. La, an interpreter at the International Tribunal, is embarrassed in front of her friends for being unhealthily obsessed with a man she has just met, Adriaan, who has not yet finished divorcing her wife, with whom he shares three children. When they both go to a friend’s house for dinner, her friend doesn’t hesitate to flirt with her new troublesome boyfriend. In Andrew Ridker’s humorous novel The Altruists (Random House), the boomer dad, a 70-something widower who can’t seem to keep up with his partner thirty years his junior, is as lost as his millennial children.
What all these books, so disparate in their form and in their objectives, draw is an approximation to the loving uses of right now. And one of the central axes of this new confusion is FOMO, the Fear of Missing Out, or Fear of Missing Out, an idea as logical (who doesn’t want more, all the time?) as it is relatively new when applied to the sentimental. That same Berlin couple who lies in the sex club (which they leave without doing anything) feels that their own happiness is defective or caused by the wrong reasons. “They were afraid of being happy simply because they had been happy,” Latronico writes. “I hid the moral in that chapter,” clarifies the author [the full interview, below]. “For hundreds of years, on every continent and in every culture, that has been the definition of happiness, contentment. If you are afraid of that, you are afraid of being happy. And what I wanted to ask myself is what makes them unhappy, is it heteronormativity or is it a lack of self-confidence? If you like your partner and you’re happy, that’s fine. If you like your city, that’s fine. The need to constantly expand is what gives them unhappiness.”
Dating apps are, of course, the invention that both enables and complicates relationship FOMO. Once again, the LGBTQ community opened the door to using algorithmic-based applications, which added geolocation technology, to find new sexual partners, with the pioneering Grindr, and the heterosexual world followed later with Tinder, which has celebrated its decade this year. , and all the others: Bamble, Raya, etc. The effects that these horizontal supermarkets of the affective sex have had have begun to be studied in essays such as Sad by Design (Consonni), by Geert Lovink, The Love Algorithm (Contra), by Judith Duportail, and in The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations (Katz), by Eva Illouz, among many others, and it was to be expected, with the narrative possibilities that they contain, that they would also be explored in fiction.
In Reward System, Jem Calder tells the story of a match on two planes, his and hers. “The user liked the clean, asensual experience of using the log-based dating app; the position of freedom and control, of distance, that facilitated this rationalized simulation of discovery and romance. She liked that it involved little risk, that it was easy to write off the slimes.” Of course, that same user can’t help but “imagine her own violent death at the hands of one of her matches.”
Later, when they have already gone to bed, something happens to the user: “In the dark of the room, I couldn’t remember the user’s true appearance, only the images of his profile.” The user, for his part, has ideological doubts about the use of the application. On the one hand, he intuits that classifying women as fit or unfit based on their physical appearance shouldn’t be very feminist, but later he remains somewhat calm thinking that they also do it to him. “Since he was seriously into the app, he had started to see women as sort of clones, as if each woman he matched with was a continuation of the woman who had come before it.” But, what is the alternative, really? Going back to the non-algorithmic-based homogamy pairing system? Getting together with someone from the same neighborhood, or from the same town, from a compatible family and a similar socioeconomic status?
Mixing gender roles that are still stubbornly (and again) persistent with such a transactional system has its dangers, apart from being strangled to death, as the protagonist of Calder’s story suspected. “Heterosexuality organizes inequalities in an emotional system that loads the weight of the success or failure of relationships on the psyche of people, mostly women,” says Illouz in The End of Love. “Men and women, but especially women, look to their psyche for resources to manage symbolic violence and the wounds caused by these emotional inequalities: why does he show himself to be distant?” She adds.
The writer Merritt Tierce explained in an article published on Valentine’s Day this year in The Paris Review that she had 107 dating apps after her divorce, none very fruitful, but some very educational. Like the one he had with a French economist on OkCupid, who explained that he wasn’t attracted to her because of her mimetic desire. If they were on a deserted island, he developed French, and he had to choose between Tierce and “a gorgeous person”, he would choose her because they could talk and go to bed, but in the real world, surrounded by other people who would be watching, he would be embarrassed because everyone would know that he could be with a more attractive woman.
Given this panorama, it does not seem bold to point out, as Andrea Long Chu, the latest winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literary criticism, does, that heterosexuality is “on the brink of collapse, held with tape and fingers crossed.” Nor is it surprising that it is straight women especially who post memes about the curse of being attracted to men and who cling, half as a diagnosis and half as a cure, to what Asa Seresin called in his founding text on the subject a Bergsonian solution and anesthetic, heteropessimism. With this, the writer refers to the fact that the idea is applied like those ointments that must be applied half an hour before a skin intervention and that reduce pain, a method that “protects against the overintensity of feeling” but that does not finish fixing the problem. problem. Condemned some to live in the era of heteroperplexity, the only thing left is to read, a lot, and varied, on the subject.
