Deifying an actually present man guarantees torment because he is not God

Evidence

But this glorious felicity is seldom stable. No man is God. The relations the mystic has with the divine absence depend on his fervor alone: but the deified man—who is not God—is present. That is where the torments of the woman in love stem from. Her most ordinary destiny can be summarized in Julie de Lespinasse’s famous words: “At every instant of my life, my friend, I love you, I suffer, and I await you.” Of course for men too suffering is linked to love; but their heartbreaks either do not last long or are not all consuming; Benjamin Constant wanted to die for Juliette Récamier: in one year, he was cured. Stendhal missed Métilde for years, but it was a regret that enriched his life more than destroying it. In accepting herself as the inessential and as total dependence, the woman creates a hell for herself; all women in love see themselves in Andersen’s Little Mermaid, who, having exchanged her fish tail for a woman’s legs out of love, walked on needles and burning coals. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1866

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The asymmetry between mystic love (safe because its object is absent) and woman’s love (tormented precisely because its object is present and finite) is a genuinely paradigm-shifting insight about the structure of idolatrous love.
• SEED: Article angle: how the ‘deified man is present and therefore falls short’ mechanism predicts the chronic disappointment built into romantic relationships where one partner is worshiped — and why its cure is mutual recognition rather than more devotion.
• XREF: The Little Mermaid image recurs as Beauvoir’s emblem for the woman who mutilates herself for love — echoes in feminist readings of fairy tales and in the self-sacrifice motif threaded through The Second Sex. — connects to: Sovereign play with weaker beings lets man feel godlike without risking reciprocity — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 481; In Revealed Religion God is beheld directly as an actual individual man; Revealed religion alone incarnates spirit’s self-knowledge in a determinate man — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 770 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• In Revealed Religion God is beheld directly as an actual individual man #corroborates (0.85)
• Revealed religion alone incarnates spirit’s self-knowledge in a determinate man #corroborates (0.85) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 770
• The concept of a needy God is internally contradictory #corroborates (0.70) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 180