Possessing the loved one wholly destroys the transcendence that made him lovable

Evidence

And yet, she does not really consent to have the man be nothing else but her prisoner. Here is one of the painful paradoxes of love: captive, the god sheds his divinity. The woman preserves her transcendence by handing it over to him: but he must bring it to the whole world. If two lovers disappear into the absolute of passion together, all freedom deteriorates into immanence; only death can provide a solution: this is one of the meanings of the Tristan and Isolde myth. Two lovers who are exclusively destined for each other are already dead: they die of boredom. Marcel Arland in Terres étrangères (Foreign Lands) described this slow agony of a love that devours itself. The woman understands this danger. Except for cases of jealous frenzy, she herself demands that man be project and action: he has to accomplish exploits to remain a hero. The chevalier who embarks on new feats of prowess offends his lady; but she scorns him if he stays seated at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love; woman wants to have man all to herself, but she demands that he go beyond all the givens he could possibly possess; one does not have a freedom; she wants to lock up here an existent who is, in Heidegger’s words, a “being from afar,” she knows full well that this effort is futile. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1875

Categorization

• DEFINE: The whole passage works through the immanence/transcendence distinction, showing how love collapses the lover into immanence when both retreat from the world.
• XREF: Directly extends the Sartrean/Heideggerian vocabulary introduced earlier in the book — ‘being from afar’ names the same transcendence Beauvoir has been building toward since the introduction on the Other. — connects to: A fulfilled demand for love destroys the very condition the demand required. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 958; Love is not physical possession because the beloved’s consciousness always escapes us.; Materializing the phantasm of the double destroys its power — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 322 (+10 more)
• APHORISMS: ‘Two lovers who are exclusively destined for each other are already dead: they die of boredom’ reads as a genuinely timeless piece of relationship wisdom worth returning to.

Broader Connections

• Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought #corroborates (0.90) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989
• Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others. #expands (0.85)
• Narcissism, romantic love, and mysticism are doomed attempts to transcend through immanence #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1770
• Love is the surface where domination logic punishes the lover who loves too much #complicates (0.80)
• Faith that tries to transcend knowledge is destroyed by that very attempt #exemplifies (0.80)
• The passionate man fails where subjectivity, not content, cannot fulfill itself #expands (0.80)
• A value grounded in being would destroy value and enslave the will #expands (0.80)
• Pathological feminine love yearns to dissolve selfhood entirely into another’s will #qualifies (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1848
• Mechanical reproduction of beauty destroys the unconscious idolatry that made beauty vital #exemplifies (0.75)
• Thought divorced from emotion destroys the impulse that nourishes it #exemplifies (0.75) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 150