Willing to be loved alienates the lover’s freedom into the body-for-others.

Evidence

Judging by the discussion of sexuality in Being and Nothingness, a Sartrean love affair was an epic struggle over perspectives, and thus over freedom. If I love you, I don’t want to control your thoughts directly, but I want you to love and desire me and to freely give up your freedom to me. Moreover, I want you to see me, not as a contingent and flawed person like any other, but as a ‘necessary’ being in your world. That is, you are not to coolly assess my flaws and irritating habits, but to welcome every detail of me as though no jot or tittle could possibly be different. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 679 (#expands, via linked claim)

A cautious woman in love—but these words clash—tries to convert the lover’s passion into tenderness, friendship, habit; or she tries to attach him with solid ties: a child or marriage; this desire of marriage haunts many liaisons: it is one of security; the clever mistress takes advantage of the generosity of young love to take out insurance on the future: but when she gives herself over to these speculations, she no longer deserves the name of woman in love. For she madly dreams of securing the lover’s freedom forever, but not of destroying it. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882 (#expands, via linked claim)

Yet conversely desire stands at the origin of its own failure inasmuch as it is a desire of taking and of appropriating. It is not enough merely that troubled disturbance should effect the Other’s incarnation; desire is the desire to appropriate this incarnated consciousness. Therefore desire is naturally continued not by caresses but by acts of taking and of penetration. The caress has for its goal only to impregnate the Other’s body with consciousness and freedom. Now it is necessary to take this saturated body, to seize it, to enter into it. But by the very fact that I now attempt to seize the Other’s body, to pull it toward me, to grab hold of it, to bite it, my own body ceases to be flesh and becomes again the synthetic instrument which I am. And by the same token the Other ceases to be an incarnation; she becomes once more an instrument in the midst of the world which I apprehend in terms of its situation. Her consciousness, which played on the surface of her flesh and which I tried to taste with my flesh, disappears under my sight; she remains no more than an object with object-images inside her. At the same time my disturbance disappears. This does not mean that I cease to desire but that desire has lost its matter; it has become abstract; it is a desire to handle and to take. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Love fails because both parties cannot escape objectifying each other. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 93; The lover demands to be chosen absolutely, not as one among others — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 948; To love is always to want to be loved in return, generating indefinite regress. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 958 (+11 more)

Broader Connections

• Romantic love is a struggle over who gets to define the other’s freedom. #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 679
• Woman’s love-religion seeks possession while paradoxically preserving the lover’s freedom. #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1882
• Attempting to appropriate the Other destroys the incarnational freedom desire sought #corroborates (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 989
• Authentic love requires reciprocal recognition of both partners’ freedoms #complicates (0.75) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1883