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love and blogging

by E.D. Kain

William’s post reminds me of love, or of the process of falling in and out of love – or at least of the way that process has been mythologized in popular culture. Disenchantment is central to the modern love process. We meet someone who excites us, who we’re attracted to, who we find entertaining and enticing, and we date them until some or all of those features have dimmed. Until the thrill is gone, so to speak. Not vanished, mind you, but dimmed enough to where we begin to think that maybe someone else will have better luck stoking similar fires. And it’s true. For a time, someone else will be more entertaining, exciting, arousing. And in a while, those qualities will also dim. Monogamy, it turns out, is very hard.

Luckily, in blogging, monogamy is entirely unnecessary, even frowned upon. We can drift between blogs as frequently or as infrequently as we choose. I suppose we all read blogs differently to some degree. I think some people stick to very few blogs and read them religiously, while others may read dozens of blogs but not each all the time. Maybe you have your daily reads and your weekly reads. Maybe you use some blogs more as resources for information than as portals to deeper and more profound insights.

Andrew Sullivan, for instance, is a fantastic resource whether or not you agree with him. He links to lots and lots of interesting stuff, which is the reason I read the Daily Dish daily. Others, like Ezra Klein, may be a valuable resource for policy news and to help shake out some of the implications of the news in layman’s terms. Still others, like Daniel Larison, may be valuable for their deconstruction of commonly held foreign policy assumptions. And someone like John Cole might mainly be good for a laugh (or a scoff).

I suppose many people read blogs like William does – becoming terribly interested in one and then slowly growing disappointed or bored or disenchanted as the blogger becomes repetitive or runs out of steam and then drop said blogger entirely. Like a lover whose time is come.

I agree, of course, to some extent. You keep reading because it’s interesting, whether the blog is a resource or a trove of thoughtfulness or simply a witty read full of good snark. And the competition is fierce. Unlike breaking up, dropping a blog from your reader is not at all hard to do.

Which, naturally, puts a great deal of pressure on bloggers in this fiercely competitive and entirely free medium, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Perhaps not. It will either keep us honest or it will keep us writing new and interesting things. Maybe not both.

I don’t read blogs that way myself. I hardly ever drop anybody from my reader. I don’t visit them all with equal frequency or for the same reasons. Some are daily reads, some are resources – news as much as anything – and others I read to find things I disagree with (since I have no television to watch, and thus no mainstream pundits to disagree with regularly).

So I don’t know. How essential is fresh and interesting? How important is not repeating oneself? What keeps people coming back to a blog? Is it really just to keep the spark alive? Do we ever just settle into a good long-term relationship? It seems many of the bloggy veterans have many longtime readers who must keep coming back in spite of redundancy. There must be some other piece missing from William’s equation but damned if I know what it is. Maybe it’s something like that comfortableness we find when we ditch the “love process” – the constant falling in and out of it – the rush - and settle into something deeper.

Or maybe this analogy has run its course as well.

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11 comments

1 Jaybird { 11.30.09 at 12:20 pm }: Dude, I am right with you.

There is an acronym that I have encountered that irritates the hell out of me. I pass it along that it may irritate the hell out of you.

NRE = New Relationship Energy.

The joys of being with the new person, the smell of them!, and finding out every jot and tittle of their various nooks and/or crannies. It’s fresh, it’s exciting! And, if you’re lucky, they get a lot of joys from doing the same with you. It’s so much fun to be found to be fresh and exciting and to have one’s nooks/crannies explored by someone unfamiliar with one’s jots and tittles.

And, you know what, six months later… well. It’s drab.

SO FIND SOMEBODY NEW! HURRAY! FUN!!!

NRE!!!!!

In my experience, NRE is the goal of this sort of thing, rather than the other person qua person. It doesn’t really matter who the other person is, it just matters that they provide the experience. When the experience fades, it’s time for another jolt of NRE and the only way to get that is to get an NR.

I’m firmly in the “stick with your wife” camp, myself. We don’t have a whole lot of NRE, she and I. Good lord, I don’t miss it.

E.D. Kain
November 30th, 2009 at 12:25 pm
Amen, brother. I never much liked the dating scene myself. Of course at sixteen NRE is amazing. But it’s definitely a drug to some. And culturally we’re taught that unless that spark is eternal then something must be wrong. True love and all that. If I had to guess, I’d say this has something to do with divorce rates, but who knows?

In any case, I think blogging can be a good venue to form longer-term relationships, deeper intellectual foundations, etc. It doesn’t always have to be fresh and exciting.

Cascadian
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Though I read Sully and RCP daily, LOOG is my home daily read. I’ve followed you all since you were spawned from C11. However, in the context of this post what am I to make of the fact that it’s a group of bloggers instead of a singly heart throb?

E.D. Kain
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Free love, man. And peace and all that groovy stuff.
2 Mike at The Big Stick { 11.30.09 at 12:38 pm }: To carry this analogy forward a bit, while the new relationship is fun ( I miss certain aspects of dating immensely) it’s also cosmetic and not really as rewarding. When the hard work starts, the longterm benifits are maybe harder to recognize, but they are there.

To use the League as an example, when I first found it I read it like crazy, refrenced it on my blog frequently, shouted about it to blogging friends. Now the luster has worn off a bit. My favorite authors don’t post as much, or they post about things that don’t interest me as much, but I hang around because I believe in the concept and I know that my persistence will occasionally be rewarded. When it is, it’s often better, because this relationship is getting older and more familiar and I guess I understand those jewels a bit better.

Mike at The Big Stick
November 30th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Also – if this analogy holds true, my blog traffic seems to be a long series of one-night stands.
3 Roque Nuevo { 11.30.09 at 12:43 pm }: “Disenchantment is central to the modern love process.”

I realize that the above refers to a “mythologized” process and that it’s an analogy to a blog reader’s reading habits. But if you’re interested in extending the analogy there is no better source than Balzac, The Physiology of Marriage. For example, he states your “disenchantment” problem as the problem of the honeymoon:

The married couple who intend to love each other during their whole life have no notion of a honeymoon; for them it has no existence, or rather its existence is perennial; they are like the immortals who do not understand death. But the consideration of this happiness is not germane to our book; and for our readers marriage is under the influence of two moons, the honeymoon and the Red-moon. This last terminates its course by a revolution, which changes it to a crescent; and when once it rises upon a home its light there is eternal.

How can the honeymoon rise upon two beings who cannot possibly love each other?

How can it set, when once it has risen?

Have all marriages their honeymoon?

You can meditate on any one of his thirty “meditatations,” the introduction or the postscript. But according to Balzac, the following is the nucleus of his argument:

All our meditations have revealed” to us about the basis of the
primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is
at the same time the principle and the result of the law.

LIX.
In every case we receive only in proportion to what we give.

The meat of the argument is found in “MEDITATION XVII. THE THEORY OF THE BED.”

We know only three ways in which a bed (in the general sense of this
term) may be arranged among civilized nations, and particularly among
the privileged classes to whom this book is addressed. These three
ways are as follows:

1. TWIN BEDS.
2. SEPARATE ROOMS.
3. ONE BED FOR BOTH.

I’ll leave it to you to read Balzac’s illuminating and very funny discussion of points 1 and 3 (above). He argues for point 2. Again, the I’ll leave reading the details to you:

There cannot be found in Europe a hundred husbands of each nation sufficiently versed in the science of marriage, or if you like, of life, to be able to dwell in an apartment separate from that of their wives.

The power of putting this system into practice shows the highest degree of intellectual and masculine force.

The married couple who dwell in separate apartments have become either divorced, or have attained to the discovery of happiness. They either abominate or adore each other.

The point, says Balzac, is to render the institution of marriage one of “fidelity and constancy.” In other words, an institution devoted to the “happiness to one woman.” This may seem trivial compared with what a man’s talents can earn him in the wider society, but, in the grand scheme of things, it’s something that even god has failed to achieve:

the rendering of his mistress happy gives any one the fairest title to glory which can be earned in this valley of Jehosaphat, since, according to Genesis, Eve was not satisfied even with a terrestrial Paradise. She desired to taste the forbidden fruit, the eternal emblem of adultery.
4 William Brafford { 12.02.09 at 11:27 am }: I really didn’t mean to offer a total descriptive theory of blog-reading. Maybe I could clear things up by offering one, but I don’t have a blog-about-blogging post in me today.

E.D. Kain
December 2nd, 2009 at 12:30 pm
Well suffice to say I think you rattled a few cages.

Jaybird
December 2nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
“But dear! I meant all those *OTHER* chicks!” doesn’t work on Maribou either.

William Brafford
December 3rd, 2009 at 9:26 am
Married to the blog? No! You can’t tie me down!