Ibiza, Too Much Space, and Avoiding Hypergamy

The potential was beautiful. They had a vision of their erotically charged fantasy yet to materialize. He wanted what she was writing about and so did she. They met through her content, he challenged her, it was hot.

Five days before Cat and James were going to meet, he sent her a picture of a silhouette of a girl, she assumed his daughter, holding up a love symbol against an intense blue scene of electric lights at a concert. It immediately triggered Cat's dislike of crowded, loud spaces. In her typical borderline manner, she started calculating all the reasons she shouldn't go to Ibiza. She shot down his attempt to connect.

Before they had even met, James had bought Cat a ticket to Ibiza, all expenses paid from Alabama to Spain. It was a romantic gesture of enormous faith, he said he felt abundant with her. When he first suggested it, she hesitated because loud dance parties sounded like a particular kind of hell. But it was an opportunity to stretch herself. She loved dancing, after all, even if doing it anywhere outside the privacy of her own house made her uncomfortable.

Then she started wondering what it would feel like to be James's proverbial handbag. To be the attractive woman on his arm. To have everything paid for. To become the kind of woman she had sometimes been critical of, despite having dated men with substantially more financial resources than her own many times throughout her life.

She wasn't suggesting James saw her that way. In fact, he was one of the most emotionally mature human beings she had ever encountered. But she also didn't think anyone was entirely impervious to the seduction of social status, the status conferred by having a beautiful woman beside you or the status conferred by having enough money to buy expensive holidays. Nor did she believe it possible that he was above the carnal urges of most men — he was not so high-minded that he could evade the male tendency to consume women.

She reeled that she might potentially be becoming the woman James finally got to have sex with after a sexless marriage. Perhaps she would simply be the means through which he shook off the dust.

It forced Cat to confront the dualism of it all: somehow, the very thing intended to bring them closer was making her feel more separate from him.

Cat thought about Byung-Chul Han's book The Agony of Eros. He talked about us being a narcissistic society and that to truly cultivate Eros, she must be prepared to be transformed by Other. For Cat, one of those narcissistic patterns had been painfully simple: liking men because they liked her. It made some of the motivations behind the men she chose painfully evident. James was different. She liked what he was, she listened to him.

But she was still confronted with her own hypergamy and with how, for much of her life, she had paired marriage — "she has arrived" — with greater legitimacy for women, greater social respectability, and more "proper woman" status.

The experience with James had also taught Cat a great deal about her avoidant-insecure attachment style. She had read a lot about borderline and the push-pull tendencies of what anxiety did to her. But she knew it was bigger than that. The more she read about the problems facing men and women in love and relationship today, the more she realized that psychological idiosyncrasies alone were wholly inadequate for understanding the cultural forces shaping love.

"The culture did retain and even amplify the ideal of love as a power that can transcend daily life. Yet, when it put the two political ideals of gender equality and sexual freedom at the center of intimacy, it stripped love of the rituals of deference and the mystical aura in which it had hitherto been shrouded."

Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts (2012, p. 9)

"However, while love has played a considerable role in the formation of what historians call 'affective individualism,' the story of love in modernity tends to present it as a heroic one, from bondage to freedom. When love triumphs, so the story goes, marriages of convenience and interest disappear, and individualism, autonomy, and freedom are triumphant. Nevertheless, while I agree that romantic love challenged both patriarchy and the family institution, the 'pure relationship' also rendered the private sphere more volatile and the romantic consciousness unhappy. What makes love such a chronic source of discomfort, disorientation, and even despair, I argue, can be adequately explained only by sociology and by understanding the cultural and institutional core of modernity."

Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts (2012, pp. 12–13)

Cat found peace in reading works like Why Love Hurts. It helped her understand the words that she could see but couldn't verbalize. What happened with James can't be explained entirely through her own attachment wounds or psychological idiosyncrasies. Cat and James were living out the contradictions Illouz identified in modern love: enormous freedom and possibility alongside very little institutional certainty. Free to imagine Ibiza, intimacy, and a future together before they had even met, but they were equally free to withdraw from those possibilities almost instantly. There were no shared obligations, established rituals, community expectations, or even a clearly defined relationship holding the connection in place.

The fantasy expanded rapidly. Nothing constrained it. But for the same reason, it could disappear just as quickly. Her withdrawal and James's decision to step away exposed the paradox. At the center of Illouz's argument: modern romantic freedom gives individuals unprecedented power to choose whom they love, while simultaneously making love more contingent, negotiable, and vulnerable to withdrawal.

Once they decided she wasn't going to Spain, their pending visit, now only five days away, seemed to lose some of its pertinence and long-term potential.

It was detached. A little cold. But Cat felt it was necessary to protect her heart.

And like that, it was over. The erotic vision vaporized with two texts.

With all the therapy in the world, all the sobriety, all the spiritual growth, some forces of human existence still seemed capable of overwhelming even a genuine intention to create an erotically charged life.

In tears, she told her mom that learning all this feminism was excruciating.