There are people today who think that little-l liberalism is a disgraceful fraud, asserting that individual liberty obscures group-on-group tyranny. For example, individuals being free to form contracts obscures the tyranny of capitalists over workers, individuals being judged independently of their race obscures the racist tyranny of white people, etc. They assert that there is no such thing as a private domain of life, that the personal is political, that any and all feelings and thoughts and actions are to be praised or condemned based on whether or not they help the good kinds of people triumph over the bad kinds of people. To be a human is to be an instance of a collective category, categories which are defined by their conflict with other categories, and our deepest human duty is to achieve consciousness of these categories and to take our place at the front lines of their war.
There is one domain of life, though, where individual liberty is elevated for its own sake - the domain of intimate relationships. With intimacy, your first duty is to value your partner or partners’ autonomy, to maximize their freedom and self-expression as self-sufficient individuals. Rather than being instances of social categories, in the domain of love human beings are to be seen as self-sustaining and self-authorizing, at least ideally. Here, and nowhere else, the vision of Enlightenment liberalism gets to be fully self-expressed. People form relationships as a sort of transaction, an agreement between two separate individuals to exchange the meeting of sexual and romantic needs, an agreement constituted entirely and only by mutual desire and consent.
Under this relational view, human emotions are the expressions of deeper drives called ‘needs’. These needs include things like ‘security’, ‘play’, ‘belonging’, ‘self-expression’. Our emotional experience is constituted by these needs and the degree of their satisfaction. Very-roughly, we feel happy when our needs are being met and unhappy when our needs are not being met - our happiness is an expression and an indication about the state of our psyches at the deeper level of needs. We are called to define our emotions and our needs as rigorously as possible and reference these definitions in as many conversations as possible. Lying sweat-drenched in bed with my lover after multiple hours of soul-melting sex, our bodies ablaze with tenderness and bliss, I gaze deeply into their eyes and speak from the deepest core of my being: “I am experiencing happiness because my need for sexual expression has been met”.
Needs are understood as things that can be satisfied in many different ways with many different people. Non-monogamy is the enlightened pursuit of need-meeting by spreading your need-meeting out across multiple people. If your need for sexual self-expression can’t be met because partner A is unavailable, simply leap into bed with partner B. As sexual self-expression need-meeters, partner A and partner B are interchangeable. Nobody has any commitment to be available for anyone else - it’s great if they happen to be available as a result of their autonomy, but if they aren’t available to meet your needs then you’re on the hook to figure out a new way to meet them yourself. You should be maximally prepared for partner unavailability, since you never know where their autonomy will take them. Needing anyone in particular is ignorance, since all relationships reduce to the particular needs they meet for two forever-separate individuals. To say “I need you, in particular, for the rest of my life” is an atrocity. The best thing you can say to someone is “you are free and you don’t have to worry about me - it will not hurt me when you leave me”.
There is no commitment in this world of relating as rational autonomy. A commitment, by definition, is a promise that is kept unconditionally, whereas enlightened relating centers relationships that are consciously conditional and provisional. Everything you say to a lover has an asterisk now - “I will see you tomorrow” becomes “I will see you tomorrow unless I don’t feel like it and any disappointment you experience in that situation is your problem to solve, not mine”. Eternal love and the very idea of ‘soul-mates’ are terrible social constructs that do nothing but torture people by creating impossible expectations. Nobody can meet all of your needs forever, so it is gracious and wise to release them from the expectation to do so. Nobody will love you forever, everyone will hurt you, everyone will disappoint you, everyone will leave you, and you will disappoint everyone too. We must avoid frustration and isolation by taking them as inevitabilities. The best we can hope for from each other is a sort of transitory enjoyment.
This view does have its overlap with the post-Marxist war-of-all-categories Left. Both views see themselves as ‘emancipatory’, and so the overlap sees the emancipation of individual desire as continuous with the emancipation of victimized social categories. You might see this as ‘decolonizing’ romantic relationships, where the oppression of desires is continuous with the oppressions brought about by white cis-het patriarchal capitalism against all marginalized social groups, where humanity must return to some pre-’civilized’ state of nature where everyone frolics in the woods and fucks out in the open and mother nature provides everything and demands nothing. Anything that does not promote the full expression and gratification of all desires is contemptible fascism. Someone expecting me to pick them up from the airport is continuous with Auschwitz.
What I see as missing from this is the autonomy of relationships themselves. I’d assert that two people joined in love create a shared world and a shared identity. I’d assert that, in love, there is an ‘Us’, something that emerges from two people but that is not reducible to either of them. This ‘Us’ opens up a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of identity that would not be available to individuals in isolation. The autonomy of the relationship is what is what is most vital.
Consider a polycule, an arrangement of people all in enlightened-need-meeting with each other. What happens when someone wants to escalate a relationship, say by taking a one-on-one vacation with another partner? That vacation can only happen if the other partners approve, or if it’s undertaken with the understanding that it will not happen if another partner’s needs-meeting takes priority for some reason. I’ll vacation with you today and tomorrow I’m gone, or maybe I’ll be texting my other partners the entire time. Whatever this relationship is, it doesn’t have autonomy in and of itself, and will only grow to the extent that the needs and desires of the polycule permit it to grow.
Perhaps this is fine! Perhaps this is what really makes everyone happy. What irks me about it, though, is that enlightened-need-meeting presents itself as an abundance of love when it is actually the deprivation of love, as a depth when it is actually a shallowness, as a connection when it is actually an avoidance. The enlightened need-meeting of individuals is totally ok, at least with me, and I’m glad it’s opening up more relational possibilities. Where it goes wrong is by closing off relational possibilities while denying it is doing so. Self-transcending, identity-shifting love is a real phenomenon, perhaps a vanishingly rare one but a real one all the same. Critically: is not something that human intelligence can engineer. It is something mysterious, something we can only ever really be open to by letting relationships be something that surprise us, letting love unfold on its own terms.
A lot of people have been really hurt by a rather thoughtless application of self-transcending love. A lot of people have destroyed themselves trying to share a life with someone they aren’t compatible with. A lot of people carry around a lot of unhealed pain without knowing it, pain which sprays all over the people they care most about. Critiquing the limits of enlightened-need-meeting as a model for relating does not mean discarding the moral imperative to seek self-knowledge and to be intentional about what we do and who we choose to be with. It remains critical to take as much responsibility to heal and grow as it makes sense to do. It also remains critical to say that there are some issues that can only be resolved relationally and will only be perpetuated if you try to solve them individually. Being hurt in love, I think, can only really be healed in love. Spending your life avoiding the pain of your past can actually keep that pain alive.
So: I support and endorse enlightened-need-meeting as a possibility of relating, but not as some cheat-code that resolves all issues. It can be great to play and explore being with people you wouldn’t want to commit your life to! As long as you remain open to the possibility that love will surprise you, that you might accidentally encounter someone who somehow meets needs you never knew that you had, someone you get to be 100% yourself around and whose absence never comes as a relief, someone who makes you painfully aware of how short human life is, someone who makes you hope for a world beyond this one because, with them, you found someone you would want for eternity.