What's Love Got To Do With It, Part I

Ahhh, true love.  Or I suppose to put it into the dialect favored by the weekend ass slapper, twu wuv.  For many within the greater BDSM spectrum, twu wuv is often the binding force of their relationship.


Am I the only one that can see the problem with this?  Surely I can't be.  Let's start by looking at commonly known figures.  Divorce rates, while not a calculation of twu wuv, does point us in the right direction.  Most people marry for wuv, after all. 

What do these figures tell us?  American divorce rates are staggering, with an estimated 41-50% of first marriages, 60-67% of second marriages, and a whopping 73-74% of third marriages ending in divorce. Twu wuv seems to lose some adhesiveness somewhere down the line, unable to hold marriages together over time. 

If we stopped and thought about it for a moment, and we know that most people don't, we would see through the romantic fallacy.  We need not even compare divorce rates.  We only have to look at how many times each of us has felt that one twu wuv in a budding relationship only to have that relationship end.  How many times have couples expressed mutual twu wuv only to find their ships parting down the river?  For that matter, how many times does twu wuv end in one of both parties despising the other?  Twu wuv has a poor track record indeed.

One of the slayers of twu wuv is the feeling of hurt, and there are far more things than I can include here that can create a feeling of hurt within a relationship.  A few of the heavy hitters are feeling betrayed, feeling a lack of support from ones partner, and a feeling of  lack of trust.  These hurts, real or imagined, have long term implications in the wuv based relationship as it places the sufferer in the position of evaluating their feelings toward the transgressor.  They begin to ask themselves if the injury was intentional, does their partner not care about their feelings, why their partner who had professed their twu wuv would hurt them, etc.  These and other questions build to a mountain of negative emotions that can transform twu wuv into feelings of hatred.  Toss in a half cup of relationship contingent self esteem (look it up you lazy sods) and you have a recipe for twu wuv evaporation. 

Next, consider how many people within the BDSM umbrella online you encounter insisting how twu wuv is the most important component of their relationship.  Find a forum and scroll back as far as you can and tally these people up.  Check their relationship status at the time of their writing, then check their current relationship status.  How well has twu wuv worked out for them?  If you are lazy, narrow the criteria down to subs and 'slaves' making the claim, then see how many of their relationships have held past a year.  You will find that quite a surprising number of those twu wuv advocates change masters more often than a priest molests an altar boy.  If twu wuv is going to be the binding force of your relationship, you should probably consider reinforcing it with something of a higher tensile strength.  Common sewing thread comes to mind.

Twu wuv is a wonderful and inspiring thing.  It can be dizzying, mystifying, and sometimes painful.  It can drive us to create and destroy.  If classical literature is to be taken at face value it can even launch a thousand ships.  What it can not be counted on to do reliably is to form an enduring bond.  Our emotions are too chaotic, too mutable, too fluctuating to depend on twu wuv to supply anything greater than secondary support services for binding a relationship.