Love or Tolerance?

At the start of a romantic relationship, it is not uncommon to slide into what we may call romantic pathology- that our partners must be figures of perfection. Only after a period of time, along with the objective evaluation of our friends, we may be spared of all the romantic fantasies and forced to admit to the inherently normality of them. If we are consistently reading things into our partners which don't belong to them, it is perhaps because we often fall into the delusion that their physical beauty necessarily aligns with the quality of their souls- that they must be filled with delicate and divine thoughts. It is only in dialogue with loneliness we may justify the existence of love.

Whatever our fantasies may be, the reality is always in the habit of disappointing us. A partner with an angelic face who supposedly possesses the ability to read Oscar Wilde's works may end up pinning her interests firmly on an issue of Cosmopolitan. This opens up a range of interesting yet dangerous questions: Why would she prefer to listen to Britney Spears rather than Mozart? Why would she favour a PC rather than a Mac? Why would she admire a pair of Converse's instead of Jimmy Choo's?

If there is a danger regarding our conflicting tastes, it might be because most of the arguments we have largely stem from a subjective hierarchy of tastes rather than nationality, class, and the likes. Yet we often hear the saying "I love you for everything you are." However many pages of the romantic diary we have contemplated, all of us seem more than happy to cherish the conventional wisdom of "everyone makes mistakes". Hence we should tolerate whatever flaws deeply clung to our partners' characters because what elicits love in the first place is that we love them for who they are.

But again, reality cannot be more unpromising. It seems we are often too unfortunate to see such reasoning applied to a romantic relationship. Rather than exciting our admiration for the political virtue of liberalism, most of us secretly harbour an idea that our partners must behave according to our ideals. If only we pay more attention to the nature of love, can we not conclude romantic love bears the same coercive structure of dictatorships in our political history?

From a distance, politics seems unrelated to love. But on closer inspection, we may easily arrive at a more charitable assessment of the relationship between both of them. The nature of romantic love might be easily seen as a contrary pull away from one of the highly praised democratic values, namely, tolerance. Though we may openly agree on the notion of diversity of ideas and opinions, romantic love is by nature fascist, that our partners should appreciate or depreciate certain things based entirely on our preferences. The fact that their tastes differ from ours suggests that their aesthetic logic is somewhat superficial which is in need of much edifying. But should we not respect their tastes?

If we think romantic love is coercive, it is perhaps because we often misunderstand what tolerance truly is. British philosopher Karl Popper suggests that tolerance is not to leave each other alone, but rather, to desire to understand each other. Rather than taking pride on being ignorant of what we are tolerating, we should understand what we are tolerating by enforcing an open dialogue. Therefore, the value of tolerance lies not only in permitting diverse ideas and opinions, but in the democratic virtue that all opinions should ultimately decided by discussions and debates even when they conspire to offer unhappy endings.

Hence to argue is to tolerate our conflicting tastes. But however democratic we may be, a constant argument over what a perfect sofa should be like or how leggings should be worn will result in a romantic revolution, namely, the threat of breaking up. If our aesthetic opinions and habits can no longer relax with a sense of humour, it is because we are in danger of understanding each other too much, a realisation of the inherent incompatibility between us and our partners. Each party stands firmly on the ground of doing what's best for the other. Though the truth is often depressing, it seems perhaps a stable relationship can only be founded on the contract between absolute authority and absolute obedience.

If romantic love makes no allowance for the idea of tolerance, then perhaps we may legitimately conclude that there is no "true" love at all, for everyone is unique, especially in the aesthetic realm. Our romantic fantasy is merely a naive romanticism inspired by novels and films. Romantic love, often mistaken as the same thing as marriage, should only be considered as stops rather than lifelong journeys. It is only intervals between loneliness. After all, we all have to die alone.

W