Obsolete Mononormativity

The crisis of contemporary relationships is not so much due to heteronormativity as to mononormativity: this belief that a single person should meet all our emotional, sexual and material needs.

The Illusion of Total Complementarity

Recent conceptual reflections on contemporary relational malaise, notably the notion of heterofatalism developed by American researcher Asa Seresin, reveal a non-recognition of women’s place in heteronormativity. Seresin describes this feeling as “the set of negative discourses held by heterosexual people when they claim that their orientation is doomed to be dysfunctional or a source of suffering”. This conceptualization, although enlightening, seems to me to grasp only the symptoms of a deeper malady.

The same problematic of unsatisfactory relationships can be found in all types of couples, lesbian, homosexual, queer or heterosexual. The true source of the problem lies, in my view, in the lack of respect for the other within the couple instance as it is defined in our Western societies. This lack of respect immediately manifests in an economic reality, strange if we take an ethnological perspective: people living as couples systematically have more financial means, resources and social existence capacities than single people.

We take this data as an economic given, but it is fundamentally an anthropological datum. Let’s look at things differently: the fact that the couple unit is endowed with more means than the single person is not linked to an objective determinism, contrary to what might seem obvious. In reality, it’s an organized social arrangement that passes itself off as natural. This organization manufactures a form of structural individual incapacity: individually, we are made less strong, with less power, less grip on the world, less patrimonial capacity.

Mononormativity as the Root of the Problem

I postulate that the problem is not heteronormativity becoming heteropessimism or heterofatalism—these are only effects. The deep cause is mononormativity. As I wrote above, in homosexual couples, we observe systems of domination and lack of respect for the other comparable to those found in heterosexual couples. Since heterosexual couples are proportionally more numerous and women are socially dominated by the patriarchal system, this mononormativity effectively becomes heteronormativity to the patrimonial detriment of women.

This patrimonial structure built around a family led by a father who transmits name and inheritance dates from the French Revolution. We are products of this legal history, not of a natural objectivity. As Sophie Lewis, German-British researcher, emphasizes, “the conditions of heterosexuality are inseparable from economic realities”. This living history deserves, I believe, to be faced so that we can be actors of our own history today.

Behind this legal-economic norm that structures the aggravation of patrimonial inequalities, particularly visible in French real estate, also hides a mythology of property. Those who have no inheritance can no longer access property, whereas thirty years ago, even with a small salary, a full loan was possible. This system produces deep inequalities linked to patrimony, and we paradoxically defend this system without realizing it, due to an idealized system of representations.

Emotional Insecurity as the System’s Cement

We have invented the idea that two people who love each other should find full and complete complementarity, intellectual, organizational, parental, sexual, cultural, and should best respond to all of each other’s needs. This representation justifies the system through confirmation bias: we maintain this representation to justify a system that we take as natural when it has been historically constructed.

Reality contradicts this myth. The majority of people love several people, even if they defend themselves against it and often prevent themselves from living other romantic relationships beyond their couple. Immense personal enrichments can exist outside the couple, at emotional, sexual, cultural or other levels. Mononormativity locks us into the couple that is supposed to respond to needs it structurally cannot meet, manufacturing a hypocrisy where we make ourselves believe our couple is solid and complete while we secretly seek, acknowledged or not, elsewhere what it should bring us.

Western education builds enormous emotional insecurity. Children, frustrated at not being sufficiently recognized, listened to and given confidence by adults who lie to them, put them aside and don’t answer their disturbing questions, arrive at adulthood with great emotional insecurities, a fear of abandonment, a need to be taken care of. This immense lack, we all have it, myself first. And that’s why we seek to compensate in the relationship with the other for what we lack in ourselves, hence the myth of complementarity. I don’t mean by this that the other cannot deeply enrich us! I mean there’s a problem in confusing mutual enrichment with mutual dependence.

Dependence as a Brake on Emancipation

In the couple, the expectation of resolving emotional insecurity is accompanied by a dynamic of mutual submission and domination. This process works in both directions between partners, which creates excessively fragile relationships where people, not anchored in themselves, need the other to exist and be recognized. They believe this reliance on the other is the romantic ideal, but it creates a reduction of individual being, who considers themselves incomplete without the other.

Literary and cultural romanticism valorizes this dependence, presenting it as beautiful and desirable. This valorization extends to the material domain: we are convinced that the couple brings more financial and patrimonial means, and objectively, it’s true in our current system. But this apparent evidence masks the fundamental problem: this emotional dependence actually constitutes a terrible brake on emancipation, including economic.

Guilt and feelings of betrayal emerge as soon as an interest, even intellectual, is directed toward someone else. The other may perceive as betrayal any breach in the supposed complementarity. Yet these breaches are humanity itself. Humanity is not made of pairs but of multiple links in all directions. The one who learns that the other has opened certain dimensions of their intimacy feels betrayed, reduced, humiliated, because they need the other fully to reassure themselves. Out of guilt and to avoid hurting, we then prevent ourselves from opening to fulfilling and constructive experiences of an individual identity, all the richer and more open as it is woven from multiple links.

Toward an Assumed Multiplicity of Bonds

This mononormativity is obsolete because it doesn’t create well-being but inequality, suffering, social, personal, creative, artistic, professional and even economic brakes. How to do otherwise? I think we should seriously consider not mono-love but what is called polyamory (which has nothing to do with libertinage). It’s about simply assuming to love several people, or rather assuming reality itself, getting out of denial, because we already love several people simultaneously. Previously loved people are still in us, they haven’t disappeared. We are a weaving of all our relationships.

Having parallel emotional commitments and knowing that our partners also have them forces us to deconstruct relationships based on emotional insecurity. It forces us to structure them differently, to anchor ourselves in personal confidence, to no longer believe we need the other to exist. As Asa Seresin states, “heterosexuality and more broadly romantic relationships would be much more desirable if we abandoned a deterministic vision of gender and if the economic and political conditions in which we live were more viable”.

Once we no longer believe we need the other to exist, the impact is felt in all our relationships, in general, romantic, or professional. Our stance toward work and employment transforms. The very concept of employment, with its corollary of subordination link, is related to this structural dependence. Work (that is, transformation, travel, bonds, production, exchange) can operate autonomously in multiple relationships. And if we return to the material aspect, we clearly see it will also produce more wealth.

Rebuilding Solidarity on Equality

The concept of employment is biased as the couple is biased, because behind it hides structural domination. What dominates is the structure that makes us believe that couple and salaried work are normal when they are cultural constructions unsuited to contemporary challenges of an emancipated, free and autonomous life.

Solidarity systems built after World War II are progressively being deconstructed. This solidarity no longer works because it was based on domination and not on equality. Envisioning ourselves as responsible for ourselves modifies the entire system and balances. We no longer represent ourselves as needing to be in a couple to not be too poor, nor as submissive employees doing unpleasant technical work out of necessity. We represent ourselves as autonomous people, rich with our qualities and skills, able to share them and having full right to be free within multiple relationships.

This polyamory, these poly-activities, this poly-life - the reality of life masked by mononormative cultural representations, will allow us, if we embrace them, to build different and beneficial social structures. What builds human community is the quality of bonds between people. With more complementary bonds, without expecting from the other what they cannot provide, without hypocrisy or underground searches, we create stronger and more anchored bonds, and completely different social realities. The paradigm having changed, it will be the couple that produces less wealth than a single individual, because the couple closes the multiplicity of bonds.

Masculinists as System Revealers

I know this cultural change may seem radical. For many, what’s solid is the couple, and someone who would have several romantic relationships or several employers is rather seen as unstable, searching, not yet constructed. But these are only representations. If we represented things differently, we could live our lives differently. What seems objective to us today would be nothing more than an old system from another time, which it already is.

The masculinists who hold ultra-normative discourses about women frighten us precisely because they are us; they say out loud what underlies our system. They are not unhinged people, they are on the contrary over-adapted, over-coding the system as it is. They are safeguards showing us that our system is sick, obsolete, outdated and brutal. They reveal the absurdity of an inequality made norm.

Let’s be poly, and we will change the world. Not through ideology, but by recognizing and assuming the multiplicity that already constitutes our lives. Sophie Lewis expresses it well: “Most women are too overworked, too exhausted by the demands of capitalism and its culture of obligatory enjoyment to even have the possibility of learning to love.” To believe in the possibility of relational optimism, we need a paradigm shift that gives pride of place to experimentation, individual freedom, dialogue, free time. The problem has nothing to do with the intrinsic qualities of women or men, but with the social and cultural conditions in which love is forced to exist, restricted to the couple, which bridles life itself, reassuring as it is in its immobility, in reality very fragile on all levels, one only needs to see the deleterious consequences of divorces.