The same-sex marriage debate in Australia

At the outset it must be stated that support for same-sex marriage is not universal in the gay and lesbian community. Many in the gay, bi-sexual, lesbian, transsexual and intersex (GBLTI) community, both in Australia and elsewhere, question the desirability of same-sex marriage on practical as well as on normative grounds (see Butler, Reference Butler2002; Warner, Reference Warner1999; Graycar and Millbank, Reference Graycar and Millbank2007; Slavin, Reference Slavin2009; Polikoff, Reference Polikoff1993; Reference Polikoff2000). Leaving that aside, however, the fact remains that while marriage exists, there is no good reason to exclude same-sex relationships from that institution. As Tamara Metz puts it: ‘so long as the state defines, confers, and uses marital status as a vehicle for protecting and supporting associations of intimate caregivers, also known as families, it must offer the status to same-sex intimate care giving couples’ (Metz, 2010, p. 120). And so when in 2004 the Howard government introduced, and passed, an amendment to the Marriage Act (1961) that restricted marriage to being a union between a man and a woman,Footnote ² same-sex marriage became a major issue.

The need for this legislative definition of marriage was questionable. While the 1961 Marriage Act did not define marriage, Section 46 requires a marriage celebrant to state that ‘marriage according to Australian law, is the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of others, voluntarily entered into for life’. Australian courts have consistently adhered to this definition since it was first given in 1861 in the case of Hyde v. Hyde.Footnote ³ However, it appears from the parliamentary debates that the need for the change stemmed from significant concern among some liberal MPs that the courts were becoming more liberal, as evidenced, among other things, by the decision by the full court of the family law court in Re Kevin Footnote ⁴ to validate a transsexual marriage (Barnett, Reference Barnett2004).

The need for the amendment to the law was considered by some to be more political than legal. Graycar and Millbank have described the amendment as a cynical political exercise by the Howard government leading up to an election designed to act as a ‘wedge issue’. Its effect was to reaffirm the ‘special-ness of marriage’ and to single out ‘lesbians and gay men as objects of exclusion’ (2007, p. 160). The issue therefore began to gain momentum, and one of the most decisive moments in the debate came when the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) introduced into its parliament the Civil Union Bill (ACT) (2006). Same-sex relationship recognition legislation did already exist in Australia at state level, as did legislation which aims to equalise rights and entitlements between same-sex couples and married couples (see Millbank, Reference Millbank2006a; Reference Millbank2006b). The ACT legislation, however, brought same-sex relationships recognition closer to marriage than had ever been attempted before.

The ACT Bill was introduced into parliament on 28 March 2006 by the then Chief Minister John Stanhope, who explained that while a civil union is not a marriage, under this Bill it would be treated in the same way as marriage for all the laws of the ACT (Stanhope, Reference Stanhope2006a). Much debate followed about the extent to which a civil union under this legislation mimicked marriage. Some of the ways that a civil union resembled marriage was that a civil union was to be treated the same as marriage for all ACT laws. The other similarity is that a ceremony was provided to bring the relationship into being, and this ceremony was to be conducted by marriage celebrants registered under the Marriage Act (1961). However, unlike a marriage, a civil union would not be treated as marriage outside the ACT (see Zanghellini, Reference Zanghellini2007).

Opposition quickly followed. On 3 May 2006, the ACT liberal leader Bill Stephaniak introduced into the legislative assembly an alternative Bill based on the Tasmanian registration model, The Registration of Relationships Bill (2006), which, he argued, did not undermine the values of marriage. On 11 May, Stephaniak tabled into parliament a petition gathered by the Australian Christian Lobby, and signed by 1,710 people who opposed the government's Civil Union Bill. The petitioners said: ‘[w]e the undersigned believe that this [bill] creates a marriage like relationship which so mimicks marriage as to confuse and diminish it’ (Stephaniak, Reference Stephaniak2006).

At the federal level the then Liberal government argued first, that the ACT government did not have the constitutional power to legislate for marriage, and second, that marriage as an institution was to be preserved as a union between one man and one woman. The ACT Civil Unions Bill was seen to be creating a relationship between same-sex couples which was too close to that marriage model, and therefore eroded the idea that it takes a man and woman to have a marriage (ABC, 2008).

The Civil Union Bill passed into law but it never became effective. On 13 June of the same year, Governor-General Michael Jeffry, on the advice of the federal government, disallowed the Civil Union Act (2006) under Section 35 of the Australian Capital Territory (Self-Government) Act (1988). The federal government's disallowance was described as ‘autocratic’ (Corbell, Reference Corbell2006), as ‘very unusual’ (Williams, quoted in Farouque, Reference Farouque2006), and as ‘homophobia dressed up as an argument about state rights’ (Siewart, 2006).

The ACT government persevered. On 12 December 2006, it presented into the ACT parliament the Civil Partnership Bill 2006. This new Bill made a number of changes in the hope of addressing the concerns of the federal government. The most important of these was that the Bill did not specify that a civil union was the same as a marriage. It in fact did not use the term ‘union’ at all, substituting it with the word ‘partnership’. The other major change was that the civil partnerships would not be celebrated by marriage celebrants, but rather by the newly created class of civil partnership notaries (Corbell, Reference Corbell2006).

Unfortunately, the new Bill was still not considered acceptable to the federal government, and the federal Attorney General announced that his government would not rule out using the Governor-General's disallowance power to override the Act a second time (Ruddock, Reference Ruddock2007). The ACT government left the Bill on the books, but waited until after the 2007 federal election to make their next move. In November 2007 the Rudd Labor government was elected. The ACT announced it would revive the legislation. However, in May 2008, negotiations between the ACT government and the now Labor Federal government came to a conclusion, with a clear understanding that the federal government would not allow the ACT to pass legislation which in any way mimics marriage. Politically the ACT Labor government felt it had no choice but to scrap all previous plans and introduce legislation that instead mimics the Tasmanian Registration model.Footnote ⁵ On 11 November 2009, the ACT legislature once again opened up the issue by passing the Civil Partnerships Amendment Bill 2009.Footnote ⁶ This Bill, introduced by the ACT Greens, and supported by the ACT Labor Party, introduced the right of parties to declare their relationship before a civil partnership notary, and thus introduced the much sought after ceremony that had been attempted by past versions of the legislation. The first ‘partnership’ under the new law took place on 25 November 2009.Footnote ⁷ After initial concerns that the Federal government would override this amendment, it has remained untouched.

The issue, however, remains a hot one in Australian politics. It was identified as a central human rights issue in Australia's national human rights consultation during 2009 (Brennan, Kostakidis, Williams and Palmer, Reference Brennan, KOSTAKIDIS, WILLIAMS and PALMER2009). The Australian Greens have made same-sex marriage part of their political platform. Same-sex marriage became a central issue of debate at the 2011 Labour Conference. In February 2012 there were three bills before the federal government seeking to legalise same-sex marriage. It continues to be therefore a topic of considerable public debate.

Procreation v. love: the struggle for the meaning of marriage in the same-sex marriage debate

One of the most prominent arguments made by opponents to same-sex marriage is that marriage should be preserved as a union between a man and a woman primarily because it is an institution intended for the procreation of children. In the ACT parliamentary debates this view, held by many, was put clearly by Liberal MP Vicki Dunne who said that:

This distinction was stated time and again either explicitly or implicitly in the debate about the ACT Bill. It was also a feature of the arguments around the changes to the Marriage Act in 2004. Marriage is different because it is geared towards the act of reproduction. A heterosexual couple can have children and a same-sex couple cannot. The reality, however, is that children are born to same-sex couples via a variety of means such as artificial insemination, donors and surrogacy agreements. The reality, we also know, is that many people marry without ever intending to have children, whether, for example, because they already have them or because they are infertile or simply because they do not want to. The reality is also that many people have children who are not married and who never intend to be.

Despite these facts, the view of marriage as procreation retains its currency because, I believe, it is embedded in another long-held view: a heterosexual marriage is the best and only place where procreation should occur. This was the view that motivated the government to introduce the amendment to the Marriage Act in 2004, stating that heterosexual marriage ‘provides the best environment for the raising of children’ (Ruddock, Reference Ruddock2004). The idea that heterosexual marriage and family are and should remain the cornerstone of procreation and the raising of children is often argued most strongly by strands of Christianity. For example, Peter Jensen, Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, has stated that ‘we are better off generally speaking, living in families founded by a man and a woman … It is this family that provides children with the experience of the interaction of human maleness and femaleness.’ It is this system which, he argues, best meets all of the caring needs that a family traditionally provides in society (Reference Jensen2008).Footnote ⁸

When one looks closer at divorce rates, child abuse and domestic violence cases one surely needs to question the rationality of this view. Anthony Albanese ALP MP suggested that it might be the case that same-sex couples make better parents. He said: ‘I have seen a lot of bad parents. I have not seen bad same-sex parents. I do not know very many, but every same-sex couple I know really wants their child and loves their child. That should be respected’ (Albanese, Reference Albanese2004). This view has some empirical backing. Some studies on same-sex parents/families suggest that sexuality has either a completely neutral, or some positive effect on the physical and psychological wellbeing of children.Footnote ⁹ However, the view that procreation and childrearing should occur only in a heterosexual context still holds much sway.

Above, we have seen the strength of the argument that marriage is an institution that is and should be intended primarily for procreation. However, there are alternative arguments about the meaning of marriage. An equally strongly held one is that marriage is about love and companionship.

Recognising love in marriage became the goal for many in the debate over the ACT's Civil Union Bill. Andrew Barr MLA, a member of the Act government, said that the Civil Union Bill is about:

John Stanhope said that ‘[t]hose of us who enjoy rich and enduring marriages might ask ourselves how we would feel if we were to be suddenly and rudely informed that our love was a lesser love’ (Reference Stanhope2006b).

Love was also raised in the Senate when a motion to disallow the federal government's overriding of the ACT legislation was introduced by the Greens. Senator Nettle said that ‘this debate is about love. It is about who can love each other and who can have their relationship recognised’ (Nettle, Reference Nettle2006). Senator Bob Brown also thought it was a debate about love and asked: ‘What is it about these gentlemen that they cannot recognise thousands of Australia's loving relationships?’ (Reference Brown2006). Senator Christine Milne also saw the debate as being about love. She said: ‘it is about recognising love and commitment – and isn't that the very definition of the marital ideal, of what marriage, of what civil union is fundamentally about; love and commitment?’ (Reference Milne2006). The argument that marriage is about love is neither new, nor novel. Love was used to argue for the reformation of miscegenation laws in America (Pascoe, Reference Pascoe2009), and, as I will show below, the connection between love and marriage in popular discourse is overwhelming.

The institution of marriage has changed significantly over time. The history of marriage shows that for most of its long existence it has been considered as separate from love. Its function has often been political, diplomatic and economic rather than emotional. Marriage has also fulfilled class, religious and moral functions (see Stone, Reference Stone1992; Reference Stone1997). However, as many commentators have noted, in Western countries love has become an important rhetoric of marriage (Coontz, Reference Coontz2005; Yaloum, Reference Yaloum2001; Mount, Reference Mount1982). In reality, as Martha Fineman says, the reasons for marrying are as ‘diverse as the inhabitants of our contemporary, secular state’ (Reference Fineman and Bernstein2006, p. 53). Nevertheless, a popular part, if not the central part, of the rhetoric of marriage is that it is the natural expression of a romantic love relationship (Diduck and Kaganas, Reference Diduck and Kaganas2006, pp. 35–36).

The coming together of love and marriage has been documented by Stephanie Coontz in her book Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage (2005). Coontz shows that the idea of marrying for love was a highly radical idea that reached popular acceptance by the nineteenth century with the Victorians.

The idea stuck. By the middle of the nineteenth century there was unanimity in the middle and upper classes in Europe and North America that ‘the love-based marriage, in which the wife stayed at home protected and supported by her husband, was a recipe for heaven on earth’ (Coontz, Reference Coontz2005, p. 162). In contemporary Western societies, the connection between love and marriage is indisputable. Studies consistently show that it is the primary reason people give for marrying (Lieberman and Hatfield, Reference Lieberman, Hatfield, Stenberg and Weis2006, p. 280).

As we saw above, the persistence of the marriage for procreation argument can be attributed to the influence of the Christian religion on the discourse of marriage. However it is also important to note that one can find support for the proposition that marriage is for love within Christian teachings, including Catholicism. Acquinas, for example, said that marriage was an institution that relies upon ‘societas/amicitia’ a kind of friendship and companionship as well as upon procreation (Finnis, Reference Finnis1995, pp. 28–29). Erasmus, too, saw love as part of marriage, and in fact goes further and defines love as both sensual and spiritual (Leites, Reference Leites1983, p. 388). Edmund Leites argues, however, that the idea that marriage is about love within Christian theology finds its most prominent expression in the Puritan theories of marriage (1983). By looking at the works of the leading theologians of the seventeenth century, such as William Gouge, Richard Baxter, Daniel Rogers and Jeremy Taylor, Leites argues that the Puritans saw love as one of the greatest goods in life, as central to marriage and, indeed, as one of the duties of married of life. He says that according to these writers ‘love is not simply permitted, given the existence of a higher, holier, “spiritual” relation between man and wife, nor is it allowed only to forward the other purposes of marriage. It is required as a constituent and intrinsic element of a good marriage’ (1983, pp. 388–89).

However, the connection between marriage and love in Christian theology should not be overstated. That marriage is for procreation is still a central view within Christian faith, and even when love is admitted as a part of marriage, it is still the case that the meaning of love itself converges around the heterosexual procreative act. The argument that is made to justify this is rather tortured, but worth outlining as it appears to be embedded in the idea of complimentarity of which I will have something to say later in this article.

One example of the argument that love is embedded in heterosexuality and procreation comes from the prominent natural law theorist John Finnis. Finnis agrees with Acquinas's conception of marriage as being for both procreation and amicitia. However, he says that amicitia is a bond that occurs between couples only as a result of a particular sexual act, that is, penile–vaginal penetration. This sexual act, and only this sexual act, is capable of creating unity between two people (Reference Finnis1997). This view is reiterated by many: Lee and George say that while oral sex and anal sex constitute body parts coming together, it is not the same thing as penile–vaginal sex because only then is there a biological unification between two people (p. 146). Germain Grisez says that every animal, whether male or female, is incomplete in relation to reproduction; that each animal is only a potential part of a mated pair. He suggests that, ‘[t]his is true also of men and women: as maters who engage in sexual intercourse suited to initiate new life, they complete each other and become an organic unit. In doing so, it is literally true that they become one flesh’ (Reference Grisez1993, p. 146). In order to realise the good that is in marriage (either procreation and/or love), the couple must achieve unity and complementarity ‘so really and so completely that they are two in one flesh’. ‘One flesh reality’ is achieved via ‘marital consent’ and ‘bodily communion’ (p. 586). Conjugal sex is required to achieve this heightened state of togetherness. But not any sexual contact will do, only the union of the reproductive organs is capable of achieving the required complementarity.

As I will argue shortly, the idea of complementarity does not serve us well. However, what we see from the above discussion is that the connection between love and marriage is very well established in a multiple of sites. But does accepting that love is the basis of marriage necessarily open marriage up to same-sex couples? We have seen above that at least within some strands of Christian ideology this cannot be so, but even outside it, as I will discuss shortly, it has been argued that love is understood in contemporary society in a way which excludes, or at the very least does not readily apply to, same-sex couples. This then leads to the question of what love is.

What is Love?

Love as a philosophical idea is not new, it has been described as being as old as humankind (Lieberman and Hatfield, Reference Lieberman, Hatfield, Stenberg and Weis2006, p. 276; see also Lidholm, 1998; Mellen, Reference Mellen1981).Footnote ¹⁰ Romantic love, however, is a relatively modern development. It is often considered as an extension of courtly love. The term ‘courtly love’, while not popularised until the nineteenth century, refers to the idea of love that emerged in the twelfth century among a small section of the aristocracy, predominantly French. Its ideas were proselytised by troubadours who performed highly styled love poems (Capellanus, Reference Capellanus and Parry1941). The stories often depicted a struggle between love, desire and duty (Akehurst and Davis, Reference Akehurst and Davis1995). The common story was of a poet's or knight's love for an aristocratic lady who was inaccessible. The love they expressed was not always ‘platonic’, adultery being a common theme.Footnote ¹¹

Irving Singer, the prominent philosopher of love, clusters courtly love around five central ideas. They are: first, that the love between men and women is something splendid, and an ideal worth striving for; second, that love is ennobling for both the lover and the beloved; third, that sexual love is more than libido or a physical impulse but something ethical and aesthetic; fourth, that love has rituals within it but it is not necessarily related to marriage; fifth and finally, that love is an intense and passionate relationship that establishes a oneness between the lovers (see Singer, Reference Singer1984, Chapter 1). These ideas remain central to romantic love. However, it would be a mistake to see romantic love purely as a restatement of the courtly tradition. Romantic love reflects the many changes that had occurred following the Middle Ages, and can be seen as reflecting a new kind of humanism (Chapter 9). This is evident in the ways that it embodies ideas of liberty and equality. As Solomon argues, one of the features of romantic love is that it is appropriate only between equals.Footnote ¹² He claims that romantic love is a ‘great levelling device’ in society, a force that not only requires equals, but is also capable of creating them (1994, p. 45).

As well as equality, romantic love is also associated with progress and modernity. Hendrick and Hendrick claim that primarily love must accord individuals a certain freedom and autonomy, and love must itself be liberated from considerations of economy and politics (Reference Hendrick and Hendrick1992, p. 39). In this way romantic love becomes connected not only with individual freedom but also with modernity and progress. As Solomon argues, ‘in essence, romantic love came of age only when newly industrialized and increasingly anonymous societies fostered the economically independent and socially shrunken (“nuclear”) family’ (1994, p. 60). The idea that romantic love is radical, liberating and modern has spread beyond Western societies. For example, it is a common theme in Bollywood films to contrast love marriages with arranged marriages. Typically, arranged marriages are depicted as backward and traditional, and love marriages as liberating individuals from oppressive familial duties. As Rochona Majumdar says, ‘[t]he association of arranged marriage with antiquated ideas of gender relations and cultural backwardness is a by product of the coupling of love marriage with progress, choice, agency and modernity’ (Reference Majumdar2009, p. 7; see also Kapur, Reference Kapur2005). The revolutionary nature of romantic love is also evident in the concept of ‘red love’. While this term is hard to define (it encompasses the coincidence of romantic love with Marxism and is often also equated with free love), it undoubtedly connects love with modernity and progress.Footnote ¹³

In contemporary society we can say that the message of love has reached saturation point. As Berlant puts it, without knowing how it has happened, love has become a ‘core feeling of being and life, a primary feeling of sociality’ (2000b, p. 436). Beck and Beck-Gernsheim claim that love is now considered the major existential goal of our times, capable of providing us with a sense of worth and a way of being in the world (1995, pp. 193–94). A goal, they claim, which is now not only of the ‘eccentrics and heroes’ (p. 190), but of everyone. Illouz claims that love has been glorified as a supreme value capable of delivering happiness. In fact she describes it as a ‘collective utopia’ (1997, p. 7). Indeed, it appears that the promise of romantic love is endless. Branden, for example, attributes an endless list of achievements to the experience of love. He says that romantic love satisfies our need to love and be loved, it enables us to experience psychological visibility, sexual fulfilment, to have an emotional support system, to gain self-awareness and self-discovery, to experience ourselves fully as a woman and as a man, to experience the enjoyment of being alive and to enjoy and be nourished by the excitement of another (Reference Branden, Sternberg and Barnes1988). It has been described as an ‘important mythology’ (Illouz, Reference Illouz1997, p. 7), a ‘secular religion’, as the ‘new centre’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, Reference Beck, Beck-Gernsheim, Ritter and Wiebel1995, p. 5) around which our lives revolve. In popular culture we are told that all we need is love,Footnote ¹⁴ (Lennon and McCartney, 1967) that it is the only happiness in life (Typo, 2010), and even that love is the ‘root of everything good that has ever happened and will ever happen’ (Blackberry, 2010).Footnote ¹⁵

Contemporary love also continues the themes of liberty and freedom. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim assert that love requires individuals who are free, active and accountable agents (1995, pp. 193–94), and assert the features of romantic love as devoid of any external rules and pressures. They describe love as a blank form whose actual content is a ‘subjective and mutual invention’ (p. 195). They do not, however, regard this as a positive thing. The meaning of love, they suggest, is always open to negotiation and always at risk. Love can end on one person's say-so at any time; there is no right of appeal. Love is the opposite of instrumental and rational behaviour, it makes its own rules ‘out of sexual desire unhampered by moral or legal obligations’ (p. 194). They argue that:

However, while for Beck and Beck-Gernsheim the absence of moral and legal obligations from love is to be lamented, to others it is to be celebrated. One such thinker is Anthony Giddens, who can be described as the most positive reader of romantic love after Robert Solomon. In The Transformation of Intimacy (1992), Giddens claims that the rise of romantic love today has led to the democratisation of the private sphere. It has given rise to the ‘pure relationship’, which is a durable emotional tie that can be established according to another person on the basis of the tie itself rather than to anything extrinsic to it (p. 2). He says that the pure relationship is ‘part of a generic restructuring of intimacy’ which can emerge in contexts other than heterosexual marriage (p. 58). Essential to the emergence of the ‘pure relationship’ is the emergence of ‘plastic sexuality’. Giddens explains that sexuality today has been:

Romantic love has given way to ‘confluent love’, an ideal of love that gives everyone a chance to become sexually accomplished that is not necessarily heterosexual or monogamous. In the model of the pure relationship and confluent love, the relationship holds only while each partner is gaining sufficient benefit from it. This is especially important for same-sex love, because ‘while not necessarily androgynous, and still perhaps structured around difference, [it] presumes a model of the pure relationship in which knowing the traits of the other is central’ (Giddens, Reference Giddens1992, p. 63). As such, sexuality is only one of the factors that have to be negotiated as part of the relationship.

While Giddens's formulation of love in modern society has been criticised,Footnote ¹⁶ its importance for this article is in its formulation of a democratic way of understanding love. For Giddens, ‘pure relationship’, ‘plastic sexuality’ and ‘confluent love’ are all ‘part of a generic restructuring of intimacy’ (1992, p. 58), which represents a formulation of love that is more democratic and inclusive than any we have had in the past. Interestingly, Giddens thinks that the groups that benefit mostly from this are women, gays and lesbians. I will return to the importance of Giddens later in this article.

Love as radical discourse?

From the above discussion, we can see that a dominant part of the discourse on romantic love is that love is radical, liberating and equalising, capable of creating equals by breaking down the most tenacious of social and cultural barriers. As such, it is not surprising that love is being used as an argument to support same-sex marriage. Indeed the same-sex marriage discourse around love can be seen as a reaffirmation of this interpretation of romantic love. However, there are other discourses of romantic love that do not match this positive interpretation. I have already alluded above to the criticisms by Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, who see love as totalitarian. Other sustained criticism can be found among feminist and queer theorists, who in turn see love as oppressive, patriarchal and sexist, and, importantly for this article, as heteronormative.

Romantic love, from the very beginning, was considered a dangerous idea, its connection with liberty and freedom, its disconnection from family, class, social and religious duty – what are to many its very strengths – make it an obvious target of criticism. Its association with free love and sexual freedom made it a threat to traditional family structures and to lifelong monogamous marriage. The very features of romantic love that receive praise also receive criticism. If romantic love liberates individuals from the shackles of traditional morality it will equally be seen as ruinous of those institutions. Dennis de Rougemeont describes romantic love as a pathology which began as a reaction against Christianity, and in particular the institution of marriage, by people who were still pagan (de Rougemeont, Reference de Rougemeont and Belgion1983 [c1956]). He is, of course, reacting here to the connection that emerges in romantic love with erotic desire and with the fact that it is connected to sexual liberation. There is also a link between romantic love and the subversion of marriage. Giddens refers to romantic love as ‘intrinsically subversive’, and it is indeed hard to refute this. It is no surprise that the rise of romantic love coincided with calls to liberalise divorce laws, recognise homosexuality and secularise marriage by removing the jurisdiction of the church from its regulation (Giddens, Reference Giddens1992, p. 46).Footnote ¹⁷

The connection of love with freedom and equality has been interpreted by many as liberating and empowering women (Solomon, Reference Solomon, Baker, Wininger and Elliston1998), and yet many feminists have long argued that love is the pivot of oppression for women (see Firestone, Reference Firestone1970; de Beauvoir, Reference de Beauvoir and Parshley1953; Douglas, Reference Douglas1990). For some feminists the problem stems from love's association with other institutions. As Carol Smart puts it, feminists have identified love as an aspect of ‘patriarchy's ideological armament through which women became hooked into dependent relationships with men, entered into an unfavourable legal contract (namely marriage) and ultimately ended up with care of the children’ (Reference Smart2007, p. 60).Footnote ¹⁸ However, many have also challenged the central ideology of love itself. Wendy Langford directly disputes that love is equalising. She argues that while the idea that love has spread principles of justice and fairness widely is an attractive and optimistic view, it is empirically unsustainable and conceptually misguided. She says that while our society has come to ‘venerate deliverance’ through love, with promises of ‘liberty, equality and togetherness’, in fact romantic love is a ‘process by which restrictions, inequality and dissatisfaction are merely obscured’ (Reference Langford1999, p. 21). She argues that the rhetoric that love takes us higher and allows us to develop is wrong. She says, ‘[l]ove does not merely fail to give us what we desire but in so doing compounds painful feelings of dissatisfaction and low self-esteem’ (p. 50). Its effects are not positive, not even neutral, they are largely negative (p. 50). While love promises happiness and freedom from social constraint, it in fact delivers the opposite. Not only does love not deliver its promises at an individual level, it also does not create the society it promises. Love is based on an assumption that an ethic of intimacy will be a humane one. Langford disputes this idea also. The practice of forming and dissolving relationships upon the quest for satisfaction does not advance egalitarianism. She says: ‘[love] does not result in a society determined by equity and humanity at all, but one in which the individual is either subject to the insidious regulation of “government by love” or cast aside like a piece of flotsam upon the whim of love's unruly passions’ (p. 151).

Queer theorists have also been critical of romantic love, arguing that love is always constructed as heterosexual, while gay and lesbian relationships are categorised predominantly as sexual rather than as loving. Cheshire Calhoun has argued that romantic love is constructed in our society in a way that excludes homosexual and lesbian love from it (Reference Calhoun1995; Reference Calhoun and Nelson1997; Reference Calhoun and Bandes1999; Reference Calhoun2000). Romantic love, like other emotions, is dependent upon a society's emotional scripts. Such scripts have the function of teaching us those emotions, the proper object of them, how to assess their authenticity and how to perform them. Emotions therefore rely heavily on these scripts. Calhoun argues that in relation to homosexual and lesbian love the problem is that there are no paradigm scenarios and emotional scripts to follow. All of our paradigm scenarios cast heterosexuals in the leading roles. Even in love stories involving same-sex love, she argues that the love story itself is not the central story. It is either the secondary story or it is performed in such a way that it becomes ‘vulnerable to being read as a drag performance’ or as ‘sexual obsession or displaced hatred of the opposite sex’ (1999, p. 222).Footnote ¹⁹ In fact, the problem is deeper still. Gay and lesbian love is not only silent, there are actual barriers to the performance of romantic love for gay and lesbian couples. As she says:

For Calhoun, same-sex love is not conceived as romantic love because our society sees gay and lesbian people as incapable of experiencing, and unfit for the performance of, romantic love. Rather, “sexual obsession”, ‘ “promisculty” and “sexual perversion” remain staples of everyday discourse about gays and lesbians’ (Reference Calhoun and Bandes1999, pp. 235–36).

Paul Johnson (Reference Johnson2005) has argued that the heterosexual construction of love is maintained in two ways. First, love is translated into relationships which draw upon traditional scripts of marriage and domesticity, and second, love is constructed in the way in which love is felt as essential, natural and compelling. Johnson found that for the subjects of his study, love was experienced as ‘a gut feeling’, a ‘whole body experience’ which ‘comes out of nowhere, cannot be planned, and overpowers those who experience it. It constitutes a need, a desperate urge, and displaces logic’ (p. 40). For Johnson, this connection between love and nature inevitably leads to heterosexuality (p. 93).

Furthermore, the link between love and traditional scripts of relationships, domesticity and procreation are so pervasive that they find expression in the gay and lesbian community itself. Sean Slavin's (2009) study of sexual practice among gay men found that the men in the study struggled to make sense of their sexual and romantic lives through the binary of sex and love, and sex and relationships. Slavin found that the men in his study to some extent accepted these ‘traditional binaries, while at the same time they were frustrated by them’ (p. 93).

Slavin here points to another important issue that emerges from our understanding of love, and that is its connection with, and yet its distinction from, sex (meaning sexual activity). The relationship between love and sex is the crucible for both feminist and queer critiques of love. Many feminists have argued that sex is necessarily oppressive for women, and a source, if not the source, for male dominance over women (MacKinnon, 1987; Dworkin, Reference Dworkin1987).Footnote ²⁰ For queer theorists, the relationship between sex and love is equally problematic. As Slavin has shown above, the perception that same-sex relationships are more about sex than they are about love not only makes them less important, but also connects them with discourses of promiscuity and sexual perversions. As such, same-sex relationships are judged to be unfit for ‘respectable’ scripts of love, such as parenthood, domesticity, fidelity and marriage, and are ultimately seen as unfit for love itself (see Richman, Reference Richman2002; Bateman, Reference Bateman1992).

In the discussion above, we have seen how some feminists equate love with women's oppression, and some queer theorists with heteronormativity. Both of these critiques therefore cast a serious shadow over love's claims of freedom, personal satisfaction and happiness. However, despite these trenchant criticisms, within both of these schools of thought love retains its power and receives favourable readings. Some feminists dismiss romance as a site of women's oppression and complicity in patriarchal structures and instead see love as a site of resistance, transformation and agency. For example, Pearce and Stacey (Reference Pearce and Stacey1995) argue that despite the early feminists' strong critique of love it remains ‘as gargantuan as ever’ and the desire for love has survived: the reason for this is its ‘narrativity’. They argue that an engagement with the narrative of romance enables women to facilitate the ‘rescripting of other areas of life’ (p. 13; see also Radway, Reference Radway1991). Langhamer (Reference Langhamer2007) has also shown how in everyday courtship behaviour young women in twentieth-century Britain have been able to act as ‘architects of their own lives and as active agents of social change’ (p. 196).

Within queer theory, one positive reading of love can be found in the work of Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant1997; Reference Berlant2000a; Reference Berlant, Dean and Lane200b). Berlant is not unbothered by love's heterosexual scripts of marriage and procreation (Reference Berlant, Dean and Lane2000b, p. 438), and the importance that this has had on ‘normalizing’ heterosexuality (p. 440). However, for Berlant these problems can, and should, be overcome because love is ultimately a site of optimism, change and transformation: ‘love approximates a space to which people can return, becoming as different as they can be from themselves without being traumatically shattered; it is a scene of optimism for change, for transformational environment’ (p. 448).Footnote ²¹ To be able to achieve this, however, love must be seen as being connected rather than disconnected to agency, as being connected to but not subordinate to desire, and, importantly, to be seen as something that exists outside the heterosexual scripts. Berlant says that when queer thought enters the discourse of love, it must not teach ‘that we are all alike and compelled to repeat our alikeness intelligibly, but by teaching some of what we've learned about love, under the surface, across the lines, around the scenes, informally’ (p. 448). ‘Queering’ love for Berlant is achieved when it lives up to its promises of existing outside established institutions, when it challenges all rules connected with it which presume to establish principles for living (p. 443). In other words, when love delivers what it promises: intimate relationships that are free of oppressive and traditional forms. Berlant is interested in love because of its potential for freedom and possibilities and rejects it as a means of establishing rules and barriers.

Defining love for our time

Love is part of who we are; it is unlikely that we will see our relationships via an alternative paradigm anytime soon. As Langford says, ‘[n]o remedy is to be found in a reactive return to the regulation of love along traditional lines. Justice and humanity cannot thrive through the imposition of a repressive moral order and the institutionalisation of oppressive practices’ (Reference Langford1999, p. 151). Love therefore must be reconceptualised in a way that retains its utopian ideals while removing those elements within it that tend towards a reproduction of patriarchy and heterosexuality. Much of this can be achieved via a reconceptualisation, which among other things moves love away from one of its central ideas – that of complimentarity.

Complimentarity refers to the idea of love as the unity of two people. Many (Solomon, Reference Solomon1994; Friedman, Reference Friedman, French and Wettstein1998) have traced this idea of love to the myth of Aristophanes recorded in Plato's Symposium. In the Symposium, the gathered philosophers and writers are asked to speak on the meanings of love. In the speech of Aristophanes we hear that love is a longing to find a part of ourselves, and that when we find it, it constitutes a unification, a merging of both our bodies and our souls, which ‘heals the human sore’. Aristophanes' myth tells that long ago human beings were physically very different. They had four hands, four legs, two heads and two sets of genitalia. They could move forwards and backwards and would move very quickly by cartwheeling on all eight limbs. In this powerful form, humans were a great threat to the gods, and for this reason Zeus decided to cut them in half. In their reduced state humans were miserable and spent their whole time searching for their other half. When they found each other they stayed together, foregoing all other activity in fear of losing each other again. Zeus took pity on them and turned their genitals around so that they could satisfy the urge they had for each other by engaging in sex. This was therefore the origin of love (Plato, Reference Lamb1975, p. 141).Footnote ²²

The history of romantic love has continued to build upon this idea of love as two people coming together – merging. The courtly tradition saw love as an intense and passionate relationship that established a ‘oneness’ between the lovers. This idea progressed even further during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with the idea that love could involve, as Singer puts it, a ‘oneness with an alter ego, one's self, a man or woman who would make up one's deficiencies, respond to one's deepest inclinations, and serve as possibly the only person with whom one could communicate fully’ (1984, p. 40). Robert Nozik claimed that the central idea of romantic love is a desire to ‘constitute a new entity in the world, what might be called a we’ (Reference Nozik1989, p. 70). Delaney says that ‘perhaps the most important thing people associate with the ideal of romantic love, is this desire to unite with another person in profound psychological and physical ways’ (Reference Delaney1996, p. 340). By the end of the twentieth century, Marilyn Friedman has described love as having become ‘merger mania’ (1998). This idea of a man and woman coming together and complimenting each other to create a whole is also at the heart of Christian ideas of both love and marriage, as we saw above with Finnis and Grisez.Footnote ²³

The idea of a merger per se does not have to be between a man and a woman. Aristophanes certainly did not specify that the two halves were of opposing sex. Merger has, however, continued to be understood that way. For example, Branden describes romantic love as fulfilling our need to ‘encounter, unite with, and live out vicariously our opposite-gender possibilities: the need, in males, to find an embodiment in the world of the internal feminine; the need in females, to find an embodiment in the world of the internal masculine’ (1998, p. 225).

The idea of the male and female coming together to form a unity is a popular one that we can also find expressed in other places. As Zanghellini points out, it is a message that exists in our popular culture as well as other knowledges. He says that it also exists in discourses that are non-dominant, ‘such as for example certain strands of feminist theory insisting on sexual difference’ (2007, pp. 290–91).

The idea of complimentarity is easily connected to the idea of love as something which is grounded in nature. Johnson showed how much of the everyday discourse of love resonates with nature. He showed how people described love as something outside of our control, inevitable and overpowering, as a ‘force or power inside the body’ (2005, p. 24). He argues that this construction of romantic love is premised on the central idea that love is a ‘trans-historical “fact” of human nature’ (p. 40). This link with nature immediately leads to biology and then procreation, and then, inevitably, back to heterosexuality.

This view is shared by Sternberg, who argues that, because of sexual intercourse, love is very much connected to fertility and in turn gets connected to the sex of the actors (Reference Sternberg1998, p. 85).

Biological, pshychological and neuroscientific discourses of love also feed the connection of it with nature. Take, for example, the work on love by Helen Fisher. Fisher, in Why we Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Reference Fisher2004),Footnote ²⁴ sets out to prove ‘scientifically’ that romantic love is a ‘universal human feeling, produced by specific chemicals and networks in the brain’ (p. 51). She traces most of the feelings associated with romantic love to three main chemicals: dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. She finds that the higher levels of dopamine produce focused attention, unwavering motivation and goal-directed behaviours. These, she claims, are the central characteristics of romantic love. Higher levels of norepinephrine can produce exhilaration, excessive energy, sleeplessness and loss of appetite. These too, she claims, are central traits of romantic love. Seratonin is responsible for the obsessiveness which she labels as the litmus test of romantic love. She says: ‘lovers are obsessed. And doctors who treat individuals with most forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder prescribe SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) … [s]o I came to suspect that the lover's persistent, involuntary, irresistible ruminations about a sweetheart might be associated with low levels of some type … of this chemical compound’ (p. 54). And so the whole book goes on, finding explanations to love which reduce it to often pathological chemical reactions which leaves one feeling not only that love is something to be avoided at all costs, but, more importantly for the argument here, that love is something which exists outside our control, that it is a physical natural response rather than a social and cultural phenomena, where individual agency can play a central part.