Simone de Beauvoir: the Best Romantic Partners Celebrate Each Other’s Freedom

  The Lovers, by René Magritte (1928), via Wikimedia Commons

Note: the following article is an abridged extract from my upcoming book, The Philosophy Prescription: Lessons from Big Thinkers for Every Stage of Life, published by Penguin Random House. It’s adapted from Chapter 5, ‘Falling in Love’, which considers how different philosophers discuss romantic relationships. If you enjoy this extract, I’d be honored if you’d consider checking out the book!

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“To will oneself free is also to will others free,” writes Simone de Beauvoir in her 1947 work, The Ethics of Ambiguity.

This principle forms the bedrock of what Beauvoir thinks ‘authentic’ love must look like. If we value our own freedom, then it’s inconsistent not to value the freedom of others – including that of our romantic partners.

An authentically loving relationship, Beauvoir tells us in her famous 1949 work The Second Sex, involves the meeting and continuation of two individual freedoms, permitted to unfold as they are, governed by reciprocity, free choice, and respect.

Unfortunately, this kind of authentic love is difficult to achieve when one’s culture frames relationships quite differently.

The ‘natural’ romantic roles of men and women

Writing in Paris in the 1940s and 50s, Beauvoir observed the imbalanced romantic expectations placed on men and women. Marriage for men was just a part of life; but for women it was its ultimate purpose, necessary for both financial and social survival.

The cultural ideal for women was to cultivate relationships of devotion and self-sacrifice, whereby their individuality was subsumed in favour of fixed, predefined, ‘feminine’ roles like ‘wife’ and ‘mother’.

We all grow up with cultural narratives that serve to mystify us about our own potential, Beauvoir claims – narratives that might encourage us to think it’s ‘natural’ to play a certain role.

The particular mystifications she identified for women in the mid-twentieth century encouraged an absolute deference to the other, a relinquishment of their own freedom, a routine subservience on the basis that this is simply what a good woman does.

But upholding this kind of rigid, default blueprint of ‘feminity’ – deference, subservience, devotion – is bound to produce inauthentic relationships, resentment, and what existentialists like Beauvoir call ‘bad faith’.

Bad faith essentially means self-denial. We deny ourselves by limiting our own possibilities, be it consciously or subconsciously, and by living according to the opinions of others.

Rather than authentically create ourselves through free choice, we outsource our decisions and identities to convention and society. (I further discuss Beauvoir’s analysis of bad faith here, in the context of work and retirement).

A love of absolute devotion is a particularly subtle form of bad faith, Beauvoir thinks, for it’s often dressed up as ‘selflessness’ or ‘duty’.

Same-sex relationships tend to be better placed to transcend patriarchal stereotypes, Beauvoir suggests, but even they cannot totally escape pre-given categories like ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, and that means they are at risk of reproducing problematic dynamics.

In a 1950 essay, she asks:

Is it not possible to conceive a new kind of love in which both partners are equals – one not seeking submission to the other?

Such relationships, she writes in The Second Sex, would form a middle ground between devotion and self-interest: they’d be

founded on reciprocal recognition of two freedoms; each lover would then experience himself as himself…

Rather than impose broad stereotypes, healthy romance accounts for and celebrates individual difference

Beauvoir’s point, then, is not that differences within a relationship should be eradicated, but that they shouldn’t form the basis of a power dynamic. One party should not automatically enjoy more freedom, power, or possibilities than the other.

Neither should we aim for total unity: love should not be an absolute fusion that consumes its participants, but a connection between individuals who respect one another’s uniqueness, and who have simply volunteered to share life together.

Couples can still form a coherent ‘we’ without losing their own personalities. In fact, sustaining our individuality is crucial for maintaining a romantic spark, Beauvoir suggests:

eroticism is a movement towards the Other.

If individuals lose themselves to the relationship, if a couple comes to share exactly the same opinions and thoughts, then the sexual act “is no longer an intersubjective experience where each one goes beyond [themselves].”

Authentic love is a mutual celebration of equality and individual difference. Meeting as equals – as unique individuals with their own potential for becoming, self-making, and flourishing – neither party subordinates the other nor allows themselves to be subordinated.

This kind of love is authentic, Beauvoir thinks, because it augments the potential of the people involved, rather than diminishing it; it is based on principles like reciprocity and equilibrium, rather than exploitation; and it promotes freedom and becoming, rather than self-denial.

So who takes the bins out?

Commentators often scrutinise Beauvoir’s own love life in relation to her theory, for she had a lifelong open relationship with fellow philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. Each permitted the other to pursue other relationships and live fascinating lives that led them all over the globe.

But not everyone can live as a 20th-century existentialist thinker, smoking cigarettes in Parisian cafes, contemplating what it means to be free.

On the more everyday practical side of relationships, the bins need taking out, the bathroom needs cleaning, the laundry needs doing. Money must be earned; food must be prepared.

What I take from Beauvoir is not that we are forbidden to ever have particular roles, to live according to pre-given ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ archetypes, or to follow monogamy; it’s more that, to be authentic, any lifestyle we pursue should be actively chosen, discussed, and renewed by us as individuals, not automatically and forever imposed on us because of a wider social norm.

We all play roles: the question is the extent to which we play those roles knowingly and freely. To really improve our lives with love, Beauvoir suggests, we must approach our connections with others as we approach life: authentically, without slipping into unthinking bad faith.

Not seeking to control one another, not seeking to sacrifice ourselves for one another; but striving to bring out the best in each other, to help each other grow through life and fulfil our potential.

On this view, then, true connection does not involve possession; rather, it involves recognition, acceptance, protection. As Rainer Maria Rilke memorably puts it in Letters to a Young Poet:

Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and greet each other.

Some argue Beauvoir did not honour her own recommendations. While her lifelong open relationship with Sartre could serve as a model for the kind of existential freedom both thinkers wrote about, they’ve also been accused of sexually exploiting their students, partaking in a number of relationships with an utterly problematic power dynamic.

The extent to which this undermines their works on freedom and authenticity is up to readers to decide. Perhaps ideas have a purity that people never can.

In this case, the idea we’re left with is that the best romantic relationships consist in mutual projects of growth and change. Does this judgement ring true for you?

Note: this article is an abridged extract from my upcoming book, The Philosophy Prescription: Lessons from Big Thinkers for Every Stage of Life. It’s adapted from Chapter 5, ‘Falling in Love’. If you enjoyed it, I’d be honored if you’d consider checking out the book!

What do you make of Beauvoir’s analysis?

• Do you agree with Beauvoir that healthy adult relationships recognise and promote the freedom of all involved?
• How might we reconcile respecting someone’s free choice with advising them on what we think is the best course of action? At what point does care and advice become interference?
• What qualities have the best relationships in your life consisted of?

To inform your reflections, you might enjoy the following related Philosophy Breaks:

• ​Authentic Love: Simone de Beauvoir on What Makes a Healthy Relationship
• Simone de Beauvoir on the Crisis of Retirement and Facing Old Age
• Sartre’s Waiter, ‘Bad Faith’, and the Harms of Inauthenticity
• Heidegger On Being Authentic in an Inauthentic World
• Plato’s Scala Amoris: the Ladder of Love
• Erich Fromm on Why Love is Not About Finding ‘the One’
• Aldous Huxley: Other People’s Lives are Ultimately Unknowable

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