“Once consent becomes the only value by which an individual can assess sex to be good or bad and justify their assessment to their partner or anyone else, all that’s left of seduction is contract negotiation fueled by whatever mix of horniness and loneliness brought the two parties together.
There’s an alternative. As Srinivasan herself suggested, to treat any romantic partner like your oldest friend. Fine attunement to your partner’s wants and needs, a willingness to place them at least on par with your own, and giving your partner the benefit of the doubt that they are doing the same. Since your partner doesn’t want their consent violated that part is a given, but it’s not the main focus or a sufficient condition.”
-Jake, “Consensual Hostility.” putanumonit.com. October 11, 2021
Not much to add here beyond two points:
- Transaction model: A transaction model for relationships is the model of psychopaths, sociopaths and others with Cluster B personality disorders. Framing everything around consent frames every interaction as a transaction.
- Love is a Blank Check: “[M]ake a commitment to put someone else before ourselves over the long haul, over a life, without any guarantees that it’ll work out well, and a virtual certainty, that, for some period, it’ll be a bad bargain. Love is what transforms a bad bargain into a good one, where you give someone a blank check, the ability to ask for and get more than you have, and by some miracle, at the moment it is needed, you find there is enough in the bank to cover it, money you never knew you had.”
The mystery of love is it transcends transactions. If it’s a transaction, it isn’t love.
cafebedouin.org 