On Repeat: Thinking about Love

I recognise something here in Marc-Aurèle’s installation. In this seemingly endless scroll of underwear, displayed like a vestimentary anti-climax to an intimate encounter, how reminded I am of all the boys I have slept with, forgetting their names and they forgetting about me, even if they turned my life upside down and I perhaps theirs. I myself have boys' underwear, the original owners of which are a mystery to me. Ah the nonchalance and ordinariness of it all! It reminds me of a beautiful thing about being queer: you can go to acruising ground and have a sandwich with a friend while three feet away someone is getting railed; or a brief moment of intimacy can be as powerful as a life-long relationship. Queerness can show us how sex and intimacy are really just the very ordinary and very powerful things about what it means to be human.

At the same time, Marc-Aurèle’s installation reminds me of what has happened to intimacy and connection in an era of Grindr and individualism. Anonymity and casualness can also become a mask for the loneliness and longing that emerges from a fear and evasion of getting truly close to one another, however brief or long that moment might be.  Sometimes this covered up by a desire to have “fun”, to be “light”, to be “easy” and to let people passionately into one’s life and then let them go carelessly in a misunderstanding of what it truly means to “let go” (more on this below). We evade because we think there might be better options elsewhere as if the person is a product we bought can be exchanged, and we are afraid because we don’t really want to be wrenched apart by feeling.  

And my god, there is enough drudgery and heaviness in the world, so I’m all for fun, lightness and ease.  I’m also all for the eroticism of the transitory encounter, the thrill and contingency of it, the freedom of exploring the erotic, no matter how brief, in ways that can leave us breathless and beautifully confused and startled.  And how too in those encounters we can sometimes feel strangely and utterly ourselves as we are deep inside the intensity of the moment. Heternormativity and a homophobic culture too easily psychologises queers and says they are obviously so hurt they can’t form real, lasting bonds with each other and can only have brief, meaningless encounters.  But I know from my own experiences that this is not true. 

But I also want to place attention on how we have at times lost sight of the potentials of liberatory intimacy because we increasingly submit to a culture of optimisation, entitlement, efficiency and ease that often plays out in the way we relate to one another. Reflecting on Marc-Aurèle’s installation I want to simultaneously celebrate queer intimacy and reflect on the loneliness that emerges from it and why this is the case. I realise I am assuming a “we”, but note I emphatically include myself in what follows and perhaps the “we” will speak to those amongst you who have grappled with the pleasures and pains of sex, intimacy and dating today.   

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When I visited Marc-Aurèle’s studio and listened to driving techno music and discussed sex and relation, I thought about how much I wanted to go out and dance and be free and easy. And in fact, I did that very day.  But perhaps because I am writing from a place of wistfulness, loss and grief, my thoughts were accompanied by the recognition that there can be no fun without the mess of play,  no grace and lightness without gravity and weight, and no ease without consideration and responsibility. There have been times when I have wanted to cry this out to some lovers in my life.  How often we forget that queerness is a way of life and so an ethical mode of relation that is full of possibilities and true freedom. How sad I have been to see elements of the queer community merely aestheticised as a style to parade.  Queerness too often can simply become synonymous with being exclusively cool, unattached and somehow uniquely liberated from need and longing without acknowledging, making visible or making room for difficulties, pains and fears that are a necessary condition of all forms of relating.   

In social media, clubs and on dating apps, this coolness is often presented as being endlessly beautiful and emotionally unencumbered. But of course enormous amounts of hidden labour go into presenting such a facade. There is almost a privilege in appearing above the all-too-human  traits of longing, labour, struggle, pain and attachment. I remember writing my dissertation on Renaissance and Baroque conduct manuals (I know, don’t ask) and looking at the word “sprezzatura”, loosely translated as “ease of grace” or an effortless style of self-presentation for the courtier that concealed the labour of shoring up such a performance of the self.  In today’s dating-app culture and some of our clubs, there is a peculiar version of this, where desirability is predicated on appearing self-sufficient and detached.  In this culture, there is always another possibility, another person, another encounter, so to show any form of attachment in such a world of endless choice and keeping your options open would be embarrassing. I’m not arguing for attachments (wow, unchecked can they mess up relationships) but to perform we are somehow above them would be to ignore the aching mess of being a flawed human being. While the Renaissance courtier knew effort was necessary but hid it, it seems in today’s culture, we should pretend effort should not exist at all.  

But where does this fear of showing our vulnerable and longing sides come from? Why this armoured individualism? Why this terror of closeness and intimacy? Why this fleeing from responsibility for the other as soon as we get closer to them?  Why this desire for smoothness, as if we were the wipe down surface of a kitchen counter or the glossy surface of Marc-Aurèle’s Emo(r)ji which deliberately and pointedly flattens the most intimate moment of anal sex?  Surely we know that when the richer textures of opened souls and bodies come together we have not only the source of difficulty and conflict, but also the condition of warmth and vibration –– and so of passion and of song?  Why do we run away from the other when, through our relation to them, we are able to glimpse the holy enigma of their life as well as our own dark and beautiful mystery –– all so unexplainable, painfully and brilliantly unknowable?  

Well a lot of ink has been spilled on this. And I don’t have the space here to rehearse the psychologies and philosophies of why queer and gay men in particular can be so magisterially fucked up by our hurts and traumas, not to mention by all the effects of neoliberalism, consumerism and the cult of narcissism that social media have bred. But I think a lot of answers can be found in the fact that we live in a society where so much of intimate life is now organised around optimisation, comparison and selection, which Marc-Aurèle’s work reflects on. Perhaps most brutally it is structured around the management – and mitigation – of risk. (You recent boys who broke my heart, how afraid you and I were of the all too risky business of falling in love).  

We also seem to be living in an epic era of entitlement where we think we can get what we want, when we want. That ebullience of youthful curiosity, of wanting to experience as much as possible, to have sex and intimacy in that frantic wonder of being open to experience and our bodies as they grow and shift –– this is powerful, it can be destructive and it can be profoundly creative. But too often it can play out according to a logic of accumulation, possession and expendability. People and experiences become merely things to amass, like the underwear here, and the complexity of another person is reduced to a means to a narcissistic end: to heal me, to validate me, to give me access to something or someone, to give me an experience etc., etc. The relationship of “I” to the mysterious “thou”, as Martin Buber would call a relation of reverence to the mystery of the other, disappears under the weight of I and it: separate and pitted against each other and built on extraction and exchange.  And so it goes: You give me this, I’ll give you that. I deserve and want this, so I will get it. I want to have fun? Give it to me. I want to have sex now? Give it to me. I want it to be light? Don’t get complex. Are you getting complex? Hell, goodbye. How often we want our cake and to eat it.  We want all the passion and comfort of a partner but none of the responsibility or commitment that comes with opening out intimately with someone. We mistake the very idea of commitment with restriction and a loss of freedom as if it were some eternal contractual obligation. We want the lessons of love but none of the honour and respect for the relations that offered it up to us in the first place. We want erotic growth but none of the terrifying, powerful and raw vulnerability that comes with it.  

And then, because we live in an era of individualistic entitlement, everyone is presented as ultimately disposable. I really think this is one of the tragedies of contemporary life that plays out in intimate encounters. We are so scared of staying with the difficulty and pleasures of someone and of having our minds and souls unsettled and shaken that we’d rather just toss them away and run for it before we are too rattled and unnerved.   

This does not mean staying with someone for the sake of it or for not attending to when it just doesn’t make sense to carry on. There are relationships that diminish, wound and crush us and leaving someone is not an evasion of responsibility but an expression of it. And sometimes it’s not that deep. We just aren’t aligned in our lives.  But too often “difficulty” is interpreted only and prematurely as a fault and not as something potentially generative –– a condition of possibility of bringing two people closer together.  Many of us know this, I think. We are closer to our friends when we are able to argue with them, when we are able to be angry, upset, –– feel human feelings! ––  in all our contradictory ways and know that they are still consistently there and that we have learned more about ourselves and others in that moment of being jostled, stretched and remade. The question isn’t how do we rid difficulty from a relationship (every relation is difficult because every one of us is hurt, traumatised and complex), but how do we and how can we turn to it to expand, rather than erode, mutual growth and understanding? That is the creative, generative question. We have become suspicious of discomfort. We want the Pantone-colour chart simplicity of Marc-Aurèle’s Emo(r)ji .  We leave relationships before we allow ourselves to be transformed. We mistake being unsettled with being unsafe, and being vulnerable with being damaged.  This is what is happening to our education system. It is now increasingly organised around a misunderstanding of what it is to be “safe” and “secure”. It is all about being “comfortable” and certainly not about having our minds blown and our assumptions and attitudes wrenched apart by learning and seeing the world from multiple complex and difficult positions.  

Individualism’s twin value of competition and the highly capitalistic values of efficiency, productivity and speed that govern contemporary society  also militate against truly liberatory forms of encounter and relation.  It’s what Grindr thrives on, placing people side by side as one game of endless choice, comparison and easy access.  These values put the very process of being a human –– grappling and fumbling our way awkwardly through this eternal mystery we call life and making a right old glorious mess of it –– into a kind of race to be successful, to win in our ‘emotional journey’ and get what we want. And if we aren’t winning (which is probably most of us) in this zero sum game where someone’s success depends on someone else’s failure, then we might look to others sitting smugly on their gleaming throne of heal-dom and apparent sexual liberation and feel we are so hopelessly fucked that there isn’t much point in carrying on.  We might then feel our hurts and our traumas are beyond the pail, and nobody could ever love us, least of all ourselves.  It is no joke; too many men have contemplated or taken their own lives because of it.  

But I need to look again at Marc-Aurèle’s pageant of underwear looping up and down on those clothing racks. I cannot see only sadness and desperation. No, I think I also see a gathering of intimacy and vulnerability. And I hear in the music not just the angry isolation I have sometimes felt in techno parties, drugged up, lonely and longing, but also the euphoria and pleasure of dancing wildly in community with so many bodies of all shapes and sizes and with a queer community fiercely brought together out of both love and hurt.  Both / and, not either / or. An abundance (how I wish this word hadn’t been so vacuously co-opted by social media), not just an accumulation. 

So somehow I feel I have to conclude by thinking about love and eros. I have to.  It’s what I hold onto nowadays ––please, never stop loving! my dad cried to me when my heart was so shattered, at once carelessly and lovingly, by someone.  And do I see love here in Marc-Aurèle’s installation, in this display of intimacy and discarded and gifted underwear, in this meditation on all our pains and desires as queers?  I think I do. Or at least I want to because I know that in this fuzzy, but surely so intuitively known feeling there lies the possibility of liberation: the liberation from the restrictive modes of relating to one another that have come out of the “neoliberalisation” of desire which constrains and presses it into rigid patterns, schemes and processes. And do we not know from the expansiveness of love and the freewheeling possibilities of eros that restriction is anathema to them? That is true freedom and true letting go: the total expansiveness of loving someone that comes from a desire to see ourselves and our lovers soar and rise.  But crucially this has to happen with responsibility. This means creating the conditions of possibility that allow this to happen. And surely if we have built these conditions for love and selves to expand, we want to continue to nurture them? This is the meaning of commitment –– not staying with another person for the sake of it or out of obligation but staying with the powerful work of nourishing mutual growth  in all our encounters, no matter how brief, casual or intense.  Reparative relationships increase possibilities of relating deeply and responsibly far and wide.  And yes, sometimes this means lovingly and fiercely letting our lovers go.  

Perhaps this is where the poetry of art and making comes into play and what Marc-Aurèle’s installation might teach us. Hurt begets hurt. But the lesson of poetry, which as I have noted many times before, is the activity of continual reparative making which is poetry’s etymological origin.  And so the only way to break that endless cycle of hurt is to make something from it, like Marc-Aurèle’s work here and to make room for a myriad of feelings and thoughts, contradictory and confusing. It is this sense of overflow and tension that might allow us to see that relation and intimacy is a continual negotiation, built from profound sensitivities to its ever-forming flow.  We cannot dictate the terms of it, but we can groove channels of relation that do not shy away from complexity and contradiction, from pain and hurt as much as desire, pleasure and ease.   “Without contraries there is no progression”, William Blake wrote (an artist at the forefront of my mind).  And so again, here is the power of both / and not the restrictive binary of either / or.  

And love, if you will permit me to briefly and clumsily parse a word that has had thousands of years of brilliant and not-so-brilliant thought and action attending to it, is where such ever expanding possibilities reside. Foucault, in a beautiful interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life” (1981) wrote about this.   I should quote him in full:   

One of the concessions one makes to others is not to present homosexuality as anything but a kind of immediate pleasure, of two young men meeting in the street, seducing each other with a look, grabbing each other’s asses and getting each other off in a quarter of an hour. There you have a kind of neat image of homosexuality without any possibility of generating unease, and for two reasons: it responds to a reassuring canon of beauty, and it cancels everything that can be troubling in affection, tenderness, friendship, fidelity, camaraderie, and companionship, things that our rather sanitized society can’t allow a place for without fearing the formation of new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force. I think that’s what makes homosexuality “disturbing”: the homosexual mode of life, much more than the sexual act itself. To imagine a sexual act that doesn’t conform to law or nature is not what disturbs people. But that individuals are beginning to love one another-there’s the problem. The institution is caught in a contradiction; affective intensities traverse it which at one and the same time keep it going and shake it up. Look at the army, where love between men is ceaselessly provoked [appele] and shamed. Institutional codes can’t validate these relations with multiple intensities, variable colors, imperceptible movements and changing forms. These relations short-circuit it and introduce love where there’s supposed to be only law, rule, or habit. 

The creation of new relational possibilities. This, for me at least, is at the heart of what it means to be queer and to love. But certain spaces and institutions, from dating apps to clubs, can regulate these flows of relations between people. They try to stabilise and stylise relational possibilities. But when new forms of relation emerge, they create new flows. This is exactly when we must remain completely fearless and open. We must make space for them, because systems cannot ever fully map these new relational possibilities. Societies are obsessed with regulating intimacy because can reorganise networks of commitment and responsibility: who will care for whom? Who belongs to whom? Who shares resources with whom? These are political and ethical questions.  And given we live in a system determined principally by scarcity (if I possess something, you cannot possess it (land, property, time, that tiresome phrase ‘emotional labour’ etc.)) we have begun, tragically, to think of love, relations, friendships, imagination and attention in the same way. But all those things –- imagination, love, friendship, meaning, attention –– do not deplete by virtue of being shared but expand, proliferate, grow.   They are not proprietary and individual, in the way that our present society implies when it tells us to ‘own our truth.’ Not, they forever exceed and overflow.  They are not productive in the capitalist sense but generative in the poetic sense.  And yes, anxieties, fears and hurts can also proliferate exponentially. But maybe the hopeless lover boy in me wants to believe that they can never be totalising, and that somehow love, understood in that deep spiritual sense of profound connection beyond fear and ego ultimately diminishes hurt. In a beautiful passage in the Song of Solomon, that most fabulously erotic section of the Old Testament, the poet writes: “for love is as strong as death [...]Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the Lord. Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."  

So, my dear Marc-Aurèle, my dear boys who have entered my life and I into theirs, I hope that love and eros will come into our bruised and fearful hearts when we find someone else’s underwear, when we are dancing together and when we are deep inside the body and souls of our lovers. And in those moments, may we turn toward and not run away from the ever growing pleasure, beauty and terror of relation again and again, on repeat, always failing, but, yes, always trying, trying to learn what it means to love.   

Yates Norton, June 2026