248 - Playing Monogamy with Simon(e) van Saarloos

Full transcript available

Simon(e) and her inspiration

Simon(e) van Saarloos is the author of Playing Monogamy, published originally in Dutch and now translated to English, which explores intimacy, polyamory, and sexuality. Simon(e) incorporates a lot of philosophy into her writing that has led her to possess a unique and introspective view on ethical non-monogamy.

Simon(e), though living non-monogamously, found that there wasn’t any European- (and definitely not Dutch) based literature or resources on ethical non-monogamy when she first decided to write Playing Monogamy. Many (if not all) of the popular resources were North America-centric, and a lot of them were solely guides on how to live an ethical non-monogamous life. Simon(e) didn’t identify or relate to a lot of the existing literature on polyamory, and wanted to approach non-monogamy through a different lens.

Through a desire to cultivate more discussion around ethical non-monogamy from a different voice and different experiences, Simon(e) decided to write Playing Monogamy. Non-monogamy is a lens for her, which affects every bit of her writing, no matter what she’s writing about, as well as how she sees and experiences the world, which is important to share with others.

“[Literature on polyamory is] an attempt in which you acknowledge and realize that we have been conditioned in certain ways, and we can try differently. There’s also this sort of utopian sphere in non-monogamy that I actually want to honor…constantly pushing for something more and to imagine a world in which indeed love does exist, but in different ways.”

Simon(e) van Saarloos

In this episode, Simon(e) talks about her views on polyamory as a lifestyle, monogamy and safety, and other poignant, philosophical and cultural questions about ethical non-monogamy. Listen to the full episode to get her perspective!

Transcript

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Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory Podcast, we're talking to Simon(e) van Saarloos, author of Playing Monogamy. Written for more of a lay audience, the book proposes an expanded and polyamorous engagement with intimacy and sexuality as a possible alternative. It was originally written in Dutch and published by De Bezige Bij Publication Studio. I'm super impressed that I said that name right.

Emily: Me too.

Jase: Because it's not written like you would think, and is excited to bring this book to an English speaking audience for the first time. Welcome Simon(e). Thank you so much for joining us.

Simon(e): Thank you so much for having me.

Emily: As I was reading this book, I read what the publisher said that it was written for more of a lay audience, but quite frankly, it's a very cerebral and very intellectual book. You really have to sit with it and think about it and process everything that it says. Jase, I and Dedeker especially, we've been doing this for a while now for many, many years, and yet it's still proposed a lot of really interesting things that I didn't even think of before, on any non-monogamous journey that I've had.

From that standpoint, I was very impressed and I just kind of wanted to talk about that a little bit. Jase also wanted to ask what your inspiration for writing the book was and why you decided to be so cerebral about it and bring this viewpoint to it?

Simon(e): That's actually so great to hear about your experiences like that. Thank you for that. Now I feel guilty about saying that it's more for a lay audience. I think that also comes from being sort of in between academic writing and writing for the public as at least in the Netherlands it would be called, where writing for the public, maybe also has immediately a kind of different audience where there's such a large gap between academic writing and writing for the public. Especially because the Netherlands is such a small country, Dutch is also a small language.

Writing academically basically means having no audience at all and writing for public means having to reach out for everybody who speaks Dutch almost. That's at least how I experienced it as a writer. I think that in the US or North America the gap is sort of smaller in a way because even having an academic audience means that there's quite a large English speaking audience that can still reach towards this academic language. Or has some familiarity of this sort of academic language.

I think there's something there like a cultural difference in terms of audience. In terms of the inspiration for this book, obviously it came also from living non-monogamous myself and I wrote this book in 2015, I was 25 at the moment. I did not see any--definitely not Dutch, but also not European based writing on non-monogamy. All of the writing came from North America. I couldn't find any in my own language or just in any European context.

At the same time, everything I read from the US would always be sort of how to live polyamorous, how to live non-monogamous. Not so much at least how I felt, how I came to non-monogamy was not so much through living non-monogamous because that sort of happened, but that didn't need to have a direct label. It was much more that I felt that non-monogamy using this lens in philosophy - I was studying philosophy at a time - it was really helpful to actually dismantle many ways of how we look at the road into the road and give meaning to things.

I was at the one hand missing philosophy and non-monogamy and I was missing non-monogamy in philosophy. Because, of course, when you're studying philosophy, I mean it's mostly white men that you're reading. If you're in traditional academia and so much of it is based on is hierarchizing or categorizing, getting to meaning through allowing yourself to say like, 'Oh, this is very important or this is the right track or this is the important question that we're going to be asking

. I continuously felt like I do not understand, feel and effectively experience the rule through that hierarchy. In one way, yes, it was really like pushing non-monogamy into philosophy, but also for me, philosophy and thinking are like feeling, so it's an embodied experience. I need this philosophy to be able to practice non-monogamy. Because by thinking it through, it also starts existing for me. It's not just like, "Oh, how can I act polyamorous?" I can find that online if I want to.

There has been also like great work written on it. I don't mean to demean any of the work that has been done. Without relating it to the way that we come to meaning and the way that we come to how we feel the road, I cannot be non-monogamous because then it just feels like living a set of rules. Also, actually, because Playing monogamy was my first book. I've written on a variety of topics after that. I start to feel now that the translation has come out which was four years after I've written the original version. That actually in all of my work, whatever it is about the trial against Geert Wilders who's a right wing politician in the Netherlands who was on trial for inciting hate or whether it's about memory and commemoration. All of the thinking from a non-monogamous perspective is still there, or actually just developed more and more.

Jase: Right, It still affects the way you approach all of it.

Simon(e): Yes. There's still this non-monogamous lens and this sort of non-hierarchical attempt at least to think, right. Because I think that's also what I find so beautiful in all of the writing that is about non-monogamy and all the conversations about non-monogamy that it is about an attempt in which you acknowledge and realize that we have been conditioned in certain ways, but we can try differently.

There's also this sort of utopian sphere in non-monogamy, I feel at least, that I actually want to honor and so it's like, "Oh no, no, no. It's just a practicality. You can do it. It's easy. People are doing it anyway already," which is great to have these examples, but constantly pushing for something more and to imagine a world otherwise in which indeed love does exist, but in different ways.

Emily: That's kind of a good segue into my next question, which you talk about this internalized disbelief that a different relationship rationality is possible, but recently, I guess within, I'd say the last four years since you've written the book, there has been more of a rise of alternative lifestyles. People talking about it, people speaking about it in media. Do you think that this internalized disbelief has become less ingrained since you wrote the book in 2015? If not, what are some of the ways in which we can start to let go of that internalized thought?

Simon(e): Yes. Let me try and separate that question in two, I guess because it's interesting you said the word lifestyle. I think indeed as a lifestyle, non-monogamy has become more and more accepted, or it has been at least more prevalent, New York Times. Accepted may be not the right word, but definitely more prevalent, more known. It's something you can refer to. There's some articles out there that are easy to divert people to. If you would be at your standard traditional nuclear family birthday party and some far away uncle asked, "How is it, why are you talking about this person and last you were talking about that person? Did you break up?" "No, no, I'm actually together with them both," and they're like, "Oh, polyamory," there might be this sigh of relief like, "I've heard about this." I would be critical of the idea that indeed then it becomes more accepted or the non-monogamy as a tool to live this different kind of life actually comes through because that's why I'm pressing this word lifestyle. I wonder whether it's not-- I think too often it is seen as a lifestyle. There's some identity you can see speak on or of. It is also often even seen as a choice where I do think there's an element of choice and how you live your life.

I choose to think more about non-monogamy from a cultural point of view. How's monogamy invested in your culture? How did it come about and what would non-monogamy do to our culture? Instead of making non-monogamy or polyamory and maybe I should explain later why I divert these terms, but the way to non-monogamy is made safe actually, to make it an accepted lifestyle. Non-monogamy is made safe by saying, "Oh, well." It's something that you don't have to do. It's my choice maybe and I came to the conclusion it works better for me.

I think that even though I do not want to pressure anybody in non-monogamy or monogamy or any other kind of "lifestyle", I do try to see non-monogamy as a tool to push against a cultural hegemony where it's not just about like, "Oh, what fits you well?" Because then indeed it's like, "Oh, well, are you choosing yoga or going to the gym and lifting weights?"

I think I'm pushing this component of lifestyle because I do think that there is an easy commodification in that. There's a commodified lifestyle and where non-monogamy is acceptable as long as you carry it out in a certain way or maybe you even have to be proud and maybe it has to be a hashtag as well. I'm sorry-

Emily: Yes. You are absolutely right.

Simon(e): Then I think non-monogamy should be a bit dangerous, by which I do not mean the people who are living non-monogamous are dangerous or dirty people in any way, which is of course also a stigma that people are fighting against. I do not want to take away the hardships of people who're fighting those stigmas in their daily lives and who do have to go for the narrative of coming out because they might be "in the closet". I'm using quote marks here as well. "In the closet" at work as a polyamorous triangle or something like that.

I do not want to negate that in any way, but for me, I hope that non-monogamy is dangerous. With dangerous I mean that is also it dismantles the way we think about relationships and basically anything in our life from the point of view of property, from the point of view of commodity, of does it work well for you in which when you say that doesn't work well for you, there's a you, that's centralized or there's an I that's centralized. Where it's like, oh, something either works for you or it doesn't, but should we also not talk about the way that subjectivity is constructed? Where the way that you consider yourself in relationship to others is very much related to this sort of I or how you view yourself.

Jase: Yes. It also reminds me a little bit of a debate that I've heard going around before too about the question of, is polyamory queer? One of the things that I thought was really interesting in that discussion is that it's sort of, it can be, but it also cannot be, the definition of queer that was given at that time is that part of queerness is dismantling this status quo, this kind of commodification and things like that that basically, you could be polyamorous and like you said, maybe the "polyamorous lifestyle" but in that very New York Times friendly, still very commodified, still very defined and prescribed.

Emily: It's palatable for people.

Jase: Yes. Right. In that way, you could be polyamorous and not be queer at all, or you could be polyamorous, but be queer in the way that you're going about it in terms of what it sounds like you're talking about where it's the whole philosophy behind it of trying to get to the bottom of this kind of, we've been trained into these hierarchies or these ways of possessiveness of other people and things like that and questioning that and trying to tear that apart, which is something that on this show, we try to talk about that also in terms of whether you are choosing a monogamous lifestyle or not to maybe use the quotes the other way around. Right?

That you could embody that kind of polyamorous philosophy, like the stuff that you talk about in your book, but still be choosing to live a monogamous relationship while still thinking in that different way.

Simon(e): Yes. Then, I mean, if you want to be harsh, then there's this question of why would you then conclude to be monogamous? Because if you're dismantling all these ideas, then suddenly monogamy maybe doesn't allow for safety so much. Because often, monogamy seems to be chosen for this reason of safety, like, I want to be safe, but then also what does safety means? I mean, it's an individual question, but it's also a societal question.

I know you've talked about this on your show as well. Couple privilege for example. The safety that people get through being in a couple or through appearing monogamous. I think for me, this is also one of the reasons why I prefer to use the word non-monogamous or non-monogamy over polyamory. Because if you look into the history of polyamory, it's a very short and mostly white and middle-class history mostly centered in North America. It excludes many moments and many lives that were lived in non-monogamous, but aren't necessarily labeled or categorized as non-monogamous and definitely not as polyamorous.

One of the things that I'm thinking about is, for example, in Saidiya Hartman's book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, she writes about black women in North America around the 1900s and these way word lives, right? These are women who have queer intimacies, interracial intimacies, intergenerational intimacy, but most of them are non-monogamous intimacies.

Instead of being called polyamorous, for example, they are viewed as sex workers and they're criminalized as sex workers as black women. Then you see that this idea of monogamy is very much related to safety, not just on this individual choice level where like, "Oh, I feel safer in a monogamous relationship" but also in terms on the societal level, you are literally safer when you are in a monogamous relationship.

This is, of course written about the 1900s, but one way to be safe back then for black women was to get married.

Another thing I'm thinking about for example is Gloria Wekker's book The Politics of Passion which is maybe also a little less known in the non-monogamous region. She writes about Afro Surinamese women. Surinam was a former colony of the Netherlands, so this is a close history to the Netherlands, but where women would live together in what we would consider, I think non-monogamous concillations, have relationship with each other, have relationships also with men which I guess we would call bi, but then having a very different language for this and never saying, for example, I am lesbian, but saying, I do the muddy work.

Doing also instead of being, this doing is related, for example, to the spiritual religion of Vinci, which is the name for wind, where you would think that a certain spirit comes to visit you at a certain time and that spirit might like to lie down with women. That would make you desire at that moment women, but the spirit can also go. Having a lot less of this sort of identitarian way, labeling way of experiencing your sexuality and your behavior. I'm sorry, then like taking it off, but that too leads to this idea of safety because if you label yourself, you're safe. Depending, of course, where you live, but it's kind of at least in the Netherlands it's safe somehow to be gay, but you do have to say, you're gay. You do have to carry that label because if you carry that label, they can categorize you. I'm saying data, it sounds a bit too broader. There are, of course, like, whether there is data through Facebook or whether it's government data, there are, of course, a lot of profits being made of the categorization of our identities.

Jase: Well, and that was also, I remember growing up during the '90s, particularly, when I feel like the conversation about gay rights, basically before we even getting to marriage, but just about discrimination and things like that, when I feel like that conversation was really kind of hitting the media a lot, that the question that it felt like to me was central to that was this question of, do you have a choice? Are you just born this way, and that you're born that way, and so if that's true, like the logic goes, if you're born gay, and there's nothing you can do about it, then it means, well, either God made you that way or biology made you that way and so, therefore, it's okay. It's okay as long as you didn't get to choose and you just are this thing, kind of that identity, like you said, rather than just, "I do gay sometimes." That's like, "Well, if that's what you're doing, then we can condemn it and we can say no, you should make better choices or that somehow wrong."

In that way, arguing for that being an identity, that being a rigid thing, was maybe strategically the move to make it be acceptable to then be able to defend it and not get fired for it and things like that, but at the same time, it's kind of it just furthers that identification, that being rigid like you have to fit this label or you don't.

Emily: Yes, need for normalcy within our society. Interesting.

Simon(e): It is also meant to uphold a mainstream being related, this idea of 10% of the population is gay or queer or LGBTQIA, but then this percentage, why do we need this? Okay, we need it to keep the 90% that are them considered the normal. This is maybe when I'm saying like, "I want non-monogamy to be a bit dangerous."

When I think about like the New York Times way of presenting polyamory, it is indeed so much made to be about a lifestyle that there's not this sort of warning of like, "Be careful, non-monogamy is contagious."

I think there should be this sort of warning and I mean this in a joyful and playful way, but I think there should be a warning because, well, maybe it's like revolution, is contagious. In the sense that, when it is not about this, indeed, like you're saying, it becomes about this identity and it's something that can be contained, but it becomes about having a critical lens towards, also, for example, I know that you talked about the relationship escalator on your show, this idea of going through certain linear timeline where the only end of the escalator is breaking up and then it all failed or death.

Like you were saying, you can still choose whatever that means to live monogamous or to not have sex at all, and then how are you going to characterize yourself. There is this also, can you be asexual in polyamorous, yes, you can, so you get this constant shifting.

Speaking about this relationship escalator, this idea of moving through time and developing through different stages, this is something that we don't only see in monogamy or in relationships is something that we see in every aspect of our lives. When we look at currently the abortion bans in the Southern states of the US. People will say it's medieval or we're going back in time, but we're not actually going back in time, we're not going down the escalator or down the stairs. We're still in the same time, but there's this idea of like if you do not like something, or if you think something is backward, or something doesn't belong to your reality, then it is something that is in the past. It's backward. It's medieval loss, or it's this idea of you can separate yourself through being in the future versus being in the past.

Jase: Like this idea that progress is like a linear thing through time.

Emily: Well, and you talked about that with relationships as well that we always, as a society tend to be like, "Well, I'm glad that I went through that relationship, even though it failed because it made me into the person that I am today, or it made me stronger." I thought that was really interesting, because again, yes, it's like, well, I'm leveling up a little bit and in relationship somehow by going through this challenge that I no longer am having anymore or whatever. Yes, that we as a society just always want to like get to the next thing, level up, be better or whatever, when it doesn't really work like that. That's kind of again, a construct in our mind, I guess.

Simon(e): Yes, and it even relates to the idea of it gets better. On one hand, you want teenagers who are desperate to know that there is community out there and there is, but to say it gets better also goes into this idea of like, yes, there are, everything needs to be linear and have progress in it, where maybe it doesn't necessarily get better, and for who does it get better?

Emily: Interesting. You talked about how potentially your book Playing Monogamy could be interpreted as a plea for greedy individualism. I found this to be really interesting because I do think that Western society tends to prize individualism more than like tribal cultures or really family-based societies. Can you speak to this a little bit? Why so many people do feel guilty when they put themselves and their desires first, because I agree with you that even if we are a society that cares about the individual, we still also really care about the nuclear family and things along those lines. Can you speak about this a little bit here, because I found that to be really interesting?

Simon(e): Yes, I think there's different things that play there. For one, I think there's an actual agenda behind, making people feel like they're in individualistic when they turn themselves against nuclear family, because that we need to be told in order to keep up the idea of the nuclear family being a natural responsibility. Something that helps us go outside of individualism.

I would personally say that a nuclear family and individualism go perfectly together, because indeed, like you're saying, if we're imagining societies, whether it be our own society that changed throughout time, or whether we attempt to look at other societies without wanting to utter them, but there must be many ways of living outside of the protected nuclear family, where we say that the nuclear family is a way to keep ourselves safe so then you see that the nuclear family is instrumentalized to keep your own sort of sort-- Well, I wouldn't say species but your own people safe, which of course completely conflicts with the actuality of what happens in families in terms of abuse or violence. There's a weird tying nuclear family to safety.

However, what worries me more maybe, and this is where I'm like, "I know that I'm also guilty of pleading for a greedy individualism because I cannot escape this conditioning, but the reason that I say that or what I'm mostly scared of is that I-- We were talking just now about safety so much, and by pleading for a different way of looking at how to be safe or how to take risks outside of the usual patterns, it easily can look like you need to be a very strong individual in order to do that or you need to be a very conscious individual in order to do that.

I think non-monogamy or polyamory as a tradition has a bit of a problem there because it's very language-based and there's often a lot of pressure on communication, right? Wanting to be non-monogamous. There's this idea of you need to be able to communicate well, you need to be able to be willing to communicate. Though I agree with that, there is also difficulty in that because it also privileges language as a way of being, as an ability where you could wonder whether there would be other ways of communicating with each other, that wouldn't just be through language and differentiating and being nuanced in language.

I think that's one danger there. I'm very wary of it because it is easier to plead or to argue for stepping outside of safety when you are in my case privileged in many different ways and where unsafety is not the basis of my existence. To give the easiest example, I've never experienced poverty, so me pleading for a certain level of unsafety might not be the right way. However, saying that the way that we are taught safety can be reached might be a better way because by saying that you might also attach yourself when two ways of being that are in itself already precarious because of the inequalities in our society.

What do I mean by that is just, I think it's very difficult from my standpoint, also somebody who lives in the Netherlands, has health care for example and say, "Oh, unsafety." I'm not the right person to continue pleading for that. On the other hand, I also think that by avoiding precarity, we're also avoiding lives that are currently ingrained, embedded, and fundamentally build on precarity just by the way the society has created inequalities. If this makes sense.

Jase: Yes. It's something that I've wondered about sometimes because what's you're saying is so true. Especially with something like polyamory where most of the people talking about it are privileged. Even if they're not all white men, they're still types of privilege. Whether it's economic or just the country that they live in or education, there's lots of things there.

On the one hand, I can see an argument for yes, but because those people are, like you said, not living constantly with unsafety being sort of a defining factor in their lives, that those are the people who it shouldn't be as safe for. Maybe those are the people who need to be living it in a way that is a little less safe because they can afford to do that rather than keeping that something that the people who already are struggling with that more with being more disenfranchised or being more even physically at risk, rather than kind of leaving it to them to still be living unsafely, that perhaps people who are privileged giving up some of their safety to be changing the way that people think that to be the ones that people can look at, and to be the ones that people can engage with, to try to change the way that everyone treats people. Hopefully, through that, making the world a little bit more safe or the less safe, if that makes sense. I don't know if I lost the thread of my philosophy there.

Simon(e): No, but I think what I would add to that, though, that it is a structure of amplification, like who gets to speak. Returning to this idea of polyamory versus non monogamy and choosing in this case non-monogamy because the term opens up towards histories and current lives that are otherwise not seen as polyamorous. I think there's many lives being lived currently that we wouldn't say are monogamous or we wouldn't categorize them as not as monogamous but that are in mainstream discourse then seen as failed, flawed, unhealthy, but that they're not amplified as like this, "Oh, but no, but I choose to be non-monogamous." I can even explain you why and excise it.

This is something that is often acknowledge. Like to say, "Oh, in order to be openly poly, you have to be healthy and happy? You have to sort of be presentable in your non-monogamy." I think that is definitely a pressure that most non-monogamous people go through, but I think there's also- not just a way of how non-monogamous people have to present themselves, but also how non-monogamous people and monogamous people have to train their ear towards lives that are already living otherwise, but that we do not categorize and see and we do not think valuable of a New York Times piece - Sorry to continue using that - because we do not view it as a lifestyle. It doesn't start from indeed as this sort of hundred percent privilege and then diverging. No, it's diverging without ever having adapted to the societal norm of what a healthy lifestyle is. Then we often see that this becomes actual marginalized lives. We still expect people, I'm saying we, I don't know who this we is, but society still expects people that they want to get married, if they do not seem to have access to that.

I mean, one of the examples in the US is, of course, Katie Cohen's work on Black love, Black families having, Marry Your Black Daddy Day or something like that, she calls it, I'm sorry if I'm phrasing it wrong. There's this pushes towards marriage and this idea also that not being married is telling or a signifier of failure. Where actually this is also a form of non-monogamous living that is not being recognized as such because there's still this expectation of a certain norm that, if only people weren't so poor, they would also get married. They would also choose long-term partnerships or one partner for raising their kids.

Jase: Yes, there is a lot of assumption based on that, in the social worth of it. I think that's really interesting to relate that to how we look at poverty, at income, that it's like if only they had the money, then they would be married, or then they would be monogamous, or then they would only have kids with one other person instead of several, or whatever it is that we do.

Emily: Assumptions. Yes.

Jase: I was just hearing conversation earlier today that was saying almost exactly that of the equating poverty with having multiple baby daddies, was kind of the context of it. That's very true that there is that link of like, "Oh Yes, it's just linear or something."

If you had more money, you would also be a better contributing member of society, which means being monogamous, which means only having kids with one other person, which means getting married, which means whatever, owning a house, whatever the signifiers are. I feel like sometimes they change a little, but they do tend to be based around these either accomplishments or possessions.

I guess some of them would even look at them as the same thing. Okay. Sorry. All right. I want to move on to our next question here.

Emily: Thanks so much for saying to theorize-

Jase: We keep getting distracted with philosophy.

Emily: That's fine though.

Jase: It's great.

Simon(e): It’s true, it’s distracting.

Jase: Okay. This next one, many passages in your book, it reads like poetry. It's got that philosophical, poetic way of writing. At one point, you talked about how love and death are both industries based around the dollar, based around making money. Rather than just read a bunch of quotes to the audience, I was wondering if you could elaborate on this and then maybe if we could also get into not only pointing out how that's true, but what are some ways that we could live outside of that? What are ways we could conduct a relationship that isn't based around money being spent or being earned by it?

Simon(e): For me, it starts with this idea of love is love. When same-sex marriage was legalized in the US, obviously love is love went viral and it's still a well-used hashtag. I started to wonder, well what does this mean? Because as a philosopher this sentence love is love it's like what does this say. It's three words, it's two words. Now, so poetic. It's this question of, what do we mean when we say, love? Okay, we mean monogamy. Is like monogamy lover are synonym in that too, because it's so surrounded about having same-sex marriage.

This question of signifiers, what signifies a love relationship? How do we recognize a love relationship? For me, this is almost language philosophy. We see two people walking hand in hand this must mean that they have a romantic love relationship. I must interject here, one of my lovers is a lot older than I am so when we work hand in hand, people often assume she's my mother. I guess that also happens. There is this assumption. We just want to walk a hand in hand and you even hear this in gay couples, often saying, I just want to be able to walk hand in hand.

Now, I do not want to negate anybody's freedom or anybody's choice with a wish desire to walk hand in hand. This should, of course, never be responded to with violence, but to claim this as the ultimate freedom and to say, this is what I want, because I love somebody and thus I want to walk hand in hand, takes away that actually walking hand in hand is also a signifier. It's also something that was constructed as meaningful and as a form and then gesture of love. There's not a natural cause for wanting to walk hand in hand as an expression of love. There could be many, many other ways.

When you talk about death, one of the things that I see so significant or one image that I find so significant is for example, when I was living in New York, and there's the side in Brooklyn Dumbo, where you can see the waterside and you can see the skyline of New York of Manhattan and people get their picture taken. It's this moment where if you sit there for a while, you will see many different couples. Even though there are many different couples, they're all couples, so they're always one on one. They're often straight, but not always. When the woman is pregnant, there's these four hands on the belly. There's this whole choreography of what this picture looks like.

I'm looking at this and I'm thinking about indeed death and grief and mourning rituals. Where I'm like getting your picture taken as a couple looks very much like being at a funeral home. That at least in my experience being in a funeral home usually means that after a while you start seeing another family coming in that also has booked the funeral home. There's this acknowledgment of like, "Okay and morning rituals, we need sometimes or in grief we need rituals in order to feel." It's not always that you can access your sad feelings. You cannot always access your grief, but we have those rituals developed, whether they work or not that help us feel.

Sometimes you place the ritual first, and then the feeling comes through that. We know that rituals of mourning help us feel. When it comes to love, however, there's such a different causality because it's like well, I really love this person, therefore I want to be monogamous. Therefore, I want to get my picture taken in front of the skyline of Manhattan. I'm radicalizing it a little bit, of course, but I think there is a truth to that. To say I really love this person and thus I want this, instead of saying, "Well, I've seen other people taking their pictures as a couple together."

I think that if I do that, as well, I will feel good about my love. I will strengthen and establish my love feeling. Saying that the ritual in the sense shapes the feeling of love, instead of saying and always claiming that love goes in before this ritual.

Jase: Can I just something that struck me while you were talking about that is something that I remember the first time maybe 10 years ago really getting presented with the importance of ritual, and how important that can be. Kind of like you're talking about, like the rituals we have around grieving, help us to feel or to process things. What's striking me right now, about what you're talking about is this question of, the difference between a ritual, which is to serve a purpose, either for an individual or for a community or for a group that's still an internal purpose versus what I think maybe you're talking about with the pictures is a performance and like a performance versus a ritual.

That's an interesting question there. Because it's making me think about, for example, in Japan, I spend a fair amount of time in Japan with Dedeker. We went to this Buddhist temple that this particular one is specifically devoted to dead children, to put it bluntly. Whether that's abortions or miscarriages or infants who've died. What I learned through this is that there is a whole tradition around that. A whole ceremony that say, if you've gotten an abortion, there's a ceremony to offer up a little statue and to pray to the spirit of that child and to have some processing around that.

Then I learned that there's been some research that the instances or the duration of depression after an abortion, when doing that kind of ritual, it does mitigate that. It makes that amount of isolation and depression a lot less because there's a way to process it, as opposed to being something you just have to hide and think about on your own. In that way, I think that ritual is so important. Yet, like you're pointing out, on the other hand, we can sometimes take something that could be a ritual, when we put it on social media, it now becomes a performance.

Emily: Even religion can be one of those two things as well. It can be both ritual and just a performative way of doing things. That's interesting. It is still like this construct in our mind that, well, I'm doing this thing, and I believe that it will help man and move me on to the next thing or whatever or make me better in some way, which is interesting. I don't know the performance aspect of being in a relationship. It's like, who is that for? Is that for yourself? Is that for society? Is that for the other person? I don't know. That's very interesting. It struck me so much when I read that part because I'm like, damn, wow, that is so true. It's like, how do you even do things other than that? I have no idea.

Simon(e): No, we don't. Indeed, I would like to say that I have nothing, that actually nothing against performance or ritual and or ritual, not even nothing against I think it's actually how we create lives. If you're asking how to be outside of that, I think actually through playing through creating other performances, then the performances that are naturalized as love. I don't think there's something wrong about having a performance in order to evoke feeling. I just wish it wouldn't collapse. I wish the performance of love or couplehood wouldn't collapse. We're saying that this is just how you feel love or saying that because I feel love, I need to get our picture taken because I feel love, of course, want to show it on Instagram. I'm not saying that there's necessarily something wrong with that, I just wish that the causality would be a bit more stretched and be like, "Well, if I think that I feel something, why wouldn't I express it in another way?" I think that would be one way to go out of it. That would be one way to try-- What would happen is I perform differently towards this one person or two people or four.

Just imagine a dating session as a dating night, I'm just making this up right now, there's this expectation of going through certain set of questions or at one point showing somebody that you like somebody or not, but then, whether you would allow yourself to have the same feeling? What have you had already felt that you like this person or you like to continue this night, but you would perform completely differently, completely different than you would be expected to? Could you still feel that you like that person or what you feel completely otherwise?

Jase: Like, which is the cause and which is the effect kind of?

Emily: Exactly. We do talk about like being really mindful about our relationships and choosing what does work best for us, I guess and speaking about those things, but it is so interesting to see even down to the like nature of it all, down to like, I'm performing essentially the same type of thing on a date. We talk, we have a drink, we have a little flirtation and it get more into the intense conversation, then are we going to get a kiss at night? Are we going to call each other again? It does follow this linear fashion of what-- Basically, what our lives look like down to the smallest detail, that's so interesting.

That is something that I don't think-- It sounds to me, you are asking just people to disrupt that in a way or to at least think about it, to at least go question like, why am I doing this? If I did it in a different way, can it be just as meaningful and just as profound?

Simon(e): Yes, I think indeed-- Maybe this goes back again, to this idea of safety. What if it doesn't need to feel good? This is a very difficult question, because you immediately it's like, "Are you saying you shouldn't have consent or something?" I don't mean that, but I mean that in terms of with our bodies, it's not just our thought, it's our bodies, which is our thought which, and vice versa, are conditioned to feel good at certain moment, not just because we feel good, but because we feel we're not disrupting something that is, our body muscle almost so it's not just like, you probably are able to think outside of this fashion of saying, "Oh, where sleep occurs, maybe call you can take yourself outside of that, but how does it feel to even to act outside of that?"

I do not say that if I act outside of that, this is immediately my identity, but to say, if I act outside of that because we have consensually come to this agreement of like, let's play together. Instead, in this sort of like, let's try something. Let's try a different performance. Let's try a different ritual. That's something that when you talk to this ritual that you witness, the ceremony, I was completely with you till you said that research showed that it helps people in their healing because I was like, "Well, what if we can trust ourselves enough that we do not need research in order to understand the need for ceremony, for ritual, for play, for performance"? That we do not need to have this sort of rationalized or legible making research that says that our feelings exist in a certain way. I think that is the risk. That is the largest risk, is sort of like how to live without having this measurement. That tells you yes, indeed what you're feeling and doing is true.

Jase: That's interesting, because I feel like, and something that I think you talked about earlier about this idea of making effort to be not hierarchical in the way that you think about philosophy and things like that, with the acknowledgment that I put effort into it, because I know that it's been so ingrained in me and that that's so in me that if I just try to pretend, "I'm not going to be hierarchical I am." And that kind of having that awareness of to use a metaphor, like the awareness of the water that you're swimming in, allows you to then take actions to get to a place that is more, I guess, more neutral or more unaffected. Ironically, by affecting yourself by intentionally steering yourself away from it. I feel like my experience at least, the importance of research and things like that, rather than just quote trusting ourselves, is that sometimes we're not the best at perceiving ourselves, and so having something outside to give us a vantage point can help to then do those sorts of corrections.

Simon(e): Yes, that's great. Yes, I like that. Yes.

Emily: Interesting.

Simon(e): Definitely. Yes.

Emily: Well, we're starting to come up a little bit on time. It's funny, because we're going to talk more in the bonus episode, and I initially had an idea of what I wanted to talk but up to now I'm like, "We should just continue these conversations because they're so fantastic."

Jase: Maybe we can do both.

Emily: Yes, exactly. I did want to ask where everyone can find more of your work and what is next on the horizon for you?

Simon(e): Oops. Yes crosstalk]

Emily: We can even find it at

Simon(e): Yes, yes. No, that's one of the things. Funnily enough, talking about ceremony, my last book just came out a few weeks ago, the Dutch one on Memory and Commemoration, and it's talking about the way that memory can weigh us down even out of action, so like how to take action, maybe through forgetting, but then it also goes into, well, you can say forgetting, but that totally depends on whether your history is documented or not. It talk about white remembering, talking about white erasure, and then it go into embodied and daily commemoration.

Then we get the body and again, like this, of what are the practices we could think of that would help us commemorate. You mentioned ceremonies, that is one way. There's some there are so many different ways of embodied commemoration, but it would be less about having sort of monuments, having written history, all these kinds of things, these is all in Dutch.

Jase: For a Dutch-speaking audience, check that out, but what can our English speaking listeners find for you?

Emily: Playing Monogamy probably.

Jase: Clearly.

Emily: Yes, which people absolutely should read because it blew my mind in a way also that this conversation kind of blew my mind, but it definitely makes-- It's just so powerful. It's easy, it's a quick read, but it's you really do need to sit with it because there's a lot to digest and unpack within it, in my opinion.

Jase: Right. It's short-

Simon(e): Thank you.

Jase: -but you need to spend some time with each section to get.

Emily: Can people find it on Amazon or on various-- Where is the best way in which to get the book?

Simon(e): Through publications studio. Publication studios are worldwide network of publishers, so depending on where you are, you can get it through the newest publication studio.

Emily: okay. We'll try to add a link or do something in the show notes for sure.

Simon(e): Thanks.

Emily: Then, yes, we're going to stick around into a little bonus episode for our patrons, where we're going to talk more about this. Maybe get into your social, we'll have five but I also am really interested in talking about hierarchy with you some more because we touched on it, but that's something that our listeners are interested in for sure, so I didn't want to discuss that.

Jase: Thank you so much for joining us Simon(e). To everyone listening-

Simon(e): Thank you so much.

Jase: -at home, we would love to hear what you think about this. Was there anything that was mind-blowing for you, and you'll be like Emily did when she was reading this book? She kept texting quotes to Dedeker and me. Like, "Oh my gosh."