Pondering “Realistic Love” With Agnes Callard, Merve Emre, and Esther Perel

(Image courtesy of Interintellect)

Cold rain and a lack of local trains on the Upper East Side didn’t stop a lively group of young romantics from showing up to the collective Interintellect’s January meetup. The event, a special Valentine’s Day edition of the group’s salon-style discussion series, about “realistic love,” seemed to have a bigger draw than usual: according to the organizers, 70 people showed up. 

I was initially intrigued because of my admiration for the presenting writers—Merve Emre, Agnes Callard, and Esther Perel. But the event had an appeal beyond just seeing these women in the flesh. In a post-lockdown, the “real” has been fetishized. Interintellect’s salon seemed to offer just such realness: an evening of in-person entertainment, with a side of self-improvement and public intellectualism. One can become a member of Interintellect for $14.99/a month, and if you’re truly committed to the life of the mind, you can also sign up for ten years starting at $900. Most of the salons are hosted by founder Anna Gát, a tall Eastern European writer and entrepreneur with a knack for pronouncements like the salon’s tagline: “We’ve reinvented the art of the French salon for the 21st century.” You can also pay to start your own Interintellect salon. The goal, Gát declared, was “culture outside the culture wars.”

Attendees waited in the lobby of a dimly lit Montessori school before being ushered up to a second floor with cold brew, wine, and hummus. It felt like the beginning of Glass Onion, a group of strangers gathered in a rich person’s fantasy. I clocked a woman’s YSL purse. Yet there were more attendees with colorful dyed hair than I expected. I found a more or less normal group of thirtysomethings earnestly in search of IRL connection. I was more interested in which texts Callard and Emre would discuss than in any concrete relationship advice. Was there a canon of books I could read that could make me the ideal lover like Cyrano de Bergerac? Or, would we rehash so-called heteropessimism in an age complicated by trite performances of male contrition? 

Three of the primary speakers were cis, straight, married white women. Outside the culture wars indeed. But of course, I’d come primarily to hear three such disparate women discuss how “realistic love” related to the selected texts: Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Plato’s The Symposium, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Elective Affinities. Each speaker came to the conversation with their own framework: Perel was primarily motivated by increasing a partnership’s sustainable longevity while Callard and Emre were more interested in the tension between desire and rationality. 

Fellow essayist Terry Ngyuen and I peered over the heads of single women and couples to scrutinize the outfits of the presenters. Perel was decked out in a bright blue blazer with power-accent-jewelry. The dual moderators of the evening, Gát and Skye Cleary, both went for patterned dresses. Turning a look is essential in the quest for love. 

Callard sported a multi-colored overall dress over a pink shirt with yellow leggings and tall purple boots. I didn’t recognize her at first. She’s most famous, at least online, thanks to Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker piece on how she “blew [her] life up” by leaving her husband for a student. She obliquely referenced her notorious relationship during the salon, describing how during the early days of her new relationship it was as if anything she needed seemed to appear. If she wanted a croissant while walking with her lover, a bakery appeared. This, she said, was the magic of love. That is: rose-colored glasses. She’s also an accomplished philosopher in her own right. Last year’s essay on travel provoked just slightly less discourse online. 

Emre donned a stunning gray silk dress with heels and a sparkly cardigan. She has become a fixture of the literary world, primarily in The New Yorker and New York Review of Books where she’s praised writers like Jon Fosse and Ingeborg Bachmann. This brought a certain scholarly glamor to the evening—at one point, Emre delightedly pointed out a translator of Kafka’s letters sitting in the front row. 

(Image courtesy of Interintellect)

After being introduced by Cleary and asked about how she started writing about love, Callard outlined her problems with the emotion. The first was attachment versus rationality, later reframed as desire versus stability. The second problem was jealousy, and the third breakups. All of these problems, she noted, were weird. “A big part of being a philosopher is telling people they should be more weirded out by something than they are.” 

Cleary then instructed the women to take love cliches from a small hat and debate them. The crowd was desperate to know whether or not the course of true love ever did run smooth. Emre emphasized the slipperiness of phrases like “true love” in our contemporary post-truth context, discussing the way class and power dynamics haunt the very structure of our social dynamics. She peppered her argument with examples from recent films like May December and Saltburn. While Perel said her goal as a therapist was often to reframe what couples thought the problem was, it was Emre who tried to expand the discussion’s frame to include nonheteronormative models and even nonromantic entanglements. 

(Image courtesy of Interintellect)

In response to a question about the changes in modern relationships she’s seen in her forty-plus years of practice, Perel glossed over the rise of polyamory or HIV/AIDS as issues that, today, might prompt couples to have difficult discussions about their relationship status. Emre was the only person to point out that gender and sexuality have shifted the way many people approach love. She brought up Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s notion of a polymorphous love, or a love that isn’t pointed inward but directed towards hundreds of people. No one took the bait. While the discussion as a whole was a fascinating meditation on one small section of our culture’s idea of coupledom, it was just that: a subsection. Still, I found myself enthralled throughout the three-hour event, by how it teetered between the highbrow and the low, between literary romanticism and good, old-fashioned whining about heterosexual, monogamous dating in New York City. 

I don’t think I shared many love values with my fellow attendees. I want to understand realistic love just as much as the next girl, but I grew up fucking around with guys in clubs and in the woods. Sure I went out on dinner dates, but most of the time I waited by the phone for a flaky carpenter to call me back. I was not legible enough to receive offers of marriage. Queer and trans people do not always enjoy—nor do we always want to—our supposedly post-Obergefell society. It’s only recently in my life I’ve settled down. The trauma plot, class, gender, and all sorts of -isms have vexed my friends and I’s search for love. Some girls just have easier access to steady relationships and marriage than others. 

Since I’d been reading Robert Glück’s Margery Kempe, a book partially premised on the desire for nipples, the apolitical nature of the event made it difficult for me to buy in. Even if I’m a settled woman, I’m interested in more expansive discussions of and ideas about what constitutes love. Emre claimed that we don’t want love stories like the calmness of Middlemarch, we want passion, like Miss Bovary herself. But the political weather that led to Bovary’s downfall was not a big part of the evening. Most people wanted actionable advice, not a screed on capitalism. Understandably so. Love is supposed to be a haven from all the other shit we face in the world. We don’t want to admit class or gender play a large role in how we fall in love or who we have chemistry with. 

One woman asked what the panelists thought about chemistry. Emre said she thought chemistry was a thing that made you go home with a hot bartender. The woman said she would not go home with a bartender. Why not, I wondered. The course of true love never ran smooth because we had to follow all the rivulets along the way. Erotic deadends are just as much a part of realistic love as monogamy. Some things aren’t meant to last. If we want to understand marriage we have to experience lust. But no one else was that interested in discussing Sedgwick, polyamory, or even whether monogamy was actually an endangered species. People wanted to ask Esther for advice on how to communicate more effectively with their chosen mate. 

Another woman’s circuitous question began as a fable: “What would you say to someone who’s been dating for three months and who’s already explored all the positions…” The story went off the rails from there. After her beau asked her to get married and her friends made her a cake that said “Same Dick Forever,” she became depressed by the idea of monogamy. “What would you say to that person?” her question ended, though not without her admitting that she hadn’t read any of the suggested books or the panelists’ writing. The love columnist once again rubbed up against the critic. Who can save a woman afraid of monogamy? Not Plato. (I can almost hear Callard popping up in disagreement.) 

“Erotic couples have a lot of maintenance sex,” Perel said. “And then occasionally there are productions.” Perel argued that our search for soulmates has come to replace our search for the divine. It was a stunning note to end the evening on, a moment that could’ve radiated out. We not only want to play house with each other, we want to play God. We now search for transcendence and ecstasy in one another. Achieving such a feeling at a salon, on the other hand, may be more difficult.