Here’s how I found out I harbored a very unpopular opinion.

I was once asked to participate in a teaching workshop during graduate school. I was supposed to share my expertise after having taught many, many times. So there I was sitting with three (I think) other co-presenters talking to a group of graduate students teaching for the first time. The department chair was in attendance. While discussing how much I hated teaching Jane Eyre, I flippantly (but honestly said), “obviously, the love story is the least interesting part of the novel. I mean, ‘Reader, I married him?’” My point was that Jane makes the choice to marry Rochester despite her better judgment (the mad wife locked up in the attic is only one of the many reasons not to marry him). The only thing I like about that love plot is that she’s plain and he’s, well, really ugly.

My pronouncement sent ripples through the room. There was some nervous snickering and lots of shuffling and rearranging of handouts. I looked at the department chair seated in the back, and she looked like I had slapped her full in the face, both incredulous and enraged. Who knew a 17th century specialist would care that much about Jane Eyre? Not me, until that moment. Later, a friend told me that they appreciated that I shared my “queer reading” of Jane Eyre. While I was offering a reading I believed, I didn’t realize that I had produced a “queer reading” until my friend pointed it out to me. Over the next few hours, I came to another realization: I couldn’t remember the last time I had been invested in a fictional heterosexual love plot—except for Jim and Pam in The Office. 

And yet I knew that I quite clearly understood and could analyze heterosexual love plots. I just didn’t care about them, generally or specifically. For example, if I was moved by Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy’s love, it was because I enjoyed the battle of wits. Also, I didn’t want her to be poor. Likewise, I was a big fan of Buffy and Angel in Buffy the Vampire Slayer but only because it was a great transformation of a classic high school event (girl falls for boy, girl sleeps with boy, boy turns into a monster and treats her like shit). But I could not have cared less whether they lived happily every after (in contrast, I very much wanted Willow and Tara to be together forever).

Was I broken? Had growing up in a fully heterosexist society over saturated me with heterosexual love to the point that I could not take any more? Or, was it that I had seen so many peripheral gay characters (gay best friends) that were there solely for the reaffirmation of heterosexuality? Had I adopted a “well, you don’t care about me, so why should I care about you” mentality? Maybe the lesson that I got from Sex and the City was that heterosexual love was in some kind of crisis and seemed hardly worth the effort (and, honestly, shows like Love is Blind suggest that heterosexuality truly is in crisis).

Regardless of how I got here, what I quickly realized is that not actually caring about heterosexual love plots opened up different ways of thinking about love—about what its role is in culture and the functioning of society overall.

In the 13th century, Alfonso X of Castile (or rather, his scriptorium) undertook the project of creating a body of laws for his kingdom that sought to codify laws as universal as opposed to specific to a time and place. This project came to be called Las siete partidas (“Seven Parts” or “Seven-Part Code). In contrast to British common law, the Partidas took as a model Roman law, which is to say that, similar to a modern constitution, the text lays out the laws of the land based on Christian principles and the fitness of the law for the people being governed. Authority rises from the law itself (by way of the king) as opposed to common law, in which precedent or history is the source of authority.

To our modern eyes (ok, my modern eyes), it seems odd, then, that the Partidas is riddled with discussions of love. But that’s because love in the Partidas, following a Christian model of charity (non-erotic love), is inherently political and social. It is both sacred and profane, abstract and practical. Alfonso X does not care about romantic love as we know it. For him, the family unit was a microcosm of society and the love that exists within families is emblematic of a political and social love that must exist in order for societies and kingdoms to hold together. In other words, this is an extension on a macro level of the commandment “Love thy neighbor.” In a society, we are all each other’s neighbors, and so we are commanded, first by the God of Abraham and later by Jesus, to love one another.

So what?

Love in Las siete partidas is a foundational aspect of its political theory. Love as an orientation, as a civic and moral duty, is political. We know this. The modern LGBTQ movement proves that love and sexuality have a political valence, allowing for the inclusion—and exclusion—to certain communities that advocate for the rights of self-determination and freedom, not just for the right to party.

How is it then that love is political but is not part of political discourse? How is that love enables political formations and forecloses others? How is that love involves labor (e.g., maintaining all kinds of relationships is work) but is not part of labor relations? Nor part of economic discourse? Nor part of public policy? All of those things are real…but love isn’t?

If we bracket romantic love, just for a while, what does love in culture and media illuminate? Can we tease out where we’ve been? Where we are? Where we’re going?