2-7 January 2024, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain
International Institute of Love Studies
Maintaining Midlife Love: The Radical Potential of Endurance
Rahil Roodsaz
The radical potential of love is often sought in relation to revolutionary or unruly practices of intimacy, such as non-monogamous relationships, collective childrearing, or communal property. Marginality is here perceived as a site of oppression as well as a site of survival, creativity and transgression. This paper investigates the radical potential of love in what might seem an unexpected place, namely enduring love at midlife. It discusses how maintaining midlife love requires everyday negotiations with societal values of individualism, speed, and youthfulness which either conflict or resonate with, for instance, work, parenting, or leisure temporalities. Temporalities that are particularly tangible around midlife when questions of the good life tend to occur, including: ‘have I made the right choices?’ ‘Am I happy?’ ‘Is this all there is?’ As such, this paper investigates the qualities and possibilities of enduring love to critically reflect on late-modern imperatives to upgrade and to improve. What does it mean to attach and to engage by desire, by habit, or by survival while living in a time when many things and people are made disposable due to the ideologies of constant change and progress? Can enduring midlife love provide an alternative temporal framework to imagine the good life differently?
Key words
Enduring love, midlife, the good life, temporality, late-modernity
Rhythms of Love 