One day, the woman with whom I had lived and loved for a year told me that she was in love with another man. She moved that night from the apartment that we had shared into his place, where she stayed until they moved to a different apartment a few weeks later.
She had been playing Juliet opposite his Romeo in a low-paying local production.
This breakup did not come as a complete surprise -- she had been growing gradually more withdrawn and had been spending more time with him over the run of the play. I had upped my attentiveness in response, but apparantly to no avail.
She explained that they had both had feelings for one another for some time, but that because of our relationship, she had held off. At some point, though, someone had made a move, and the rest was history.
I must admit, I had thought of calling what this Romeo had done "stealing my girlfriend" before I read this node. It had always made me feel uneasy. Reading the writeups here has led me to try to articulate the reservations I have about using this phrase.
First, a girlfriend is not property.
Herr Webster defines stealing as "the act of taking feloniously the personal property of another without his (sic) consent and knowledge; theft; larceny."
Hmmm, so far so good. Let's turn to property. The definitions that interest us are:
- the exclusive right of possessing, enjoying, and disposing of a thing; ownership; title
- that to which a person has a legal title, whether in his possession or not; thing owned; an estate, whether in lands, goods, or money.
If you would like to refer to a woman as property, I suggest using a word like
slave or, still quite a bit of a stretch,
wife. These words have legal denotations with which
girlfriend has no truck.
I understand that it is common to use the metaphor of possession to refer to romantic love, and property to refer to people (especially women) in general. To me such usages are a problem. They tend to influence the manner in which we understand, organize, and access our perceptions of the world (see cognitive science and/or cognitive psychology). A metaphor like "WOMEN are PROPERTY" becomes endemic, gets lodged in our memepool and influences the ways in which we feel about, interact with, and think about women. The mere title of this node is part of this self-maintaining work which the metaphor performs. hramyaegr seems to be using this metaphor and the implied moral statement "STEALING is BAD" as the basis for his moral stance on the "stealing of girlfriends."
If (for evolutionary reasons, perhaps) you want your morality to include something like "MATING with a WOMAN who MATES with another MAN is BAD" then for Log's sake do it explicitly. You don't need women to be property. Your morality should be able to handle simple clauses.
Yes. I have gotten more bogged down in semantics than I would have liked. That's OK. "SEMANTICS are PEOPLE too!"
My second reason has to do with the nature of love. This is doctrinaire and somewhat ideological, but according to popular dictum, if you truly love someone, their happiness is paramount. I am still sad that things did not work out between us, but I wish her only the best in this new relationship and with her life. That another man helped her understand that she no longer wanted to live and sleep with me, and that she now sleeps with him made me angry and bitter (and still does from time to time). However, justifying what strikes me as a natural and temporary response to a painful loss with a "universal moral truth" like "stealing a girlfriend is wrong" seems pig-headed and counterproductive. Better to forgive and forget. Better to move on.