There are a few texts from your significant other that are truly devastating to receive. The break up text, the I-don’t-love-you-anymore, or — perhaps more hurtfully — no text at all. But, the text that was the genesis of this piece is far less consequential. From an ex boyfriend of mine:
FYI, I wouldn’t love you if you were a worm.
The interaction had played out exactly as I was expecting. In fact, I’d been fascinated by the worm debacle that had been unfolding on social media for weeks, watching countless posts made by (usually) women, bemoaning the fact that their partners wouldn’t promise to love them if they were to wake up the next day as a worm. On the surface, the trend is ironic: the women are after all aware that nobody is in danger of actually anthropomorphising into a pink, limbless creature at short notice. They roll their eyes at the camera under hyperbolic captions like “when my boyfriend won’t promise to love me if I became a worm and I cried until I threw up”. Some videos even include their partners, who make a show of their exasperation. At the same time, there’s a confessional quality to these posts that is concealed by the presumption of sarcasm and good fun. People really were getting upset about the fact that becoming a worm was a deal breaker for their partners. Why?
Our worm might in fact be a microcosm of the push and pull we feel within all 21st century relationships: the balancing act we perform between our ideals of independence and free choice and a powerful, essentially human urge to seek unconditional love. The worm is a perfect stand in for this urge. After all, what creature could be more innocent, more helpless, and less endowed with loveable qualities like beauty or intelligence? To love someone as a worm is to love someone completely without condition or expectation. It is a kind of love that is both abstractly noble and completely impractical for adults to perform.
Once we become adults, almost all our relationships are markedly, and, some would argue, necessarily, conditional. There’s a particular whiplash about that shift, which happens somewhere in our teenage years or early adulthood. Hopefully, many of us grew up with loving and supportive parents, dedicated teachers, best friends, or even first loves you daydreamed about marrying. But the price of our independence, and the endless choices we have about how we want to live our lives, is that these choices will inevitably piss somebody off. Some families reveal that love is now conditional on law or medical school, maintaining friendships now requires active planning and effort, and the attention of those partners begins to depend on being more exciting than a gap year spent snorting cocaine in Europe. Inevitably, we disappoint.
In some ways, the conditions we place on love are there to protect us. Why else is there so much talk about setting and maintaining boundaries with the people in our lives? At the same time, it is far harder to apply this set of principles to ourselves. Whilst we can aspire towards total self confidence and righteous behaviour, we remain conscious of the myriad ways in which we all fall short of this ideal. Under this model, love is secondary to virtue. And, aware of the gap that lies between us and a truly virtuous existence, we worry that our flaws render us unworthy of love. This nagging feeling eats away at us, making us into the kind of needy people who pose strange hypothetical questions — daring our partners to reveal that, yes, their love for us has its limits.
These (usually) women of the internet aren’t really asking about worms. Our worm is simply a convenient stand in for all the other things that can and will go wrong throughout the course of our lives. A job loss, depression, thirty extra kilos, cancer, losing a parent or sibling, the list goes on. We grow and change and are shaped by our environments, not always in a way that represents any kind of positive progress or evolution. Not alienate the men in the room (god forbid!), but the (usually) women have reasons for asking those kinds of questions. When their wives are diagnosed with cancer, men leave their partners en masse. A diagnosis of a terminal illness will double a woman’s chance of being served with divorce papers, with one in five women being left in the year after diagnosis. Conversely, a man’s terminal diagnosis brings his chance of being served divorce papers down to one in fifty. The fear of romantic relationships being contingent upon aesthetic and relational labour is very real.
We want to know that we are loved unconditionally, but, as long as we are capable of growth and change, of making moral choices, we know this is impossible. Paradoxically, we yearn for someone who will make an exception for us — who will extend us love, care, and unconditional positive regard. Even, say, if we were to become a worm.
