Kayvan Gharbi, Forbidden Fruit

In second grade, I had a forbidden love. My draconian parents decreed my ardour to be ‘detrimental,’ and denied me any contact with my dearest. Yet, my callow mind was spellbound, Forbidden enchanted by emotions I had never before confronted. I would spend hours dream- Fruit ing of the sweet taste of her upon my lips. You see, my love affair was with the starburst by Kayvan Gharbi party mix, and most candy for that matter. My persecuted passions burned brighter and brighter throughout my youth, stoked by the starvation of her soothing, sugared embrace. When I finally reached the climax of puberty, I possessed the freedom and financial facilities to regularly consummate our love in the confectionery aisle of the local Coles. However, as time passed, the sweetness of the jelly snakes began to sour, and the glamour of the gummies began to lessen – it has reached a point today where I prefer an abstinent affair with an apple to any kind of candy. In retrospect, it wasn’t even the gustatory rush that I was inherently allured by. What I truly relished was that sense of transgression, of autonomy, of exercising my free will in the face of oppression. This desire to pursue the prohibited is something that transcends the obscene sugar obsession of my childhood. It is something rather universally human - underlying our histories, literature and religions. Our chronicles are scarred by the implications of forbidden love, from Antony and Cleopatra plunging Ancient Rome into civil war, to Gossip Girl’s Jenny and Nate setting the Upper East Side ablaze with scandal. It is fascinating that we consider the tale of Romeo and Juliet to be the paragon of romance, in which the brightest of passions burn in the face of oppression. There is something about the forbidden, the taboo, that stokes our passions and excites our psyche in a manner that can transform the everyday into the electrifying.

The reasoning behind such behaviour eluded me – it seemed nonsensical to have evolved such an ostensibly destructive trait. If evolution optimises the dissemination of one’s genes, is it not more efficient to pursue relationships of ‘less resistance,’ minimising the amount of work required to achieve the same outcome (children)? It seemed a glitch in our operating system, a stray blot of ink as Aphrodite scrawled upon the manuscript of our libido. However, such is indeed no fault of a goddess, but a side effect of the byzantine and intertwined motivations that define our human condition.

66

The theory of effort justification (Pepitone and Festinger, 1959) conjectures that exerting greater efforts to achieve a goal will lead to valuing the achievement more than if meagre effort were required. Thus, the reason we relish ‘the chase’ is because the thornier the trail, the more we prize the person we are pursuing. Brehm’s theory of psychological reactance posits that we have a tendency to react against threats to our freedom by asserting ourselves (Brehm, 1981). For example, a recent study found that when a picture of a man described to be single was presented to a sample of women, 59% rated him as attractive, yet when described as married this rose to 90% (Parker and Burkley, 2009). Any kind of stipulation regarding who you are permitted to pursue can be subconsciously interpreted as a threat to your autonomy, encouraging participation in the behaviour out of a primal desire to protect and exercise your freedoms.

I found that I remained dissatisfied. On one hand, a fixation for the forbidden is a virtue critical to humanity’s inexorable and obdurate progress. It is a source of relentless inquisition that holds us accountable to our convictions, probing for fragilities in the status quo. Only by transgressing what is disallowed can the seeds of progress be sewn, and new ideologies take root. Thus, it seemed a great shame that the same facet of our psyche that safeguards our liberties is the cornerstone of affairs, sexual dissatisfaction and divorce. This is when I came to a realisation. It is not our ‘forbidden fruit fixation’ that is generating this unhappiness and dissatisfaction within relationships, but our socially conditioned definition of what constitutes a ‘relationship’ in the first place. The source of tension here, is monogamy.

Many promote the fallacious argument that monogamy is the unparalleled course for child-rearing as an inviolable partnership is advantageous for the development of offspring. The critical assumption in this case, and one that underpins many religious conceptions of relationships, is that for a strong partnership to exist, one must be monogamous. However, after challenging the prejudice of my own beliefs, I discovered multiple studies indicating that people in non-monogamous relationships are forced to communicate more - paradoxically generating greater trust, commitment, and passion whilst reducing jealousy (Conley et al., 2017). Additionally, they were found to undertake amorous congress with their partner more frequently, reporting greater satisfaction and undertaking safer sexual practices (Fleckenstein and Cox, 2014). These findings are unsurprising in the context of our ‘forbidden fruit fixation,’ as such an arrangement allows one to maintain their relationship while relegating any beguiling ‘forbidden fruit’ to the banal status of ‘vapid vegetable,’ that may be sampled and cast aside.

I am not seeking to disparage monogamy – it would be foolish to characterise the entirety of humanity as libido-driven succubi incapable of restraint. However, in the same manner that my fiery passions for the starburst party mix faded once I had the freedom to swing past a Coles whenever I wanted, from a scientific standing, it appears that non-monogamous relationships represent a solution for those more inclined to assert their liberties. However, perhaps my myopic analysis has failed to appreciate the point of it all. Perhaps (to take a leaf out of Nietzsche), anything of genuine value does indeed demand a degree of suffering, and to acquiesce to our shrieking id is not necessarily the cheeriest course. Perhaps, the marvellous beauty of monogamy stems from our stalwart loyalty in the face of the temptations that the serpents of our psyche subjects us to. Perhaps, if Eve had valued restraint in the manner we do today, humanity would still blissfully reside with the paradise of Eden.