Do they date?

Over the last few years, my sister has been initiating me by stages into the mysteries of "Army" - that is to say, the maenadic cult of obsessive followers of the K-Pop boy band BTS. Oftentimes, I have made no positive effort whatsoever to be drawn into these rites, but they have managed to bind me nonetheless. For whatever reason, these BTS boys are interesting, as is the global movement of fans they have inspired. My sister and I are convinced the boys are charting the same artistic trajectory as the Beatles, and are right on the cusp of entering their more avant-garde White Album phase.

One particular event this past summer drew the coils of obsession more tightly - it was when we went to see the latest BTS concert movie. Do I love their music? No - it's fine but not really my thing. Am I impressed by their dancing? Absolutely - but mostly in the sense that it inspires abstract respect, rather than deep interest. What I found myself obsessing over on the way out the theater door, rather, was a question that has puzzled and beguiled fans the world over. In my sister's telling, it is perhaps the greatest of all the mysteries that surround the boys. Namely: Do they date?

You'd think they would, right? They are internationally famous. They are global sex icons. There are millions of people across all continents who have fantasized about being with them. It can't be that no one's interested. And yet, no firm evidence has emerged so far that any of them has had a romantic or sexual relationship with anyone, ever.

When the boys (and convention dictates that they are "boys," although many of them are well into young adulthood) are asked this question in interviews (my sister notes), they often seem to offer one of the following responses: 1) No, we don't date; 2) No we don't date (but said sarcastically this time, as if hinting that maybe they actually do, or maybe they actually can't, because their producer overlords have forced them to sign billion-year contracts with a clause forbidding a sex life); or 3) we hang out with each other in ways that are somewhat analogous to dating.

There are seven members of BTS, after all, so it's not like they're in need of company. Plus, there's a reason the term "bromance" was invented. Sometimes our intimate friendships are the deepest relationships in our life, and who needs to go looking for more? This is certainly a theme in many of the K-dramas my sister and I have watched, such as Hwarang, where the true arc of the series concerns the gradual resolution of the rivalrous tension between our two male leads into a platonic friendship, rather than an eventual romantic conquest.

But one also need not look so far afield. Doris Lessing's protagonist Anna, in The Golden Notebook, laments at one point the obsession that all the men she dates entertain with their homosocial relationships: "All American men look back and hanker after when they were in the group of young men before they had pressure on them to be successful or get married," she notes. "Whenever I meet an American man, I wait for the moment when his face really lights up—it’s when he’s talking about the group of buddies."

So that's one explanation - namely, that the BTS boys simply mean it when they offer answer #3. They are content just being with each other.

It's also more than possible however that the darker suggestions offered by answer #2 may be the case. Perhaps the boys cannot date, because the ironclad clauses of their recording contract dictate otherwise. It is well-known in K-Pop circles, my sister tells me, that hideous and unjust consequences sometimes befall those idols who dare to develop a private life. If they date anyone, if they find a significant other, that person may well be subjected to harassment and death threats by jealous and deluded fans.

Even if we abstract away from these more deranged members of the fandom, however, it occurs to my sister and me that the BTS boys are still somewhat inevitably painted into a romantic corner. And it is perhaps this, rather than any conspiracy from above, that accounts for the conundrum with which we began - the lack of visible evidence that BTS dates.

Put simply, the boys represent an abstract ideal of sexuality and beauty. They are your boyfriend already, if you are the listener, and so they can be no one else's. In their lyrics, my sister notes, they have even paid court to a collective hive-mind entity they dub: "eternal girlfriend Army."

This, then, is the fourth and final answer the boys offer to the question: Do you date? Yes, they say, we date all of Army - we are in a relationship with our fandom as a whole. (I'm not being speculative here - this is almost word-for-word what they have said before in interviews.) And in order to be everyone's boyfriend in general, they can be no one's boyfriend specifically. They face the same problems in private life that a saint typically does - devotion to humanity renders difficult a concrete attachment to a particular person.

BTS, of course, did not invent this trope. The assiduous cultivators of the burgeoning teen market for pop albums in the early 1960s had perceived already that there were few things more seductive than the unattainable; nor does anything so well allow for the free play of fantasy as the notion that the object of one's obsession is eternally unpossessed and unpossessable by others. In 1962's "Teen Age Idol," for instance, Ricky Nelson crooned, "Some people call me a teenage idol/ Some people say they envy me/ I guess they got no way of knowing/ How lonesome I can be."

Going further back still, it was of course understood as part of the package of chivalrous romance, as cultivated by the medieval troubadours, that the singer of love songs never actually sleeps with the recipient of their devotion. "[F]rom love chastity comes forth," as one medieval romancer and singer put it (as quoted in Ted Gioia's recent history of music), "for if a man aspires entirely to love he cannot then act badly."

This is the essence of BTS's romantic Catch-22. To continue to be the object of the lustful imaginings of millions, the lads must remain entirely chaste. It is surely a trap, but not as unhappy a one as some might think. It has a certain nobility to it, after all, which is part of why it was cultivated as an element of chivalry.  It is akin to the sentiment expressed by the Cavalier poet Richard Lovelace: "I could not love thee, dear, so much,/ Loved I not honor more." Is that not the BTS Catch-22 in a nutshell? It amounts to a kind of voluntary sacrifice (if it is voluntary, in fact, and let us pray it is) - a willing abnegation of individual love for the sake of an abstract ideal.

In our democratic society, with its leveling tendencies, this notion can only seem antiquated and slightly odious. As Tocqueville long ago realized about the American ethos, it tends toward homogeneity. We think that everyone is supposed to realize all the dimensions of the good in their own lives, in roughly the same proportions. If you care about abstract ideals, that is fine, but you should balance it out with having a personal life. We don't need to go nuts with it, right?

Traditional societies - while they got a lot of things wrong - tended at least not to make this mistake. They took more seriously the Biblical insight that many may be called, but few are chosen. We have different vocations in life, and romance, marriage, and sexuality may not be part of the plan for all of us. Or, more unsettling still to our present-day expectations, the troubadours understood that romance and sexuality are also separable from one another, as both are in turn separable from marriage.

BTS seems to be bringing back some of these alternative understandings of the way we live our personal lives - understandings that pose a challenge to the ones most of us in U.S. society were taught and grew up with. The boys are in some ways perhaps the quintessential bards of our dawning post-sexual age.

Of course, I'm mostly joking. There will probably never be a human society lacking in sexuality. But neither should we deny the enormous capacity of human beings to sublimate that sexuality in non-literal ways. It was the Victorian critic Walter Pater who discerned in the medieval love poems an effort to "tranquillise and sweeten life by idealising its vehement sentiments[.]" Perhaps something of the same is happening in the global adoration of the seven boys (who so far have not found nor apparently needed their seven brides nor their Snow White).

As the modern LGBTQ movement has broken open the conventionality and homogenizing tendencies of our society, and called into question the stifling Freudian notion that there is only a single model for human happiness in private life toward which all of us must be tending, it is inevitable that there will be people as well for whom the sexual and romantic life in their literal forms simply hold no appeal. Such a choice is as legitimate as any other, and perhaps the BTS phenomenon is bequeathing to us a model for those who prefer to live their romantic life in the realm of the ideal.

The injunction of earlier generations of psychoanalysts was to embrace the "reality principle." What this meant for Freud and his followers was that the well-ordered life must eventually be lived in the embrace of bourgeois heterosexual monogamy, and anything else is mere escapism. This notion, however, breaks down in the face of the wisdom of earlier generations - being revitalized today - that recognized how much of the joy of life under any circumstances is found in abstraction, ideas, and fantasy.

Are the consolations of love as an idea less "real" that those of marriage as a fact? Surely it depends on the person, and on the marriage. And we should not forget that whole long tradition of human thought which held that the idea of something is the real - much more so than the particular mundane manifestations of that generality. Recognition of this intellectual heritage is of course preserved in the way we talk about non-sexual friendships and romantic relationships to this day - do we not call them, after all, "platonic"?