Time for a reality check on modern love

Brian Alexander • E-mail

As we hold the baby doll nightie or red silk boxers up to our bodies, smile our frozen smiles and wonder if the person with whom we have shared our most intimate moments is blind to our actual size, or is just hinting that we could stand to join a gym, we might be tempted to question the whole rationale behind Valentine’s Day: Does this socially accepted version of love’s expression mean anything to us today?

I ask because of a comment I received recently at a talk I gave for my book "America Unzipped" about the growing popularity of sexual experimentation. During my speech, I showed an image of a young woman, a bondage aficionado, handcuffed and gagged. A man in the audience raised his hand and gently scolded me.

Maybe this is becoming more mainstream, he said, but “I don’t hear you saying that these people are sick.”

He meant this sincerely. He was genuinely concerned. But she wasn’t sick, she was in love. It’s just that her expression of love looked nothing like a Hallmark card.

The disconnect, say experts, comes from the way our culture has been steeped in an iconography telling us what love is supposed to look like. But the love it depicts is more fantasy than reality and, they say, we’ve been misguided.

Stephanie Coontz, author of "Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage," and a history professor at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., points out that the ancient Greeks talked a fair amount about love, but in real life marriage was about property and heirs. Prostitutes provided enjoyable sex, and the purest ideal of love was often that between two equal men.

During the early Middle Ages, says Susan Strehle, a professor of English at Binghamton University in New York and co-editor of "Double Plots: Romance and History," the most passionate expressions of love were for the divine.

But as the religious and secular worlds began to separate, Strehle explains, those same expressions came to be used for “the beloved who will be worshipped in ways that were once connected with the church.” Today, she says, “commercial sales exploit those sorts of impulses. Valentine's Day is big business with flowers, candy, cards, getaway weekends. Those are all drawing on that same historical, deep impulse in human life to find the beloved and make that person the center of a person’s life” the way early Medieval church-goers wanted God to be the center of theirs.

The problem is that it is easier to worship the incorporeal than the person with whom you share a mortgage.

Giving love a bad name
Yet so many of us keep thinking it’s all supposed to be so “romantic.” The truth, though, is that while knights may have sworn vows of chaste love to their ladies, in real life they often went around raping the village girls. Even the stories of courtly love, like most love stories, are tragedies.

“For thousands of years marriage has not been about love at all, not friendship, and not sexual desire,” Coontz says. “In the original version of courtly love, the only pure love is adulterous love,” the story of Lancelot and Guinevere being the most famous example. “Marriage is pure convenience. Love stories were tragedies that had that element of danger, that element of unrequited love or frustrated love, two lovers torn apart, and I think this created a sort of expectation of love associated with these extremes of feeling.”

Strehle agrees: “That’s how we imagine what we are supposed to be looking for in love.” 

Most of us do experience these extreme feelings, usually early on in a new love, but the wise of old used to refer to this as “love sickness.” They literally saw the first intense fire of passion as an illness that needed treatment because they knew that such feelings fade, that we’re a little addled and unfit to make decisions.

Nobody is saying that every bit of passion has to disappear or that finding a life partner who is also a romantic is impossible. A little romance is one of the things that makes life worth living. It’s just that in our desire to keep the hot feelings forever, we can overlook the slow, eroding drip of everyday life. We set ourselves up for disappointment.

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