Irvine511
Blue Crack Supplier
i posted this essay around last Valentine's Day, and while my world is quite different one year later, (i seem to be in serious "like" with someone ... ahem) i still think it's a good essay and worthy of some kicking around again:
[q]Love Crimes
The absurd hype of romanticism.
I know this isn't exactly the week to say it, but can we please ease up on our secular cult of romantic love?
As almost any serious person before the 19th century would have told you, the concept is a crock. To paraphrase Aristotle, it's a benighted attempt to found friendship on beauty. To quote Montaigne, it is "impetuous and fickle, a feverish flame." Shakespeare got this, too. His transcendent celebration of love, "Romeo and Juliet," begins with Romeo's obsessive infatuation with a young woman he can barely let out of his sight. That woman is called Rosalind. Then Romeo meets Juliet, and Rosalind has about the longevity of an Internet start-up. Love is like that, Shakespeare seems to imply. It comes; it goes. If taken too seriously, it kills. Remember what happened to the star-crossed lovers? Compared with true friendship or patriotism or maternal love, romance is a joke of a feeling. Yet this joke, our culture tells us, is now the secret to true and lasting happiness.
[...]
But ever wonder why divorce rates are so high? The real culprit isn't some kind of moral collapse. It's excessive expectations, driven and fueled by the civic religion of romance. For a lucky few, infatuation sometimes does lead to lasting love, and love to family, and family to all the other virtues our preachers and politicians regularly celebrate. For the other 99 percent of us, relationships are, at best, useful economic bargains and, if we're lucky, successful sexual transactions -- better than the alternative, which has long been close to social death. But thanks to the civic religion of romance, we constantly expect more and quit what we have in search of more. For the essence of romantic love is not the company of a lover but the pursuit. It's all promise with the delivery of the postal service.
O.K., so maybe I just broke up with someone, and that's why this year I feel about Valentine's Day the way some people feel about Christmas. Its main effect is not to foster warm wonderful feelings in that minuscule number of people who happen to be in love this week but to engender abiding depression, jealousy and loneliness in the rest of us who aren't.
That this cult should reach its most frenetic expression in modern democracies is no surprise. The elevation of romance into a soul-saving experience was devised by Rousseau. As Allan Bloom pointed out, Rousseau saw bourgeois love as a salve for the empty emotional center of restrained, law-bound societies. He wanted to substitute the passion of people for truth and honor and power with something just as absorbing but nowhere near as dangerous. Why not love? It flatters our narcissism. It diverts us with phony adrenaline, teases us with jealousy, hooks us with sex. It is the means by which our genes persuade our bodies to reproduce. It is so diverting that we tend to forget more pressing questions, like what to believe in or strive for. More important, in a culture in which sex is increasingly divorced from procreation, it gives copulation a new kind of purpose, apart from pleasure. It sacralizes it, dignifies it, elevates it. Love, we're told, conquers all.
The trouble is, of course, it doesn't. The love celebrated on Valentine's Day conquers nothing. It contains neither the friendship nor civility that makes marriage successful. It fulfills the way a drug fulfills -- requiring new infusions to sustain the high. It prettifies sex, but doesn't remove sex's danger or lust. And by elevating it to a personal and cultural panacea, we suffer the permanent disappointment of excessive expectations, with all of their doleful social consequences. Less -- affection, caring, friendship, the small favors of a husband for a wife after 30 years of marriage -- is far more. And by knocking romance off its Hallmark pedestal, we might go some small way to restoring the importance and dignity of these less glamorous but more fulfilling relationships. "If love were all," Noel Coward once wrote, "I should be lonely." But it isn't. And nobody else's Valentine card should persuade you that loneliness is the only alternative.
[/q]
[q]Love Crimes
The absurd hype of romanticism.
I know this isn't exactly the week to say it, but can we please ease up on our secular cult of romantic love?
As almost any serious person before the 19th century would have told you, the concept is a crock. To paraphrase Aristotle, it's a benighted attempt to found friendship on beauty. To quote Montaigne, it is "impetuous and fickle, a feverish flame." Shakespeare got this, too. His transcendent celebration of love, "Romeo and Juliet," begins with Romeo's obsessive infatuation with a young woman he can barely let out of his sight. That woman is called Rosalind. Then Romeo meets Juliet, and Rosalind has about the longevity of an Internet start-up. Love is like that, Shakespeare seems to imply. It comes; it goes. If taken too seriously, it kills. Remember what happened to the star-crossed lovers? Compared with true friendship or patriotism or maternal love, romance is a joke of a feeling. Yet this joke, our culture tells us, is now the secret to true and lasting happiness.
[...]
But ever wonder why divorce rates are so high? The real culprit isn't some kind of moral collapse. It's excessive expectations, driven and fueled by the civic religion of romance. For a lucky few, infatuation sometimes does lead to lasting love, and love to family, and family to all the other virtues our preachers and politicians regularly celebrate. For the other 99 percent of us, relationships are, at best, useful economic bargains and, if we're lucky, successful sexual transactions -- better than the alternative, which has long been close to social death. But thanks to the civic religion of romance, we constantly expect more and quit what we have in search of more. For the essence of romantic love is not the company of a lover but the pursuit. It's all promise with the delivery of the postal service.
O.K., so maybe I just broke up with someone, and that's why this year I feel about Valentine's Day the way some people feel about Christmas. Its main effect is not to foster warm wonderful feelings in that minuscule number of people who happen to be in love this week but to engender abiding depression, jealousy and loneliness in the rest of us who aren't.
That this cult should reach its most frenetic expression in modern democracies is no surprise. The elevation of romance into a soul-saving experience was devised by Rousseau. As Allan Bloom pointed out, Rousseau saw bourgeois love as a salve for the empty emotional center of restrained, law-bound societies. He wanted to substitute the passion of people for truth and honor and power with something just as absorbing but nowhere near as dangerous. Why not love? It flatters our narcissism. It diverts us with phony adrenaline, teases us with jealousy, hooks us with sex. It is the means by which our genes persuade our bodies to reproduce. It is so diverting that we tend to forget more pressing questions, like what to believe in or strive for. More important, in a culture in which sex is increasingly divorced from procreation, it gives copulation a new kind of purpose, apart from pleasure. It sacralizes it, dignifies it, elevates it. Love, we're told, conquers all.
The trouble is, of course, it doesn't. The love celebrated on Valentine's Day conquers nothing. It contains neither the friendship nor civility that makes marriage successful. It fulfills the way a drug fulfills -- requiring new infusions to sustain the high. It prettifies sex, but doesn't remove sex's danger or lust. And by elevating it to a personal and cultural panacea, we suffer the permanent disappointment of excessive expectations, with all of their doleful social consequences. Less -- affection, caring, friendship, the small favors of a husband for a wife after 30 years of marriage -- is far more. And by knocking romance off its Hallmark pedestal, we might go some small way to restoring the importance and dignity of these less glamorous but more fulfilling relationships. "If love were all," Noel Coward once wrote, "I should be lonely." But it isn't. And nobody else's Valentine card should persuade you that loneliness is the only alternative.
[/q]
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). I don't go for romantic love. It's silly, it's not worth trying to get, because you'll always fail. I'd rather have the relationship that's based on friendship and respect. Mature love flows out of that, because then you're with that person, warty ass and all.
I don't think romance could happen unless one of partners feels love. So I guess love is first..
Perhaps a more honest title would have been Man, I Really Really Need to Get Laid. After all that fire-and-brimstone vitriol about the soulsucking evils of narcissistic bourgeois romance, his halfhearted props to the less-is-more, small-favors civility of longterm marriage make it sound like some kind of masochistic ashes-and-sackcloth routine. 
