The myth of modern love in popular culture
In the public dialogue the word Love is usually used to describe Romance. Romance is a particular kind of love that involves an idealization of the other and usually is expressed in passionate sexual connection. Although romance became the foundation for marriage only in recent times—the 19th century—today the romantic myth dominates the popular culture, and has become the Holy Grail of our time. The search for romance is equated with the search for love and must exist, or seem to exist, before marriage. Thus, romantic love is the most recognizable and familiar form of love in our time. It is what most of us think about when the word “love” is mentioned. We are led to believe that love is an ideal that can be realized in a moment, across a crowded room, and will last for a lifetime.
In reality, however, romance is more fleeting than we are told, more complicated than we could have imagined, more elusive than we were led to believe.
The romantic ideal of love leaves us both panting for perfection and doomed to disappointment. It is a human condition and, like all such conditions, it can lift us up or cast us down, send us soaring or sink us into despair. The term "Romantic Love" usually — though not always — implies a sense of passion and the presence of sexual activity.
Is romance “good” or “bad?” Is it too overpowering, too transformative? Is it misconstrued? Is it the only love that counts?
Among those who have a deep understanding of romance is Dr. Ethel Person, a psychoanalyst. She writes in her book Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion:
What makes love so valuable is that we are incomplete, now that we’ve left our mother’s protection. We feel isolated and we feel alone and we restore some early sense of bliss in our ability to merge or make a unity with a new object, a new love. The strength of love is that it’s both an emergent experience and at the same time it’s a re-finding. It really gives solace to our loss at the same time that it creates something new. And, in the process, enlarges us.
Finding a love that lasts
While romance lasts in some marriages, in most others, and most especially in arranged marriages, love manifests as familial love and/or deep friendship. Lasting love, mature love, grown up love is the love that develops when romance no longer has the power it once had and love transforms into commitment, friendship, respect, acceptance, dedication, duty and, most important, deep connection and kinship. It is the love that nourishes ourselves and supports the Other.
Mature love is what we need when the dream of love transforms into the reality of loving.
In her work, Ethel Person M.D., has observed various kinds of successful, lasting loves. She says, “People have different feelings about what constitutes a happy lived life in love. For some people, it would be a love in which there was a lot of agreement; very little dissension; in which things went well; in which you agreed about where to live, where the kids should go. There are other people who would prefer a feistier kind of love relationship. I believe that some of the great relationships are between people who really fight it out. And they have terrible moments, but there is an intensity of feeling that carries over into the love relationship.”
About true, lasting love, Frances Vaughan Ph.D., says, “True love does bring happiness. It brings a deep sense of happiness. But there’s also a lot of work that goes into loving another for a long time. Often, we think we’re in love only when the other person makes us happy. I think each one of us is responsible for our own happiness. The more we can learn to love, the more likely we are to have an enduring sense of happiness with others who are less than perfect. We’re not perfect ourselves, and we can’t expect others to be perfect, either. So that’s the work of love, is how do we love them just the way they are?” |
“Love is the mystery of union, the distance to be transcended, the fuel to cross an infinity. It’s another kind of math. Two times Love equals one. We are One and -not One, a paradox in being. The dramatic tension is eternal.”
— Joan Konner |
“Love seems the swiftest, but it is the slowest of all growths. No man or woman really knows what perfect love is until they have been married a quarter of a century.”
— Mark Twain |
“The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.”
— Alan Patrick Herbert |
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