The Problem With Modern Love and Romanticism
The idea of marrying for love is an incredibly new idea, which roughly dates back to the middle of the 18th century. Up until then, you were expected to tolerate your partner, but you weren't expected to love them.
This new idea that formed has been termed Romanticism, and we are all the heirs of romanticism. The way that human beings love is very dependent on their society, because we tend to do what everyone else is doing. So, it's important that we know what romanticism exactly is.
Romanticism tells us that all of us have a soul mate, and it's our task to identify this soul mate. When we meet, we'l have a very special feeling, and an instinctive attraction to them, and we will know that this is our destiny.
And that the good thing about finding a soul mate is that all of us, everything that makes us who we are will be perfectly understood by another human being. All our feelings and hopes will be confirmed by another person. When they come along, we will have no more secrets. They will understand us perfectly and we will understand them, and everything you felt ashamed and vulnerable about, you can reveal to them and they will confirm and bolster you.
Also, generally the people who invented romanticism believed that love and sex go together. Romantics believed that sex is the ultimate expression of love, which is why in the 19th century, adultery became a tragedy. It also became the most important theme of 19th century novels. Because, suddenly the romantics have made sex into the ultimate proof of love.
As you can probably tell, I'm not a big fan of this idea, in fact I believe that romanticism is the single greatest enemy on our path of learning to love.
So what's so wrong with it? Well, for starters, unlike what romanticism tells us, which is that we're kind, loving beings on the lookout for a soul mate, we're actually deeply dangerous. Most of us are on the edge of insanity. This is not an exception, this is just what it means to be human. We are dangerous to be around. We have all sorts of impulses and feelings and desires, which make us great trouble to be around. The only people we can think of as normal, are people we've just met. Once we get to know them a little bit more, we soon realize that they are not "normal".
Therefore, anyone we're likely to get with is likely to be a little bit crazy, and they won't be able to tell us how they're a little bit crazy, and we won't be able to get at this by asking the normal sort of questions we'd ask on a date. In a more psychologically aware society, one of the first questions we may ask people is how are you mad or a little bit crazy? That should be a standard question we ask over dinner, but it isn't, in fact it's seen as an insulting question.
Another reason we're so unaware of our own psychological dynamics, is because until we start a big, long-term relationship, nobody can be bothered to tell us. Our friends certainly can't, and nor can our family. The reason for this is because they simply don't care enough. Not that our family doesn't love us immensely, but they don't have to deal with you all the time. So, they don't give you the vital feedback that only a lover, deep into a relationship will tell you. Even casual relationships tend to come to an end when the part of mutual enlightening would begin in a long-term relationship.
The other problem is that we're told we should believe our instincts. In the olden days, we married for reasons such as his plot of land is next to my plot of land, or we're the same religion or whatever. But now we're told we need to follow our instincts and that our instincts will guide us to the person that will make us happy.
The problem is, and this is what psychoanalysis has revealed over the last century, that we are recreating a pattern of earliest childhood. We learn about love in the bosom of the family. And when it comes to adult love, we are mirroring on top of this ancient story, which is generally inaccessible to our conscious. So, the real problem is that when we love in adulthood, we are not necessarily drawn to people that will make us happy. We are drawn to people that will feel familiar!
And very often, happiness and familiarity have drifted apart. Because the love we knew as children is not a love that was pure of certain unhealthy or troublesome dynamics, maybe loving someone who was rather distant, or who's mood we couldn't control or we were afraid, etc.
This explains how often you'll set up a friend with another friend, and they both seem so well suited on paper, according to reasonable criteria. And then the friend will call you up and say, you know they were perfect, but I just didn't have that special feeling. and you think that special feeling is a sure fire guide to happiness, but it isn't. It really means that the person was probably a bit too normal for your friend.
They were a little bit too healthy, they didn't satisfy your friends requirement for suffering. So, we say oh they weren't that attractive. Or they were nice but a little bit boring. By boring, what we mean is that they were a little bit too healthy for me, they didn't fit my pattern of madness, so I had to let them go. So, instinct guides us to some very troublesome characters, and when we don't feel that special feeling, we're not feeling the kind of trouble that is familiar to us from childhood.
The other thing that goes wrong is that, we have this idea that you should be yourself fully in a relationship. Being ourselves fully, is a curse we should spare anyone we care about. Because, the full dimensions of our characters are really troublesome, and we have this idea that if we're not being ourselves fully, we're not being honest.
Honesty, romanticism says, is the gateway to true love. So, this sets up a really troublesome dynamic. What often happens early in a relationship is that you meet someone, and you share all sorts of secrets and have similar viewpoints on all kinds of things, and now the outside world, that scary place has been humanized because you've met someone from there, who feels as you do about all sorts of things, and so there's a really liberating feeling that comes with it.
But then, one day maybe about 3 months in you share something, and your partner who's understood so much about you is suddenly looking kind of serious and a bit upset. And suddenly you feel that thing, which is a conflict between love and honesty. Most of us at that point decide to go with the love and ditch the honesty. And suddenly, the moment of loneliness begins again. There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, contrary to what romanticism will have you believe.
Another major problem is that romanticism tells us that we should understand each other without saying too many words. This is an absolute disaster. It's very charming in the first 3 months, but in the long term, the idea that someone is going to understand you well without you explaining anything to them is a disaster. It has lead to an outbreak in millions of people's lives of sulking.
Sulking is when you have a deep conviction that your lover should understand something, and they haven't understood, and that's why you're not going to tell them why you're upset.
You're upset, and you're not gonna tell them why, and the reason for this is because if they loved you, the would know why you were upset. So that's why you're gonna lock yourself in the bathroom, and you're not gonna tell them what's wrong. This is because we believe a true lover would be able to read through the bathroom door, what's wrong.
The other thing that's really troubling about romantic love is that if you love somebody and they love you back, they accept the whole of you, and they will never try to change you. And often there's a very awkward moment when you say something like, I need to tell you about the way you chew your cereal, it's really loud and annoying. And they say something like hang on, I thought you loved me! And you go nono, I do, but I need to tell you about the cereal thing, and that is seen as a breach of love.
This is in part because romanticism tells us you should love the entirety of someone, and that there is no such thing as a vulnerability, or a weakness, and that education has no place here. The ancient greeks believed that love is embarking on a journey of mutual education. One of the reasons this goes so wrong, is because romanticism makes it seem illegal to tell your partner of their flaws.
In a teaching setting, a teacher feels they're in a normal position to teach and the audience feels it's in a legitimate position to be a student, and none of this exists in love, normally. This is also really hard because so much is at stake, in love we care so much, and we're trying to teach someone something on the verge of our life collapsing. Because, we're haunted by the feeling in long term love, that we've married the wrong person, therefore I've ruined my life.
And that's really not a good position to be in when you're trying to teach someone about eating. The background thought is, I've married an idiot, I've ruined my life, and they've got to understand. So you shout, and scream and humiliate and this is a catastrophe. They get offended and the lesson is over.
As we know from feedback forms, it needs to be 99% sweetness and honey and dear, and 1% the criticism. We think that education is a breach of love, rather than it's beginning. All of us are so imperfect, of course our lover will find faults with us, and of course they will try to improve us.
We need to reinvent love. The first thing we need to do is to get rid of instinct. Imagine someone saying I'm gonna be doing brain surgery later and I'm gonna do it on instinct, or I'm gonna land a plane later and I'm gonna do it on instinct. Of course not, and love should be the same way.
Some of the things that would be in a curriculum of love is that:
We should stop treating our partners like they were adults. We should treat them like small children. The reason for this is when a small child does something wrong, say you put a bowl of food in front of them and they grab it and throw it across the room, and start screaming. You don't go I'm so offended, I've had a hard day at work and now this, you're persecuting me.
You go oh, maybe my poor child has a sore tooth or they're tired or something. We're incredibly generous about our system of interpretation because we think "well, the other person is an adult." And of course, most adults look like adults, unfortunately.
It would be so much more useful if we looked like children. The good thing about a broken arm is that most people can see that you have a broken arm and open doors for you and things, but if you've got a broken part of your psyche, everyone thinks your normal because you look it. So we don't look like children, but we are inside. This is really what it means to love, to be generous in interpreting the behaviors of others, specifically those we love.
The last thing we need to get better at is whether or not someone is evil or not for acting the way that they did, and for this we need to learn humor. Comedy is a vital resource in love, because think about the comedic characters we know of, such as Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, if you met him as he plays himself on the show, you'd think this guy is a total idiot, you'd hate him. But because of the humorous envelope that he is presented in by comic genius, you think that vital thing, that he is a lovable idiot. That is a sign of love. When you go from seeing your partner as an idiot, to a lovable idiot.
Finally, we need to also remember of course, that secrets are okay, and if you're only lonely with 40% of your character, that's fine, you're doing very well. The idea that loneliness should end at the beginning of love is completely wrong. You must not blame someone for not understanding every part of you, how could they? You don't even understand every part of you. Nobody should be expected to read minds.
So, you are ready for love if you genuinely understand that you are of course, crazy. And of course, your partner is crazy. And you've understood that you don't completely understand yourself, and they don't completely understand themselves either. Your communication is likely to be a disaster at the instinctive level, and we need to bring it up to a more therapeutic level. You need to understand that love will be accompanied with a lot of practical details, and that we won't always be on holiday by the waterfalls. You will also be unhappy a lot of the time. Our idea of love is what we know from childhood, and so we're great at being loved, and that's what people are seeking when they talk about love, but we must also realize that we're not trained in the art of loving someone else.
Sources: Philosopher Alain de Botton
Psychologist Erich Fromm book: The Art of Loving
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