Description

In the romantic myth, love is the mysterious force that comes out of nowhere and brings us happiness. Fully 95% of all references to love in modern media are focused on the promise and problems of romantic relationships. As viewed by Hollywood and Madison Avenue, lovers are young, beautiful and destined for each other, although they must go through many hardships before the happy consummation of their love.

Origin

The modern obsession with romantic love might lead us to believe that the fundamental things of life have always been a kiss, a sigh, and a touch of old black magic. But the world has not always loved two lovers as time goes by. Romantic love has been the exception rather than the rule. In most pre-modern societies, marriages were arranged for practical and political reasons. It was the knights and troubadours of the middle ages who invented courtly love and idealized romance, but only for the elite. Romance for the masses emerged with the birth of capitalism and individualism and reached a fever pitch among modern consumers of soap operas and magazines about true and false love filled with pop prescriptions for intimacy and advice to the lovelorn. The demand for news from the realm of Aphrodite is constant and insatiable. Endless polls, questionnaires and research into our erotic habits bolsters our questionable belief that we are learning new techniques and making progress in the love game.

Impact

Our myopic fixation on romance and sex encourages a "fatal attraction" theory, that turns us into victims who "fall" in and out of love due to chemistry or fail to find it because of bad luck, childhood abuse or dysfunctional families. This fosters a vain hope that erotic lightning will strike us from heaven and spontaneously give juice and meaning to our lives.

In spite of the deep-seated craving for romance, almost all our energy is devoted to achieving success, prestige, money and power, and almost none to learning the art of loving. When we limit our quest for love to dyadic coupling we neglect the wider sphere within which we need to practice love--the family, the neighborhood, the the environment, the wilderness, the community of non-human sentient beings that includes birds and beasts.

The mistake of modern theories of love is to focus on two solitary individuals who join together to form an island in an alien sea of anonymous others and unknown neighbors. Most pre-modern theories consider love to be an elixir that gradually dissolves the boundaries we erect between the self and others and progressively drive the ego beyond individualism, beyond the sanctuary of intimacy into a more and more inclusive community.

The most serious consequence of our preoccupation with the mating game is to keep us focused on the wrong question. If I ask "how can I find my true love" before I ask "how can I become a loving person?" I will fail to acquire the skills necessary for become a loving human being--listening, empathy, compassion, caring, commitment, etc. Love is an art that needs to be developed and practiced throughout a lifetime.

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