Sullivan's valentine

The New York Times Magazine, Feb 11, 2001

The Love Bloat

The obsession with romantic love is not just the stuff of greeting-card pap. It's a curse.

By ANDREW SULLIVAN

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.

For a while, there was reason to hope that we were recovering from this blight. The most innovative popular music of our time -- hip-hop -- has largely jettisoned the romantic premise of the bulk of the genre. The world learned a sobering lesson when the dreamy English princess turned into a bulimic neurotic before meeting an untimely death. Greater sex equality has helped discredit the idea that no woman is complete without a man. For good measure, our last president had a marriage that, whatever else it was founded on, had little to do with romance. But then the romance addiction returns. Britney clones go on dates in kindergarten. Boy pop groups parade as romantic fantasies for a new generation of screaming girls. The political quest for equal marriage rights for homosexuals merges into a cultural campaign for gay romance. Ronald Reagan's love letters sell briskly. "The Wedding Planner" does oddly well at the box office. As sex makes something of a comeback in the general culture -- Temptation Island," anyone? -- it needs the fig leaf of romance as much as it ever did to maintain a legitimate air.

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.

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 15, 2001

Answers

OK. So nobody will touch this one. Here goes.

I feel no compulsion to celebrate holidays. In fact when I was quite young I questioned people on their acquiescence to customs – holidays especially - for which they obviously held little affection. Most of what I received back in response were silent looks of bewilderment that I would even ask such a question. Go along to get along reeks of living on autopilot. I rejected it then and I say no thank you to it now.

Valentine's Day is a classic example of hordes of people going through the motions in order to fulfill perceived obligations. I spoke with a few co-workers yesterday and to a man they were not looking forward to doing the flowers and dinner thing. It was expected of them and they shut down to it. Then why do it at all? Because it was expected of them. How dreadful! How utterly devoid of romance!

I've stated this numerous times and I'll do so again: each day holds the potential for celebration of life and love. Thoughtfulness and the desire to perform actions which communicate affection should not be programmed on a calendar, but spring spontaneously from one’s heart, IMO.

On to the author's essay: Romantic love as he describes it is indeed unbalanced. It is a concept ripe for the Buddha to address. Since he is in lurker mode today, I'll take a crack at it.

Romantic love, when not grounded upon a firm foundation of friendship, promises a ride the most fearsome roller coaster can only hint at. Been there, done that. The highs were extraordinary. Truly as the author states, "It fulfills the way a drug fulfills -- requiring new infusions to sustain the high." But with highs founded strictly through stimulation of the lower senses and particularly without the balancing mechanism of reason contributing to the mix, such a course promises crash landings. I use the plural – crash landings – because the effects of the love drug is so damn attractive the tendency is to return to it for another hit again and again. That the initial experience of euphoria may no longer be achievable is masked by the memory of what was and the fervent wish to return to that feeling once again. That's a labyrinth which hides its exit well. Sounds like cocaine addiction, doesn't it?

That said, to those who celebrated Valentine's Day with enthusiasm and passion borne of friendship and unconditional love, I envy you greatly. :)

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), February 15, 2001.

Valentine's Day is OK. It's nice to give a little something to somebody you love. The problem I've seen through the years is there are many spiteful women out there who will go ballistic if they aren't given things they think are theirs as a matter of right due to the relationship. This happens at Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries as well. I've avoided women like that purposely. Fortunately, my wife is not like that.

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), February 15, 2001.

I have been married since I was 18. This May it will be 20 years. As each year goes by I am more and more in love! So of course I believe in romantic love...happy sigh...

That being said, we *will not* celebrate the Hallmark Holiday known as Valentine's Day. But to denigrate the day as much as possible, we go out and buy each other a card as far removed from the holiday as possible (usually a "get well" card--no red allowed) and also buy a gift that the other person could not possibly use.

The price tag *must* be on the front of the gift to make it as tacky as possible. Then you wrap it in a plastic bag, paper towel, 8-1/2 x 11 sheet of used paper or worse.

In this made-up contest, you can not sign the card "love" (more like, "yeah, whatever...").

After we open them we score each other. The one whose card and gift are most thoughtless and comes closest to spending $2 bucks--but not less--wins! Sure, sounds strange but has us laughing and planning all year ;-)

Mar.

-- Not now, not like this (AgentSmith0110@aol.com), February 15, 2001.

Congratulations on your upcoming 20th anniversary, Mar!

Love the way you two choose to not celebrate the holiday. My sister and brother developed the tradition while in their late teens of sending plastic fruit and vegetables to each other as birthday gifts and "thinking about you" reminders. Now they think so little of each other they don't even exchange tacky gifts anymore.

-- Rich (howe9@shentel.net), February 15, 2001.

My wife bought me some ben-wah balls for Valentine's Day. I was so touched.

-- (nemesis@awol.com), February 15, 2001.

Thanks Rich ;-)

Mar.

-- Not now, not like this (AgentSmith0110@aol.com), February 15, 2001.

"It is so diverting that we tend to forget more pressing questions, like what to believe in or strive for."

Yeah, that Josephine sure threw Napoleon off his game.

-- flora (***@__._), February 15, 2001.

Sweetest Day is another "made up" holiday brought to you by: American Greetings.

When you 'love' someone, price doesnt matter. V-day is just another day.

Birthdays are the Special Ones IMHO. I received notta for V-day and was not upset. I KNOW my hubby luvs me and vice versa.

We dont need others to dictate when we should show luv, again, IMHO.

-- member me? (old@forum.member), February 15, 2001.

To Roxy, wherever you are---

"My Funny Valentine"

Writer(s): Rodgers/Hart

-------------------

My funny Valentine

Sweet comic Valentine

You make me smile with my heart

-------------------

Your looks are laughable

Unphotographable

Yet you're my favourite work of art

-------------------

Is your figure less than Greek

Is your mouth a little weak

When you open it to speak

Are you smart?

------------------

But don't change a hair for me

Not if you care for me

Stay little Valentine stay

Each day is Valentine's day

------------------

Is your figure less than Greek

Is your mouth a little weak

When you open it to speak

Are you smart?

-----------------------

But don't you change one hair for me

Not if you care for me

Stay little Valentine stay

Each day is Valentine's day

-- Lars (larsguy@yahoo.com), February 15, 2001.

"Funny Valentine" is condescending, sexist Tin Pan alley crap.

-- (LeonTrotsky@Internationale.sing-along), February 16, 2001.

Leon,

What tunes would you hum in Frida Kahlo's ear?

-- flora (***@__._), February 16, 2001.

Here's Frida's self portrait {valentine?}, which she dedicated to Leon {you devil, you}.

-- flora (***@__._), February 16, 2001.

http://www.nmwa.org/legacy/views/vkahlo.htm

-- flora (***@postus.interruptus), February 16, 2001.

Flora,

Frida merely humored me. She dug Diego. But we were all comrades so it was ok.

We did not celebrate bougeois holidays such as Valentine's Day.

I spent hours gazing into her eyebrows.

-- (LeonTrotsky@Stalin's_grave.pissing), February 16, 2001.