Is Love "the Cornerstone of Humanity" or a "Tyranny"?

As it always has been, romantic love remains a challenge for individuals in the 21st century, with arguably no pursuit more difficult than successfully and happily managing a relationship predicated on mutually shared strong feelings between two people. Living one’s life as a single person is itself a complex affair these days, making the addition of possessing love for and hopefully with another person yet another thing we must handle with great care.

Then why do it, one has to ask? “It’s the cornerstone of our humanity,” Hara Estroff Marano plainly put it in Psychology Today in 2004, thinking that, “only love protects us enough to grow and change.” Love has to be worth the effort for so many to willingly enter into it despite all the work and risks involved, we have to conclude, suggesting there is a basic human need to be part of something bigger than or outside of oneself. “Anyone who has come within waltzing distance of it, read Jane Austen or Danielle Steele, or listened to Frank Sinatra or Celine Dion, knows there’s no elixir like love,” Marano wrote, making the safe bet that it wasn’t about to disappear anytime soon.

Different perspectives on romantic love

Alongside our individual and collective love affair with love has existed, paradoxically, a deep distrust of and antipathy towards the emotion. “A lethal combination of Hollywood sentimentality, Victorian romanticism and bridal-magazine kitsch has placed an impossible burden on love,” wrote Judith Hertog in her “un-Valentine” published in the online edition of the New York Times on Valentine’s Day 2019, going on to explain how and why some people resent “the tyranny of perfect romance.”

Many women, especially millennials (those born after 1980 and the first generation to become young adults in the 21st century), have in fact resisted entering into serious relationships because they may involve love. Such a thing is, however, nothing new. As early as the 1930s, some scientists were describing romantic love as an emotion that mature adults had no business clinging to. Such love was a vestige of children’s imagination, they declared, and a sentimental state of mind that served little useful purpose. Psychotherapists, notably Alfred Adler, also dismissed romantic love, thinking that marriages would be much better off without it.

Many feminists of the 1970s, particularly Marilyn French, argued that romantic love presented a real and present danger to women’s independence and ability to lead lives with real meaning. Later scholars such as Pepper Schwartz have made a convincing case for “peer marriage” predicated on equality and “deep friendship” in place of passion and stereotypical gender roles. In short, love in America has been a contentious, highly charged site, simultaneously aggressively pursued for its emotional rewards and just as assertively avoided due to the havoc it could wreak on one’s psyche.