The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Over at Elle magazine, reader "Caught in a Love Spell" asks advice columnist E. Jean about whether she should leave her fiancé to be with a man that she is having a passionate affair with.
At my father’s funeral, I ran into an old friend. We grew up together, his was the shoulder I cried on, and we ended up having sex. We’ve been doing so ever since—a year and a half. The problem is that during this whole time, he’s had a girlfriend, and I’ve been engaged to be married to another man.
"Caught" explains that the two of them "just can't stop having sex with" each other. She writes, in anguish, "We’ve fought a hundred times over stopping and not seeing each other, but we always end up back together, no matter how bad the previous fight was. Why can’t we walk away? Why is this so hard to stop?"
E. Jean steps in with some advice:
Miss Caught, My Cauliflower: Halt! You’re marrying the wrong man. Marry the man with whom you fight “a hundred times” because you can’t cease seeing each other. Marry the man with whom you “can’t stop having sex.” Marry the man with whom you “always end up back together.” Marry the man your DNA is shouting for you to marry, and your chances for happiness are damn good. To quote the captivating Martin Amis, “Marry your sexual obsession: …the one you never quite got to the end of.”
Yes, it's advice. But is it good advice?
In his fabulous book The Happiness Hypothesis, psychology professor Jonathan Haidt thinks that E. Jean's type of reasoning about love is seriously flawed--and that acting on it will cause people to lead less happy lives. The culprit of such bad advice is not any one person, like E. Jean, but a deeply embedded belief in our pop culture that the experience of being in love must meet a very specific set of criteria. This is the "love myth."
Haidt explains:
As I see it, the modern myth of true love involves these beliefs: True love is passionate love that never fades; if you are in true love, you should marry that person; if love ends, you should leave that person because it was not true love; and if you can find the right person, you will have true love forever. You might not believe this myth yourself, particularly if you are older than thirty; but many young people in Western nations are raised on it, and it acts as an ideal that they unconsciously carry with them even if they scoff at it. (It’s not just Hollywood that perpetrates the myth; Bollywood, the Indian film industry, is even more romanticized.)
Because so many of us were raised on the myth--there's a Facebook group called "Disney Movies Gave Me Unrealistic Expectations About Love"-- and because so many of us will decide to (or not to) marry someone based off of it, we are shutting ourselves off from real romantic love:
But if true love is defined as eternal passion, it is biologically impossible. To see this, and to save the dignity of love, you have to understand the difference between two kinds of love: passionate and companionate.
Passionate love is the kind that "Caught" from Elle is experiencing. It is a "wildly emotional state in which tender and sexual feelings, elation and pain, anxiety and relief, altruism and jealousy coexist in a confusion of feelings.”
Companionate love is less exciting, but more lasting: “the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply intertwined.”
The problem with passionate love is that it eventually fades. And that creates major problems for the person who decides to marry someone based on the expectation that passionate love will last forever--the most major of the problems being, of course, divorce.
Haidt explains:
Passionate love is a drug. Its symptoms overlap with those of heroin (euphoric well-being, sometimes described in sexual terms) and cocaine (euphoria combined with giddiness and energy). It’s no wonder: Passionate love alters the activity of several parts of the brain, including parts that are involved in the release of dopamine. Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine, and the dopamine link is crucial here because drugs that artificially raise dopamine levels, as do heroin and cocaine, put you at risk of addiction. If you take cocaine once a month, you won’t become addicted, but if you take it every day, you will. No drug can keep you continuously high. The brain reacts to a chronic surplus of dopamine, develops neurochemical reactions that oppose it, and restores its own equilibrium. At that point, tolerance has set in, and when the drug is withdrawn, the brain is unbalanced in the opposite direction: pain, lethargy, and despair follow withdrawal from cocaine or from passionate love.
So if passionate love is a drug—literally a drug—it has to wear off eventually. Nobody can stay high forever (although if you find passionate love in a long-distance relationship, it’s like taking cocaine once a month; the drug can retain its potency because of your suffering between doses). If passionate love is allowed to run its joyous course, there must come a day when it weakens. One of the lovers usually feels the change first. It’s like waking up from a shared dream to see your sleeping partner drooling. In those moments of returning sanity, the lover may see flaws and defects to which she was blind before. The beloved falls off the pedestal, and then, because our minds are so sensitive to changes, her change in feeling can take on exaggerated importance. “Oh, my God,” she thinks, “the magic has worn off--I’m not in love with him anymore.” If she subscribes to the myth of true love, she might even consider breaking up with him. After all, if the magic ended, it can’t be true love. But if she does end the relationship, she might be making a mistake.
So does true love exist? Haidt thinks that it does:
True love exists, I believe, but it is not—cannot be—passion that lasts forever. True love, the love that undergirds strong marriages, is simply strong companionate love, with some added passion, between two people who are firmly committed to each other. Companionate love looks weak in the graph above because it can never attain the intensity of passionate love. But if we change the time scale from six months to sixty years, as in the next figure, it is passionate love that seems trivial—a flash in the pan—while companionate love can last a lifetime [You can see the graph here on page 127 and 128]. When we admire a couple still in love on their fiftieth anniversary, it is this blend of loves—mostly companionate—that we are admiring.
There's a great article over at The Atlantic that addresses a lot of these themes (and, in doing so, shows us that couples in old-fashioned arranged marriages may be wiser about love than those in the West who get married for love). I would quote the whole piece if I could, but here is the key part:
Hollywood--and all of the "happily ever after" stories it cooks up—deserves a lot of the blame for our distorted ideas about what marriage should be, according to [research psychologist Robert] Epstein. "There are literally millions of Americans in therapy because of violated expectations around those ideas," Epstein claims, referring to the discrepancy between our idealized notion of love and reality. (Indeed, even Amina--who isn't exactly thrilled with George—likes romantic comedies; "her favorites were Sleepless in Seattle, Mystic Pizza, and Pretty Woman," as Freudenberger writes.)
But don't romantic happy endings significantly pre-date Disney, going back at least as far as Shakespeare? Sure, in Western culture, Epstein says. But folk tales and love stories from Asian cultures have, traditionally, ended differently from ours, he says, with more ambiguous endings—ones that we would find unsatisfying—even if the Westernization of the world is starting to change that.
The historian Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: How Love Conquered Marriage, agrees that Westerners would have more success with marriage if they thought of it more as a "working partnership," as she puts it. Love " doesn't have to hit you like a storm and then move on."
Companionate love may not be as romantic or fiery as passionate love, but scholars seem to agree that it ultimately makes couples happier and keeps them together longer. So maybe "Caught" should think twice before leaving her fiancé for the thrill and excitement of her childhood friend.
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Comments:
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The advice the columnist gave was excellent in at least one regard: it saves the actual fiancé from marrying someone who is unfaithful to him already.
Good advice wouldn't have responded with offering up either man to the woman. If you're cheating on your fiance, that is the problem for which you need advice, not which man to end up with.
As for the rest, my own view is that a good marriage involves mostly a vocational understanding of opportunities to serve one's spouse but the sexual passion goes a long way to smoothing out the rough edges.
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The reason "Caught" won't be happy-ever-after with either her fiancé or her "sexual obsession" is that she's evidently an unserious, dishonest, out-of-control, egotistical person.
What turns passionate love into lasting happiness in marriage is virtue. Cinderella got the prince because her virtue and inner beauty had been proved through long-suffering. The step sisters didn't get him, because they were horrid people.
Edited on May 2, 2012 at 5:51pmDec '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I would suggest that there is one descriptor missing from both E. Jean and Haidt: What Caught is experiencing in the affair is not love, but lust. And lust, not love, is what Hollywood, Playboy, Cosmo and the rest are selling.
My relationship with my wife still has passion, but we understood before the marriage that the intense passion wouldn't be able to sustain a life together.
Dec '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I am confused. The parts of the woman's letter you quoted don't mention love at all, only sex. The advice columnist is also confused: she seems to think that the sole purpose of marriage is to have sex.Sexual obsession is not love. It also is an insufficient foundation for a marriage (outside of those instant marriages that last only long enough to legitimize a sexual relationship).The letter writer probably is acting out her anxiety about entering into marriage and pledging fidelity to one man. Her sex partner represents a lifeline to her youthful freedom and she is terrified of letting it go. She isn't drawn to the sex partner by love: she's afraid of the love she has with her fiancé and the power it will have over her.
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Something seems to me to be missing in the various discussions quoted -- the need for a common project to unite the two lovers. Passion in this regard is no more sufficient than is a ham sandwich. One can always find it somewhere else, and novelty has its charms.
The common project is another matter. Precisely because it is common, it unites two particular people, and it keeps them united. The real problem with Hollywood's representation of love is its silence with regard to children.
Oct '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Yes. 'Caught's' real problem is that she's being unfaithful to the fiance. She needs to reasses her life, come clean with her fiance, leave him for good, and then leave her boyfriend as well. Otherwise, if she stays with the boyfriend, I guarantee that eventually either she will cheat on him with someone else, or he will cheat on her with someone else. Theirs is not a lasting relationship.
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.: The advice the columnist gave was excellent in at least one regard: it saves the actualfiancé from marrying someone who is unfaithful to him already.
Good advice wouldn't have responded with offering up either man to the woman. If you're cheating on your fiance, that is the problem for which you need advice, not which man to end up with.
As for the rest, my own view is that a good marriage involves mostly a vocational understanding of opportunities to serve one's spouse but the sexual passion goes a long way to smoothing out the rough edges. · 5 minutes ago
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Supposedly, if you're engaged you're in a "committed relationship." But this woman is either committed to her own sexual fulfillment or her sex partner, but certainly not her fiancé. If she cheats now, she'll cheat later.
The advice to end the engagement is good. Better that they break up now before there's more of a financial entanglement, or worse, little ones.
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Paul A. Rahe: Something seems to me to be missing in the various discussions quoted -- the need for a common project to unite the two lovers. Passion in this regard is no more sufficient than is a ham sandwich. One can always find it somewhere else, and novelty has its charms.
The common project is another matter. Precisely because it is common, it unites two particular people, and it keeps them united. The real problem with Hollywood's representation of love is its silence with regard to children. · 5 minutes ago
Yes -- or where children are involved, it's outside of the marriage context (in films like Knocked Up and Friends With Kids).
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
That's a great point. To the advice columnist, love = sex, which is a pretty superficial, and not to say wrong (!), conception of love.
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Speaking as someone whose number one intellectual interest is the nature of conjugal love, I want to protest this false alternative from the article you link:
Put me down as someone who believes that the idea of marrying for "practical reasons" is, if not entirely illegitimate, definitely subpar. Marriage is and should be about "true love". True love is not reducible to adolescent crushes or sexual passions.
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Emily, Emily, Emily... Looking at your last dozen or so posts one could swear you've become obsessed with sex...
Zo, vee begin... Vas do you zee in dis picture here?
Nov '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I know that advice columnists are supposed to be entertaining but quite often I don't read past the letter of the person writing in, as most of the time the requests are appalling. Does "Caught" not realize that such serial infidelity is wrong in and of itself, apart from her marriage quams?
And, curiously, I wonder if the advice columnist would have been as sympathetic if a man had been writing in with the same situation. Personally I'd think less of any male friend who cheated on his significant other.
Dec '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I love this quote :" Any experience that feels intensely good releases dopamine."
No. The release of dopamine causes you to feel good.
As a mater of fact painful experiences cause the release of dopamine, hence the runner's high.
Edited on May 2, 2012 at 6:32pmFeb '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The point of reading advice columns is to sit back and say "Wow! I may have my problems, but at least I'm not that screwed up."
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Another thing that sticks in my craw:
I want to point out that this is not a description of the Western view of marriage; it's a description of a post-sexual revolution, secular view of marriage.
In the Christian view of marriage--which prevailed until recently in the west--marriage is until death. And it's all about love. Self-oblating love. A crucifixion type love.
Edited on May 2, 2012 at 6:50pmAug '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
While there may be a "correct" answer, statistically-speaking, I see NO way for an advice columnist to answer this question with anything resembling validity.
The only answer an honest advice columnist could give is "flip a coin".
Feb '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I actually think the advice is decent, if not for the reasons to columnist gives.
Breaking off the engagement with the fiance dumb enough to trust this woman lets him try to find a loyal partner.
Hooking up with the lover means she's with someone just as self-centered and dishonest as herself. When such a relationship inevitably fails, she knew she was getting in bed with a liar.
The lover divorcing his wife gives the wife the freedom to find a loyal partner. Both the wife and the fiance will probably be better off for having these people out of their lives.
So all in all, pretty good advice. Sometimes the best you can do is to get the self-destructive people away from their victims.
Mar '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The woman is a train wreck. Anyone willing to marry her has a major challenge on his hands.
But I have never understood the whole "passion fades" thing. Maybe it does for most. But I guarantee you that it does not for all. It depresses me that everyone takes this fallacy for granted.
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
katievs: ....
Put me down as someone who believes that the idea of marrying for "practical reasons" is, if not entirely illegitimate, definitely subpar. Marriage is and should be about "true love". True love is not reducible to adolescent crushes or sexual passions.
Agreed. But would you also agree that marriage is a nearly universal adult responsibility, similar to the responsibility to work (to be productive)? Isn't marriage part of growing up?
If so, should there be a deadline? A person who reaches his or her mid-thirties without having established a career is commonly thought to be avoiding a responsibility. Should we expect people to be married by a similar age?
Compatability and mutual concern provide a stronger basis for marriage. Courtship is an admirable tradition, and the increased freedom of this past century is a welcome improvement. But a fruitful courtship does not ensure a fruitful marriage.
Is there a limit to how long a person may responsibly move from relationship to relationship before deciding on "the one"?
Marriage is not merely practical. But it seems to me that soul mates are made, not found. God sends us many blessings. Refuse one, and He will offer another.
Jan '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
One possible reason for the rampant spread of the idea of "grand passion" is that women particularly do not like to appear as simply promiscuous, even in this 'enlightened' age. But, if she is held captive to a passion so strong that neither she nor her friend can control it, well then, who can blame her? "I can't help myself" is her cry.