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.
- Comment (49)
- · Quote
- · UnfollowFollow (4)
Comments:
Aug '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The following question is on some level obviously nit-picky. I guess what I'd really like to hear people's thoughts on is if--looking beneath that nit-picky layer--there might nonetheless be some truth lurking. It concerns one of the closing lines:
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.
There's a passivity about the second clause in this sentence that sits ill with me. I'm wondering if that might be an indication of just how deeply the myth runs? if it shows that even folks Emily's and my age who on some level see through the myth, remain affected by it? Rather than characterizing the virtues of companionate love as something impinging on us from the outside, isn't the contrast better put by emphasizing our agency with regards to it? Perhaps, "couples who love companionately stay together longer and better achieve happiness."
Entirely nit-picky?
I could hardly imagine a case where I'd be more pleased to be accused of such.
Sep '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.:
... 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. · 2 hours ago
This is the most succinct and elegant description of a good marriage I have ever read. Everyone contemplating marriage should read, understand, and reflect upon these few words. Anyone in a marriage should review how successfully she or he is fulfilling these aims, and indeed if these are even the path the marriage is taking. The view of marriage as partnership, with passion as the sauce, has much to recommend it.
Also, thanks to Emily for bringing some of these references to our attention. There are many interesting ideas in the Happiness Hypothesis.
Is the fact that Emily and Mollie made such insightful contributions to this topic evidence that women understand it better than men? It's something to consider, gentlemen.
Dec '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Lust =/= Love
I understand the confusion as the both begin with L followed by vowel and have 4 letters.
My mom told me to marry a girl whose bad habits i could tolerate.
Aug '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
"When the sex is good, it counts for 20%. When the sex is bad, it counts for 80%." - Dr. Phil (the only Dr. Phil quote I like)
Feb '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Where to begin! I enjoyed how Caught thinks she's entitled to one of these men, she just can't figure out which one. And that she's meeting old flames at a funeral? That's just tacky. An affair should not commence at a wake.
Also, this lady is anatomically confused. Crying on a shoulder doesn't typically lead to sex. You're doing it wrong if it does. The shoulder's up there, lady!
And she just can't stop having sex with him? If he's that good, she's gonna have a fight on her hands with his actual girlfriend.
But in all seriousness, what these people really need is Jesus. Or a good swift kick in the pants. Or both. Oh, and they need to be tested for VD. So, that's Jesus, a kick, and a doctor's visit.
Jun '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I agree, and so is the old boyfriend. Perhaps it would be best for these two to marry each other for the same reasons that Samuel Butler approved of the marriage of Thomas Carlyle:
Edited on May 2, 2012 at 8:00pmAug '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Guruforhire:
My mom told me to marry a girl whose bad habits i could tolerate.
This is why I'm still single. I have yet to meet a woman willing to tolerate my bad habits (I'm a procrastinating slob).
Feb '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
drlorentz
Mollie Hemingway, Ed.:
... 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. · 2 hours ago
Is the fact that Emily and Mollie made such insightful contributions to this topic evidence that women understand it better than men? It's something to consider, gentlemen. · 16 minutes ago
I don't think women are necessarily understanding it better; some of the most spectacular misunderstandings of it are done by women. But wise women are exposed to the foolish women more often than the men are, giving wise women the opportunity to see what happens when one doesn't understand it.
Aug '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
My wife and I will be celebrating our 15th wedding anniversary this year. We didn't have Children until we had already been married a decade. What we did have was a deep and abiding friendship and a desire to work toward aiding the other accomplish his/her goals.
My wife's graduate school program was one that is notorious for ending relationships. Her classmates marveled at my "tolerance" of her working conditions and late hours. She'd sometimes be away from home for 3-4 days straight and "sleep" on campus. I'd stop by at the wee hours with coffee and hugs. They wondered why I didn't resent her absence.
Why would I resent something that I admired? She was pursuing a dream, and I was doing everything I could to aid in that dream. I still do.
When I travel for work for more than a couple of days, I miss her companionship, her humor, and her presence. It's not sexual at all, but it is quite magnificent.
Aug '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Even if it's a fun wake, organized as an occasion for joyful celebration?
Mar '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Another reason I've come to hate modern culture. The "love myth" is just a female-romantic variant of "if it feels good, do it", damn the consequences down the road.
Feb '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Misthiocracy
Even if it's a fun wake, organized as an occasion for joyful celebration? · 4 minutes ago
That's a good point, I suppose. So let me put it this way. I'm in the south. At our wakes there's actually a dead person in the room. Under no circumstances should you be gaming how to get someone into bed when there's a corpse in the room. (Insert joke here re: Bill Clinton thinking of Monica while in Hillary's presence.)
There may be some crazy hippie wakes out in California, where there's no dead people. But here, that's just bad form.
Mar '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
BTW, I caught no shortage of guff from a poster here when I suggested just that. Now, I wasn't then, and am not now, advocating that we should automatically return to such a system. But it's apparent that the wise older eyes of parents who have been through all this stuff before are, at the very least, an important aid when deciding on marriage. Like anything else, it's good to step outside your own shell and get a view from others. This is why I've developed a lot of respect for some older traditions... such as meeting parents, and asking their permission for their child's hand in marriage. You are, after all, marrying them too. If there's a mutual problem between you, perhaps that's a big clue that you should look elsewhere for a wife or husband.
Mar '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I live in the south too, and it IS bad form, but there are no shortage of tacky gals and boys that would do it anyway.
Mar '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Death leads many to seek reproductive acts. Biologists will give you one explanation, and it may be true.
But we are not animals, and can channel our biological urges. I think there is symmetrical poetry in this animalistic woman not being able to control herself.
Feb '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
What I found interesting is that the author cited the Bollywood industry in perpetuating the love myth. It is true but it happens for different cultural reasons. The majority of marriages in India are arranged and divorce is heavily stigmatized. Bollywood is feeding a vicarious need among Indian viewers, the fantasy of a love marriage. Many of the plot lines are of couples overcoming an arranged marriage to be with their true love. In fact, cracks are starting to emerge in Indian society and divorce at least among the elite is growing. Indian society has emphasizes the companionate love thus the allure of passionate love is not far from its concious.
Jun '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
This image popped up as I was reading this thread--seems appropriate given the subject. Apparently you can make a man so addicted he loses the ability to use spell-check.
Apr '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
passionate vs. compassionate is a false choice. Love in all it's varieties is more complicated.
People from cultures that have arranged marriages are sometimes more satisfied within marriage simple because divorce is not an option. It's just not possible. They cultivate more realistic expectations because they have no options. Westerners have options and those options are always floating around out there whether we choose to acknowledge them or not.
Jul '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The main problem with Ms Caught is the inherit dishonesty of her position, both in the cheating and in lying about the cheating. If Ms Caught would come clean with her fiancé, tell him about her behavior, that she has no plans to or even can stop cheating. Then problem would resolve itself. The fiancé would either be able to accept this and continue into the marriage knowing that his intended partner is faithless or he would end the relationship allowing all to move on. Honesty is the best policy in relationships
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Aaron Miller
But would you also agree that marriage is a nearly universal adult responsibility, similar to the responsibility to work ...
If so, should there be a deadline?
I don't see it this way at all. I know lots of people in their 30s and 40s who would love to get married, but haven't yet found someone. They're not irresponsible. They're not shirking their duty.
Stronger than love?
That would imply that love doesn't involve compatibility and mutual concern. But of course it does--unless you reduce it to infatuation. Love entails the deepest possible compatibility and mutual concern between two human beings.
No, there's no limit. How could there be?
It doesn't seem so to me. Of course a happy marriage is in great part an achievement of human freedom, but the love that inspired the couple to undertake it is a gift, not a creation of the will.