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:
Feb '12
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Look, can't we all at least agree on this: there's one specific person out there for everyone, and the only way you'll know the identity of that individual is to have sex with multiple partners, multiple times a week, and often while you're in a committed relationship (the commitment to which really means nothing if he or she isn't the One).
Finding that one person can be difficult. If you're a wealthy man, your One won't be born until you're 40, so it's important to bide your time with someone you find tolerable until then.
If you're insecure, your One is the the next one... always.
If you're a recently divorced woman who's starting to lose weight, your One is the next guy to buy you drinks at a bar, and may not have been born until you were in your 20s, so how could you have known about him until now?
If you're in college, your One is likely the significant other of a good friend. Bide your time; your friend's One is likely someone you're dating, so it'll work out.
May '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
iWc: 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. · 3 hours ago
Yes! So true. The long-distance relationship thing also really works, as I recently re-discovered after returning from a 2 week business trip...
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
I read this article and wonder where the grown-ups are. Self-indulgent, selfish little twits pretending that their passions are uniquely uncontrollable.
And I am the world's strongest proponent of hot marriages.
May '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
katievs
Stronger than love?
Stronger than lust (impulsive affections). Sorry — the word limit cut me short.
katievs
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.
As I said earlier, God keeps offering us gifts as we pass them up. Yes, a spouse is a blessing, but we are not without choice in the matter. We are free to choose whom we journey with, not just how we share that journey.
God knows the choices we will make before He offers us the options (for both our wise and our foolish decisions). But I believe any person can grow in deep and lasting love with a variety of other individuals.
As faith is a gift, devotion and love are gifts. But to say they are gifts is not to say they are not also choices.
I think I'm agreeing with you.
Oct '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
"True love is passionate love that never fades...."
An overabundance of love stories that come to a screeching halt at happily-ever-after may not be terribly helpful, but does anyone who has tried to picture his grandparents having sex really believe that unbounded passion is supposed to last forever? Just because a relationship can't survive on sex alone, though, doesn't mean that we should cross heady sexual attraction off of the potential ingredient list. Some lasting relationships start out that way, and some continue that way; others don't and don't. Seems to me that passion is only problematic if it's one sided or if it doesn't grow into something more. As a great many comments here suggest, honest commitment and faithfulness are clearly big ticket items in their own right.
Ironically, it looks like Haidt, himself, is struggling just as hard to come up with a formula for "true" love as everybody else. If it similarly eludes him, perhaps that's because there's more one path to a successful marriage.
Jun '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Paul Erickson
iWc: 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. · 3 hours ago
Yes! So true. The long-distance relationship thing also really works, as I recently re-discovered after returning from a 2 week business trip...
As long as the passion lasts consider it a great blessing. Unfortunately, health and other issues (in my case surgery) often interfere with the passionate aspect of relationships. My doctor was all concerned until I told him that after forty years together my wife and I have many mutual interests, and that one was somewhere around no. 15 on the priority list. My point is one that C. S. Lewis taught: passionate love lights the fire, but it requires a deeper, calmer, more mature love to carry one through the travails of a lifelong relationship.
So cherish the passion while you may, but make sure the deeper kind of love lies in reserve.
Edited on May 3, 2012 at 1:30amMay '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
The fallacy in all of this is an utter failure to understand what love is. Love is self-sacrificial giving. Therefore, happiness in marriage isn't about finding the right spouse. Happiness in marriage is about BEING the right spouse. The best advice yet given is in Ephesians 5. Verse 21 states the broad principle. Verse 22ff tells what it looks like when applied by wives. Verse 25ff tells what it looks like when applied by husbands.
Nov '10
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Love grows and changes. Passion does not altogether fade, but it changes in nature as one ages.
I was thinking earlier today about my late wife and me and what we valued about our relationship that led us to marriage. Yes, passion was part of it. But we also had a rocky courtship, the sort that may have led many to abandon it for an easier road. What convinced both of us that we were "meant for each other" (collective sigh here!) was the conviction that this was the person with whom we wished to grow old.
That puts quite a different spin on love, and by it we weathered some serious storms in our married years with never a danger that our bark may o'erflow (as the old hymn goes).
Young folks, see yourself on the porch in your declining years. Who can you see in that rocker beside you, wrinkled and saggy, worn and tired, a shadow of who they once were? Who reaches gently over and pats your arm, and you both smile about some unspoken memory?
Marry that person.
May '11
Re: The "Love Myth" in Pop Culture
Friends, lovers and business partners. If the relationship doesn't excel in each category it won't last.