The Perils of Romance
Some time ago I went to hear Alain de Botton – philosopher and author speaking about modern relationships and love in Melbourne’s gloomy town hall.
I’m not sure our drafty town hall is conducive to love. The couple in front of us were engaging in covert hostilities. De Botton is a witty, engaging communicator, but every time he made comedic asides about marriage the woman laughed like a drain and the bloke became even more incensed.
He sat stony faced with arms crossed while his partner shrieked with merriment. She kept it up even when the rest of the audience had stopped laughing. Had they had an argument on the way to the venue?
De Botton’s first question to the audience was – raise your hands if you are married and reasonably happy. Very few hands went up and the audience sniggered.
According to de Botton the problems with contemporary love originated with the 1850’s Romantic movement. He marked it as the point where romantic ideals replaced a more pragmatic approach to love.
The Romantics popularized the idea every one of us has a soulmate waiting in the wings for us. And when we find our soulmate, our loneliness is over because we move into in a coupled world. Another romantic ideal is that real love is instant, euphoric and will last until death do us part.
De Botton maintains that the romantic concept of love changes how we view sex. Sex becomes the consecrating moment of love. And this means that when adultery occurs, it takes on the proportions of a real catastrophe.
In the 1850’s there was the rise of fictional lovers such as Madame Bovary. And like Bovary we think life has gone horribly wrong if we can’t find our soulmate and attain the romantic ideal. Subsequently our love lives have become more difficult. It doesn’t occur to us that the premises we operate on are unrealistic and largely unattainable.
De Botton also pointed out that we are shaped by our childhood experiences of love, especially by what went down in our family and how we first experienced love. We tend to seek out the same type of love we are familiar with. In effect what we are doing is choosing our pain.
Given what he said about sex being the consecrating moment of love, there might be mass confusion going down. I’m thinking that in the present era of quaintly named online dating sites, sex might only be only one or two swipes away but love appears to be somewhat thin on the ground.
Apparently there’s been a recent decline in dating apps over the past few months with many date seekers giving up on apps entirely or using them less. Match Group, the parent company of apps including Hinge and Tinder, experienced a major stock plummet last year.
Other dating apps have also lost their market hold – with women especially – complaining to the press that paid subscriptions have become significantly more expensive. And the free versions of apps just don’t deliver the high numbers of match-ups that they used to.
There’s been numerous articles published recently on how couples actually met. It seems being introduced by friends or acquaintances is pretty common as is simply going to the pub or signing up for a face-to-face meeting group in a café/pub/restaurant. In short many folk seem more interested in going about romance the old school way.
Meantime doomsaying journalists dwell on the worldwide decline of birth rates. Some predict that the human race is no longer interested in partnering up and procreating. It’s often stated that raising children is a major expense and we live in uncertain economic times, dodgy politicians, climate change, fear of the future, famines and brutal ongoing wars. The list goes on and none of it is good.
Augusten Burroughs doesn’t believe in romantic ideals. In his book This Is How he writes, I don’t believe in the concept of a soul mate. Because we are all unique, but we’re also simply too similar. Burroughs reckons we need to get right out of our immediate environment, change our daily routines and go someplace else. This would raise the possibility of meeting someone new. As Burroughs puts it, I believe destiny and chance are the oldest poker buddies in town.
Not much has changed. In History of My Life – written over two centuries ago – Casanova wrote,
What is love? … It is a kind of madness over which philosophy has no power; a sickness to which man is prone at every time of life and which is incurable if it strikes in old age … Bitterness than which nothing is sweeter, sweetness than which nothing is more bitter! Divine monster which can only be defined by paradoxes!’