The Love Paradox
Romantic marriage is a relatively new concept—one that has fully consumed Western culture, and whose mixed success record belies the complexity beneath its central truth.
Western history is replete with stories that extoll romantic love and relationships.
Whether it’s Shakespeare, Hollywood, poetry, ballads, valentines or books, every last one of these treats love (and honoring it, through marriage) as the acme of human focus and achievement.
It’s understandable. The entire animal kingdom lives to breed, and quite literally breeds to live.
But.
Initially, marriage was a way of bonding families and communities for mutual long-term benefit, whether it was “to make political alliances, to raise capital or to expand the workforce,” per Stephanie Coontz, author of Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage.
Only recently did the pragmatism of finding and negotiating a lifelong partnership find its way to the thoroughly modern Western concept of romantic love, which trades on the idea of a singular soulmate that can answer every need in one human package.
