Marcus Collins: _Modern Love_
I was considering posting this before, but a conversation with a friend this morning convinced me. It seems to me as if many/most of my friends have admirable lives, but remain dissatisfied as a result of the ongoing frustrated quest for the optimal personal relationship. I've abandoned said venture myself, but on lj and in conversations it constantly comes up as the one sore point, the one place where people don't get "what they're doing wrong."
Perhaps an historical perspective would help.
Such a perspective is offered in the first book by young scholar Marcus Collins in Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2003, Newark, DL, 2006). The English edition sells at the shockingly low price of 8.99 Pounds, or less than $20 (almost free, by the standards of scholarly monographs). Collins argues that mutuality represented a significant missing link between Victorian models of personal relationships and our own: mutuality being Collins’ term for the widespread notion among self-styled progressives that a combination of mixing, companionate marriage and shared sexual pleasure would forge an intimate equality between women and men. In doing so, thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century set up an impossible, utopian set of expectations for relationships which has led to an almost complete collapse of lifelong companionships. From mutuality, then, we have moved to an ideal of autonomy, wherein each individual is expected to achieve an (again, impossible) level of self-sufficiency, and only contract with partners to meet specific needs. "An atomized society," he argues at the end of the book, "prized connection as an alternative to loneliness and doubt and living alone remained a luxury resembling a privation, involving ceaseless single supplements as well as detrimental physical and psychological effects."
In short, if you want it to last, don't expect so much from it for so long. Just what I've been saying all along.
Perhaps an historical perspective would help.
Such a perspective is offered in the first book by young scholar Marcus Collins in Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 2003, Newark, DL, 2006). The English edition sells at the shockingly low price of 8.99 Pounds, or less than $20 (almost free, by the standards of scholarly monographs). Collins argues that mutuality represented a significant missing link between Victorian models of personal relationships and our own: mutuality being Collins’ term for the widespread notion among self-styled progressives that a combination of mixing, companionate marriage and shared sexual pleasure would forge an intimate equality between women and men. In doing so, thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th century set up an impossible, utopian set of expectations for relationships which has led to an almost complete collapse of lifelong companionships. From mutuality, then, we have moved to an ideal of autonomy, wherein each individual is expected to achieve an (again, impossible) level of self-sufficiency, and only contract with partners to meet specific needs. "An atomized society," he argues at the end of the book, "prized connection as an alternative to loneliness and doubt and living alone remained a luxury resembling a privation, involving ceaseless single supplements as well as detrimental physical and psychological effects."
In short, if you want it to last, don't expect so much from it for so long. Just what I've been saying all along.