The vicious Hollywood lie of "true love"

[ianvass]

Recent events in my extended family have had me pondering the word love and how our society sees it. It’s one of those words that defies the best definitions as it seems to encompass much more than mere words can convey, but I think it can be easier to say what love is NOT.

I think one of the single most deceptive (and destructive) phrases in our

Comments

[thesslea]

I would agree and disagree with this. Love is a feeling -- you can't control your feelings. They aren't rational, which is what makes them feelings. You can control your actions. So, once you have a feeling, you can then step back and say, "what is the best and most proper response to this feeling". Or, at least, that is the ideal.

Long term relationships are about making consistent choices to enhance the good feelings you have between one another; choices that respect the commitments and agreements you have made with one another. A purely rational relationship is no more healthy than a purely emotional one.

I would go further and say "true love" encompasses the entirety of our beings (physical, emotional, spiritual, and mental) to create a full and complete experience. Any time one of these aspects is excluded or over-emphasized, the relationship will lack the balance and fullness to truly thrive. Only when you have included all aspects of yourself would I say you have achieved "true love" in your life.

[ianvass]

This perspective is an entirely Western one. I would hesitate to say that no one has discovered the secret of true love until we did.

Fact: Arranged marriages have been around for a looooong time, much longer than our concept of dating until you find "true love" has.

Fact: Arranged marriages work. Their divorce rates are much lower than our own. I am aware that some of that is due to women not being empowered enough to be able to leave an abusive relationship, but that isn't all of it.

In Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye sings to Golda, "But my father and my mother said we'd learn to love each other.". In arranged marriages, the expectation is that they don't love each other at first, but that they can learn to love each other

[thesslea]

but you are also over looking the fact that cultures with arranged marriages also typically have a much more tolerant view of infidelity, concubines, and/or houses of ill repute (at least for the men). when marriage is viewed as purely a social contract or method of gaining either power or wealth, it is often separated from the impulse of feelling. but that doesn't mean the feelings aren't still there or being acted on, just not within the marriage. it's just like the arguments against todayls high rate of divorce. sure, people used to get divorced less frequently, but they died more frequently too! plenty of people had step parents, because life was just more dangerous than it is now.

i'm not saying this is true of all arrranged marriages, nor do i disagree with ypur basic premise, relationships are generally going to last based on our choices rather than just our feelings. but i think you also have to look at the whole picture, which does include a double standard of infidelity.

[ianvass]

You are absolutely correct, but there WERE cultures that had arranged marriages (where the woman still had the power to say "No" to any arrangement her parents made for her) AND took a very dim view of infidelity. In those cases, a very large percentage of these people did learn to love each other and had very successful marriages. That's a generalization, of course - the devil is always in the details and there are always exceptions to every rule.

I would argue that the cultures with the double standard of infidelity undermined the innate power in telling people "You have to learn to love each other", and thus those that participated in such activities were divorced emotionally if not physically/legally.

Love on the Radio.

[g_whiz]

Good post, and something I've thought about alot. The concept of love has indeed changed a great deal over the last century, and as more individual freedoms (i.e- Women not being beholden to men to subsist) are gained, the ...simple acquiessences people had to endure lessen. I think all the things you say above are true; the idea of love we've been sold on the radio is false, romantic comedies only show one aspect of love, and not the enduring longevic conjugal love needed to maintain a long term relationship. This is unfortunate because its not often understood that the "new car smell" people are familar with at the beginning of an affair isn't entirely practical to have for the entirety of a longterm relationship. When people say "I love you, but I'm not in LOVE with you" there's room for pause. The meanings and expectations of love are numerous and conficting. And in my opinion often as loaded as the hollywood myths you point to in your entry.

G