The fallacy of romantic love

We had several marriages in the family in the last year or so. Grown children, grandchildren, all in love, all getting married. It's charming and even touching to watch. They promise to love and honor one another. They clearly feel passionately about one another. They announce that they will love each other forever.

From that last sentence, you might easily think that love has something do with getting married and with staying married. We're in an age of romance. We like the idea of passionate feelings sweeping inhibitions away. We like the fantasy that such feelings can endure "forever". People "fall in love" and get married on the basis of such passion and frequently expect to stay married on that basis. The success rate for that belief system is not very high. We have begun to recognize that romantic love is not a good basis or predictor for a lasting marriage. In fact, we might find ourselves singing "What's love got to do with it?"

Part of our difficulty, as usual, lies in the multiple meanings of the word "love". Romantic love is a feeling, and like all feelings, waxes and wanes with time. Usually it includes a fantasy of a perfect union, a closeness unmatched since before our birth. It thrives on mutual admiration and on the capacity to ignore or discount flaws in the other person. Being thought lovable, even being thought perfect and wonderful, was (and is) a pretty intoxicating experience. In particular, when the participants had previously fairly low self-esteem, being in a "romantic" relationship in which they were seen as flawless and perfect had a disproportionately huge effect on their ego. That kind of love, romantic love, can be addictive in the extreme. When romantic love is combined with sexual passion it is one of the most exciting and gratifying experiences one can have.

However, romantic love is not only a feeling that passes and changes as feelings always do, it is based on a fantasy of perfection and mutual adoration that can't be sustained in the real world. It doesn't take long until the image of perfection begins to show signs of damage. When marriages are based on total mutual admiration, they eventually (and usually sooner rather than later) fail. Small wonder that when reality re-enters the picture and the illusion of personal perfection is lost, the person may find him/herself looking for a fix elsewhere. The result is frequently infidelity or perhaps divorce and serial monogamy. The search for the fantasied ideal romantic partner can go on episodically forever.

People in a romantically loving relationship don't necessarily really love each other as individuals, flawed and human. They love the admiration they receive, and they are passionately grateful to the other person for loving them and for the huge ego-boost that such admiration causes. When one or the other person begins to focus on the flaws in their partner, the fantasy of being perfect in their eyes is destroyed, and the disappointment and accompanying anger is sometimes surprising and sudden. All relationships based solely on romantic love are doomed to failure. There is nothing wrong with romantic love. It is simply a terrible basis for an enduring, long-term relationship.

There are other kinds of love than "romantic". It's a shame we use the same word for both unhealthy ("romantic") relationships and the most positive and healthy relationship two people can have. The confusion causes many wrecked lives and much misery. Healthy forms of love have been described many times and in a variety of ways, which I won't bother repeating here. It suffices to say that when we use the word "love" in a healthy relationship, it includes the willingness and even desire to put the other person's welfare in a place of equal importance to one's own. Healthy loving relationships are intimate, trusting and affectionate. Healthy love involves a commitment, not a temporary feeling, and because commitments can be permanent, can remain constant. Loving feelings come, go and return in a healthy relationship but the committed relationship remains constant.

In our romantic age, "falling in love" seems to be a prerequisite for marriage. However, it wasn't that long ago (in my grandparents' youth) when couples married first and developed a lasting relationship later. Many or most of those marriages lasted the lifetime of the partners. "Arranged marriages" didn't require romantic love. They were working partnerships in a difficult world that helped both partners survive on a higher level than they could have achieved alone. The workload was divided between them. In many cases the partners developed a strong, respectful and genuinely loving relationship over time. In other cases, the partners sought the romantic love to which they felt entitled in other relationships outside the marriage.

Among other things, successful marriages are business partnerships. As in all partnerships, workloads must be balanced and rebalanced. Mutual trust and respect is required and have to be earned as well as given. Happily married partners have open-eyed, realistic love AND like for each other, and such liking is harder to find than romantic love by a long shot. Liking one's partner, as I am considering it here, is something that necessarily develops over time. When couples have a romantic love to start their relationship, perhaps the fantasy can buy them the time it takes to fall in "like" with their partner, and then the relationship has a chance at enduring. However, romantic love is a weak reed to lean on; it has an expiration date somewhere in the near future.

The Buck Stops Where?

I remember when the then President of the United States had a sign on his desk that read "The Buck Stops Here". Harry Truman recognized that no matter who gave him information or how he obtained it, the final responsibility for acting on that information was his, and his alone. He did not rely on the doctrine of "plausible denial". The buck simply stopped there.

Now we have a President who acted on flawed and erroneous information. It seems likely that he knew the information was unreliable at best, but for whatever reasons, he used the WMD idea to defend the aggression against Iraq. Now his support staff are acknowledging that their information was wrong, wrong to the point of raising issues of criminal culpability. Why does the buck not stop with Bush?

Having made a major error that cost many lives, he can, of course, dump the blame on his staff, his support staff, CIA and the like. He undoubtedly will, having neither the integrity nor honor of Harry Truman. But. HE acted on that information. It seems clear that a more honorable course of action would be for him to resign. I would prefer to see him impeached with the potential of criminal charges being placed against him. A resignation, however, would restore at least a trace of honor and the remnants of dignity to an increasingly tarnished and tattered office.

Perhaps it is time to begin thinking of reorganizing the election process. The Electoral College system is certainly inequitable and no longer an appropriate means. A four-year term of office allows a President whose reputation and effectiveness are damaged beyond repair to stay in office, like a corpse in a wheelchair, for far too long. Perhaps we could have a system, like the English (in some ways) that would allow for a popular vote of no-confidence, that would require the current government to step down and new elections to be held. If we had such a procedure in place, how long do you think Bush would have been able to remain in office?

Time and past time to resign, Mr. Bush. The best thing you can do for the country, your party and yourself, is to leave office now.

Death rates in Iraq vs. US

Suppose the following imaginary study: A cohort of American men and women living in the US are chosen to match the characteristics of the equivalent group of soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan. Over a one-year period the death rates of the two groups are compared, and it is hypothetically found that the death rates of the US-bound cohort are actually higher than that of the group in Iraq. The US cohort had a higher death rate due to drugs, car accidents, shootings, and the other usual issues that abound among the young everywhere.

So it might turn out that there are FEWER deaths in the military overseas than in the equivalent group in the US, meaning that military service might prove to be safer than young people left on their own here. If that were the case, would your (or my) position regarding the "war" in Iraq change? In other words, would your position regarding the appropriateness of the Iraq war change if it developed that young people were actually safer there than here? Why would it? Or why wouldn't it?

Religion and Magic

It seems pretty obvious that people who profess to be religious fall into several categories. For some, the way of life prescribed by their religion is important in its own right. Their religious beliefs are also an ethical and personal stance. The supernatural part of their belief system is not central to them; they rarely spend much time or energy attempting to make sense out of a supernatural world-view which exists independently of the physical laws of time and space.

For others, religion is simply a socially-acceptable way of believing in magic and the supernatural. This group of people believes that they are individually or as a group "special" and have some kind of entitlement to transcend the laws of reality. They believe they get "special dispensation" and that they can work magic on the universe, causing it to behave as they want it to. No matter how rarely that works, it works by sheer chance often enough that their belief is reinforced. When their prayers or magical chants are not answered as they want, they believe that they have done something wrong or that God (or whoever they believe is "in charge") is refusing their request.

In any case, the magical believers have a special relationship to the universe. They pray for rain, for health, for blessings, for success, for their personal (and frequently petty) little wants and desires. They pray that they will get a job, that someone will get fired, that they will win the lottery, that they won't get caught at whatever they're doing. It's magic, just simply magic. It has NOTHING to do with religious belief. They don't understand that prayer is not about changing the universe to fit their personal needs, that instead prayer is a behavior intended to put them in a proper frame of mind to deal with what comes next in their lives.

It seems to me that the vast majority of people professing religious belief belong to the latter group. They are essentially still primitive in their moral and ethical beliefs, still naive about how the laws of nature work, feeling special and "entitled". Most of them don't even pretend to live according to the rules of their religion, because for them religion is about getting what they want, not about living "right." They are the same people who buy lottery tickets, who gamble at Las Vegas, who believe in their hearts that since they are "special" they will get a better deal than the rest of us. It's amazing that in spite of all the evidence they never seem to get discouraged.