The Future of Love

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And, judging from the army of psychologists, therapists, clergy, and other experts who can be found dispensing guidance on the subject, the effort to save--or reinvent, depending on who's doing the talking--love and marriage has become a multimillion dollar industry. The advice spans the spectrum. There's everything from Rules, by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, a popular new book which gives 90's women 50's-style tips on how to catch and keep their man, to Harville Hendrix's Getting The Love You Want, and other guides to "conscious love." But regardless of perspective, this much is clear: Never before have our most intimate thoughts and actions been so thoroughly dissected, analyzed, scrutinized and medicalized. Now, people who fall madly in love over and over are called romance addicts. Their disease, modeled on alcoholism and other chemical dependencies, is considered "progressive and fatal."

Not everyone believes the attempt to deconstruct love is a good thing. The late philosopher Christopher Lasch wrote in his final (and newly released) book, Women And The Common Life: "The exposure of sexual life to scientific scrutiny contributed to the rationalization, not the liberation, of emotional life." His daughter, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, an historian at Syracuse University and the editor of the book, agrees. She contends that the progressive demystification of passionate life since Freud has promoted an asexual, dispassionate and utilitarian form of love. Moreover, like her father, she believes that the national malaise about romance can be attributed to insidious therapeutic modes of social control--a series of mechanisms that have reduced the citizen to a consumer of expertise. "We have fragmented life in such a way," she says, "as to take passion out of our experience."

Admittedly, it's a stretch to picture a lovesick 12th century French troubadour in a 12-step program for romance addicts. Still, we can't overlook the fact that our society's past efforts to fuse together those historically odd bedfellows--passionate love and marriage--have failed miserably. And though it's impossible to know whether all the attention currently being showered on relationships is the last gasp of a dying social order--marriage--or the first glimmer of a new paradigm for relating to one another, it's obvious that something radically different is needed.

For one thing, many of us raised in the stultifying, claustrophobic nuclear families that were glorified in the '50s and `60s sitcoms but were, in fact , far less than glorious, have tried it all: Bob and Carol; Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice; Bob and Ted, Carol and Alice; and just plain Bob. Or Alice. And still we're searching.

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