Is love still built to last?

March 24th, 2007

Here’s an interesting article about love, marriage and sex.

Quoting Californian Couple’s therapist Marty Klein:

Klein says his boomer generation is the first to marry for love, expect hot sex with the same partner, and live for an extremely long time.
Is this want-it-all concept working for today’s marriages? Not particularly well, according to Klein, citing statistics that suggest about 50 per cent of marriages end in some form of separation, and more than 50 per cent of boomer adults are not monogamous.

What most experts forget to mention when discussing our generation’s high divorce record is that divorce was practically socially unacceptable up until the latter half of the 20th century. People weren’t happier then, they were just less likely to be able to do anything about it, unless one of them died. In a country like America (and, by the way, Israel) where people are socially pushed into marriage and see it as an integral part of any relationship, you’re bound to end up with a higher divorce rate, as people discover they’ve made a mistake (or simply grown apart) and break up. Alternatively, they choose to keep the security of married/attached life, while getting their excitement by having illicit affairs.

I think it was Jung who theorised that relationships are a tool for growth and tend to end when the mutual lesson that needed to be learned is over (please correct me if I’m wrong) and although I don’t believe all relationships are like that, I do believe many of them are. I often wonder whether social conventions can sometimes stand in the way of allowing us to discover what we need to make us happy. Polygamy was widely practiced in times women were still being treated as property and the message brought forward was that women were monogamous by nature and men were polygamous by nature. This has now been disproved (as if women didn’t already know this). So now both men and women are known to cheat on each other, break up when things go wrong or even, in some cases, have open relationship.

When monogamy was introduced, the attached narrative told us that love is forever, because it made sense for people to believe their relationships were made to last. As the article referenced above says, marriage was often a matter of politics or economics. Maybe the happily ever after narrative was designed to support long-term monogamy as a concept?

It wasn’t just love that was assumed to be forever-lasting up until the late half of the 20th century, everything was built to last: appliances, careers, clothes, they were all presumed to be made for life. Nowadays with our disposable, throw-away culture, could it be that we have learned to throw away anything that doesn’t instantly please us without giving it a proper chance? Is the problem our inability (or unwillingness) to stay put and fix our broken relationships or are dated, unattainable ideals keeping us from progressing and accepting the fact that love may not last forever?

Related posts:

1. Dodgy press releases (again)
2. True love online – not just for gorillas

Entry Filed under: Relationships and dating