collected writings

Love Doesn't Exist

It is no accident that love is a four-letter word. Love, as it is viewed in western culture, is responsible for much of the artistic successes and cultural highpoints, but also much of the things that are wrong with society.

The United States should be a very happy country. We take freedoms for granted that, to some end, are not available to the average citizen anywhere else in the world. We live in a society where every material good a person could want is available for the consumer, regardless of creed or class.

We have been responsible for some of the most dramatic philosophical, scientific, and artistic accomplishments the world has ever seen. Almost everything that can be classified as positive, we have.

Yet we also have an extraordinarily high rate of depression. Half of Americans are overweight, and one out of four is obese. A staggering 50% of first marriages are expected to end in divorce. These are not the trappings of a happy, content society.

No one thing is to blame; not the anti-intellectual, anti-establishment nature of American society, not the dearth of emotional or spiritual support, not capitalism, government, education, the old or the young. Even the indicators themselves have been blamed for the lack of general happiness. There are more divorces every year because children grow up in separated homes and view divorce as the norm. This is circular logic.

I would like to offer a new hypothesis for the failure of the American family unit. In light of upcoming Valentine's Day, I would like to blame love.

Love is responsible for the divorce, depression, and general unhappiness of the average American citizen. Well, not completely.

There are many different kinds of love. For example, a certain type of love is behind every piece of western art that has ever been created. Although art in Greek and Roman times represented a different kind of love than what we think of today, it was still love. The love a slave was supposed to feel for his captor, or citizens for their emperor, or humans for a god.

Around the Renaissance, that view of love turned more personal; the love towards objects, the love between two people, and finally, the love of love and the love of art itself. Art would be nowhere without love. Anything that claims to be art and is not related to some kind of love is not art. It's an advertisement.

However, the love I blame for divorce and unhappiness is not the same love. This love is a product of modern western culture. It is a "pure" romantic version of love.

It is Romeo and Juliet without the tragedy, Valentine's Day without the commercialization and loneliness, a never-ending positive without any negative. It is a product of a culture where love conquers all, love is a wild desire, all you need is love.

With respect to The Beatles, life needs a little more than just love to function properly, and relationships built on a fluffy, romantic view of love will not last. Hollywood has made billions playing on the viewers' desire to see love triumph over all adversities. The film that earned the greatest box office revenue is based on exactly that principle: love triumphing, even over death.

It has been engrained in our culture that if you fall in love with someone, you should form a lasting relationship and eventually marry. However, this same culture says that if you fall out of love with the same person, you should end the relationship or end the marriage.

Love is fleeting. A love that seems passionate at first will not keep that intensity forever. Thus the high divorce rate. After that quick period of passion and excitement, love wears off. That is the nature of love.

The idea that if there is no love, there is no relationship and no marriage, is wrong.

We would be better off with a more realistic view of love: An exciting emotional experience, but one that is guaranteed not to last, and one that relationships and entire lives should not be based on. Marriages would last and people would be happy.

Lives are more satisfying when they are based on things like trust, rather than desire, history rather than the future, pride and admiration rather than sacrifice. Imagine it; a romantic comedy based on respect for a partner's abilities and triumphs, rather than love for a partner despite faults and shortcomings. One can only hope.

Trying to make sense of the plot, and to summarize it for this article, is tempting fate. With evident skill, director Crowley pulls us through the twists and turns of bank robberies and love affairs (both successful and disastrous), as well as all the poetry and profanity one could expect from the Irish. "Intermission" is an achievement, in that nothing is lost, when it seems that everything teeters on the brink of collapsing.