Why Modern Love Hurts So Much

What’s the Latest Development?

Everything we tell ourselves about modern love may be misguided, causing us pain and hardship along the way. The ideal of our age, which informs our view of society, remains the individual. Strong and independent, the individual believes society is no longer in the business of fixing marriage, at least not as the economic exchange it once was, and that he or she is free to marry for love. If love is not found, the problem likely lives in the individual and all the terrible things that befell him or her during the trauma of childhood. Now a large psychiatric industry has grown up around solving the medical condition of being out of love. 

What’s the Big Idea?

It is essential, if we are to free ourselves from our delusions of romantic love, to see the individual through the lens of popular culture. In other words, the individual has become an exaggerated figure that now forms part of a larger political and economic project. “May we all recognize the pressures we put both on ourselves and on our lovers and may we reject them for greater happiness. … Love is a greater thing than arranged marriage, and it’s a greater thing than daddy issues and attachment theory. It can transcend it all, as long as you know what the true barriers are.”

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