When It Comes to Marriage, Love Isn't All You Need

Antonia Senior asks the question in today’s London Times: What’s romantic love got to do with it?

I’m not sure it’s fair to blame the Beatles. Ouch! Senior writes: The worst, most evil ideology to have been spawned by the drug-addled decade is summed up, aptly, by the Beatles. “All you need is love.”

This is one tough lady! And no— Senior isn’t making a case for arranged marriage. But she rightfully challenges what she calls our collective pursuit of a “ditsy, sugar-crusted fairytale”, resulting in our basing an “entire civilization on the idealized pursuit of a temporary hormonal imbalance in the brain.”

Antonia asks women what we tolerate in the name of love? To be honest, I don’t believe this question was invented in the sixties? I believe that Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir dove in, straight to the heart of a pre-existing condition.

Expectations of modern marriage are changing dramatically, in the pursuit of romantic love. (Photo: Naum Kazhdan/The New York Times)

Women have “tolerated” a host of unmentionables for thousands of years, and not with the unleashing of the second wave of feminism.

Antonia Senior does hit pay dirt when she asks about the rest of marriage, the host of modern attributes necessary to a successful marriage: duty, honour and respect. We must admit that this words are comparatively gone from our vocab.

Unlike our writer, I don’t suggest that romantic love borderlines on irrelevant. Quite the opposite.

When love ideally evolves into something much richer — more profound but more difficult, as Rutgers anthropologist Helen Fisher explains in this TED Talk — we cannot leave hormones behind.

Helen Fisher tells us why we love + cheat

What Antonia Senior seems to embrace— a reality that men lament — is that passion ‘naturally’ ceases to exist in the pursuit of duty and honour, and we should all stop worrying about it and accept reality.

While I agree with her that women especially do stupid things — like accepting abuse — in the pursuit of romantic love, I leave her when marriage becomes only an institution.

In addition, abuse — as we see vividly when 20 women are stripped on the streets of Uganada a week ago — is equally tied to duty, honour and respect.  Given our immersion in international women’s rights issues, it chills me that Senior fails to acknowledge that these “lofty” words are a double-edged sword for women.

The challenge for us all is how to create a vibrant and rich union — if marriage inspires us — that lasts a long time and meets a complex set of human needs.

In our pursuit of modern love, the very institution of marriage is left behind. The trend is much stronger in Europe, but the reality is that marriage is under the microscope globally. Japanese women are divorcing in droves. In Singapore, the government gives major financial incentives for couples to have children.

The children question is the most relevant to the future of civilization. The National Marriage Project — which seems to be limping some at Rutgers with the departure of Barbara Defoe Whitehead to direct the John Templeton Center for Thrift and Generosity — has charted and written about the evolving romantic concept of the romantic marriage between two professionals who choose not to have children. (Note very readable and interesting PDFs that I’ve used in my consulting practice are available for downloading.)

Gold wedding cake with chocolate leaves via Flickr’s Herbert HarperEven young people who assume they will have children, now say that finding a marital soulmate is at the top of their agenda.

I argue in almost every page of this website, that we must trick the brain, understanding that the early hormonal imbalance, as Senior calls it, belongs in marriage. Now that divorce is relatively easy, people do seek romance in marriage.

Rather than getting realistic, or “growing up” and acting “mature” in our expectations of romance in marriage — especially the sexual component — I side with Helen Fisher, who I believe best understands the intersections of demanding hormones, far better than London Times writer Antonia Senior.

We’ve opened Pandora’s Box on the subject of hormones and the brain — allowing the reality of human needs, expectations, and brain chemistry to be viewed in the light of day and under the microscope, or brain scans, as Dr. Fisher uses in her research to understand what really happening in our minds.

The challenge is how to make this complicated love-romance-sex-marriage mosaic work, without the “help” of modern marketers creating false expectations that only fuel our unhappiness when Cinderella’s life doesn’t work out as promised. Anne