Author: Sophie Hemery / Source: Big Think
Can you imagine a world without heartbreak? Not without sadness, disappointment or regret – but a world without the sinking, searing, all-consuming ache of lost love. A world without heartbreak is also a world where simple acts cannot be transformed, as if by sorcery, into moments of sublime significance.
Because a world without heartbreak is a world without love – isn’t it?More precisely, it might be a world without love’s most adulated form: romantic love. For many people, romantic love is the pinnacle of human experience. But feelings don’t exist in a cultural void. The heartbreak-kind of love is a relatively new and culturally specific experience, masquerading as the universal meaning of life.
In Western culture, hegemonic romantic love is marked by what the American psychologist Dorothy Tennov in 1979 called ‘limerence’ or all-consuming romantic and sexual passion, which ideally evolves into a monogamous partnership and often marriage. Thus, in increasingly secular, unspiritual and atomised cultures, romantic love becomes deified.
Being in love, according to scientists, does have a biological basis, but how we experience it is not inevitable. For much of human history, what we call romantic love today would have been called an illness; marriage was about assets and reproduction.
The Industrial Revolution changed things. New economic realities and Enlightenment values about individual happiness meant that romantic love mattered. While marriage remained – and remains – closely tied to patriarchal control, it attained a new quality. Lifelong emotional, intellectual and sexual fulfilment – and monogamy for men, not only for women – became the ideal. Ever since, this kind of relationship has been propagated by capitalist culture.
The fact that heartbreak is linked to this recent romantic history is unlikely to be much comfort to those in despair. The fact that emotions are refracted through culture probably won’t reduce their potency.
There is little beside romantic love that many will pursue so doggedly, knowing it is likely to result in agony. Whether through conflict, betrayal or separation, love is almost certain to end in heartbreak. Even in ‘successful’ partnerships, someone’s going to die eventually. It’s no wonder heartbreak is readily accepted as the price of romantic love; we are socialised to believe that this kind of relationship is our raison d’être.
But heartbreak isn’t the only problem with our romantic scripts. Conventional romantic love is rooted in oppressive structures. Burdens of emotional and domestic labour still fall disproportionately on women. White, nondisabled, cis, monogamous, thin, heterosexual couples (ideally married with children) are held up as the loving ideal, with people who don’t fit this mould often discriminated against. Those who don’t have romantic or sexual partnerships at all, whether by choice or not, can feel alienated and alone, despite having other meaningful relationships.
Even if we could salvage romantic love from its worst bedfellows – for example, if we eliminated its heterosexism – the fact remains: it is likely to end in…
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