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[...] Modern selves are infinitely better equipped to deal with the repeated experiences of abandonment, break-ups, or betrayals than ever in the past through detachment, autonomy, hedonism, cynicism, and irony. In fact, from a young age, most people expect the road to romantic love to be a highly …

A third way that psychology has contributed to rationalizing the experience of love is that it deems romantic suffering an unacceptable and unjustifiable symptom, emanating from insufficiently mature psyches. Whereas “pain was an absolutely normal part of the nineteenth-century emotional response t…

[...] the “enchanted” experience of love and romance has become difficult to subscribe to. That is, although love may remain a very meaningful experience for most people, it does not engage and mobilize the totality of the self. This in turn raises the question: Why has love lost its capacity to be…

Many elements make this story typical of a certain pattern in the relationships between men and women. The woman here is swayed by the man: that is, she is persuaded to enter the relationship. What persuades her to enter the relationship is not a mystery; it is the fact that it endows her with abun…

Modern romantic suffering is also to be excised, but with radically different models of the self: it is to be excised in the name of a utilitarian and hedonist model of the healthy psyche in which suffering marks either a fl awed psychological development or a fundamental threat to one’s sense of s…