[...] 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 experienced as “enchantment,” a surrender of reason and the self? I argue here that the loss of power of love to generate romantic beliefs is the result of the rationalization of such beliefs in the three arenas of science, technology, and politics.

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 to sharing an identity with another human being,”18 in contemporary psychological culture, suffering no longer signals an emotional experience stretching above and beyond the boundaries of the self: that is, it is no longer the sign of selfless devotion or of an elevated soul. Such love – based on self-sacrifice, fusion, and longing for absoluteness – came to be viewed as the symptom of an incomplete emotional development. The cultural equation of love with suffering is similar to the equation of love with an experience of both transcendence and consummation in which love is affirmed in an ostentatious display of self-loss.19 Utilitarian models of the polity were transposed to the psyche, and in this new therapeutic culture, ideals of self-sacrifice and self-abandonment were held to be the illegitimate sign of an unhealthy psyche (or a sign that one “suffered” to get some hidden psychic benefit), and hence deeply suspect since autonomy and the capacity to preserve one’s self-interest have become synonymous with mental health.