Andrew Sullivan wrote this rant a couple of years ago, deploring the “cult of romantic love”.
The love celebrated on Valentine’s Day conquers nothing. It contains neither the friendship nor civility that makes marriage successful. It fulfills the way a drug fulfills — requiring new infusions to sustain the high. It prettifies sex, but doesn’t remove sex’s danger or lust. And by elevating it to a personal and cultural panacea, we suffer the permanent disappointment of excessive expectations, with all of their doleful social consequences. Less — affection, caring, friendship, the small favors of a husband for a wife after 30 years of marriage — is far more. And by knocking romance off its Hallmark pedestal, we might go some small way to restoring the importance and dignity of these less glamorous but more fulfilling relationships. “If love were all,” Noel Coward once wrote, “I should be lonely.” But it isn’t. And nobody else’s Valentine card should persuade you that loneliness is the only alternative.
