The millennium is a time for big thoughts. But there is one thing we hardly stop to question, because it seems to have been forever a part of our human landscape-and that is our habit of falling in love. For many people this is the most volcanic and compulsive experience of their lives, often dragging untold consequences in its wake. At its happiest, there is no joy so glittering, so plangently memorable; for all the agonies it may trail behind it, the early stage of love offers lovers impassioned sex, a heady measure of self-esteem, raging energy, capacious generosity, a profound sense of the value of another person, the conviction of being truly alive. This is happiness, and happiness is good for us. But at its worst, falling into unrequited love, or into a love later rejected, can generate pain so terrible that the lover is shaken by turmoil or frozen in grief. Love leads to abandonment, desolation, humiliation, despair-often illness, depression and sometimes suicide. Of course love is not always like this; its range is vast and it may emerge as no more than a passing interlude, bitter or sweet, and easily forgotten. However, great or small, happy or wretched, this phase of falling in love is brief, illusory, self-absorbing, obsessional, irresponsible-and inordinately time-consuming. Perhaps we should do something about it?
But if falling in love is the ancient experience it appears to be (in the west we go back not only to 12th century Provence, but to Homer at least), then our attempts to abolish it or ignore it will founder. If love is rooted in a process which evolved to care for the helpless human infant, if it is inextricably tied into our infant experience of trust, if indeed it is directed by unconscious archetypes and "love-maps," then how can we change it?
Despite the huge cultural edifices we build around love, it does look as though its substance billows out of our remote ancestral past; moulded, modified, up to a point refined, but indelibly ancient and intractable. The core emotions-sexual passion, ecstasy and despair, jealousy and rage-are still housed in the hypothalamus of the "old" brain. Of course, the activity of the hypothalamus is profoundly influenced by its environment, but it is not obvious that this cultural counter-traffic could ever be dominant enough to overwhelm the unruly material that lurks within.
So if we accept that love is here to stay, we could perhaps try for a more wary, detached, informed, and rational view of what it does to us. Falling in love can be a route to self-knowledge, just as self-knowledge can be brought to bear upon love. If our expectations could be less rosy, if we could learn to stand a step or two outside as we begin to "fall," if we could allow some play of irony to lighten our reverence, if we could understand that in love we do not see the beloved plain but in an unearthly light, then, perhaps, this phase of love could be brought a touch under control. Its landscape would be drabber, but we might be saved from some of its disillusions, treacheries and agonies.
Other thinkers, however, believe that we have no human "core" in rooted passions-we make our own destiny. Romantic love is therefore largely a cultural structure, long ago created and encouraged for social and political ends, and varying at different periods in character and significance. Because we have created it, so with clear and determined action we can dispose of it. If we could interest ourselves in affectionate, free-wheeling sexual relationships, open and malleable, without commitment to "forever" yet containing the trust and companionship necessary for lasting friendship (and child-rearing?), then we could be free of love's disruptions in personal and social life, and free of the imprisonment brought upon us by its brilliant illusory lure. We would be free of its slavery, its blindness, its emotional knots of fidelity and betrayal. In order to achieve this, we would have to assess each relationship deeply and openly, agreeing on its boundaries. Lovers would be equal and free, offering each other autonomy and respect, clean of the old complexities. No one, I think, claims that this would be easy. Cultural structures can become so deeply embedded that they appear to be innate-history becomes nature. None the less, the argument runs, falling in love is basically cultural, so it could be greatly changed, or even abolished.
The world outside seems to howl for love and more love, for romance and more romance. Yet there are hints that our ancient reverence for romantic love is falling away. Among the young, new ways of living an affectionate, sexual life are on trial without lifelong commitment, without gender imbalances, without sexual exclusiveness, without the self-absorption of being "in love."
So there are three courses open to us. We can remain as we are, taking love as it comes, in all its glory and its pain; or we can go along with it but try for a little detachment; or we can join the attempt to dispose of it altogether. Most of us will stick with what we know. But a millennium offers an august moment for a fine New Year's resolution: make love more rational.
