When Did Falling in Love Become an Excuse for Bad Behaviour?

It’s interesting, what is and is not taboo. It’s a moving feast of dichotomies, and cyclical. What got you hanged a century ago could put you on the front cover of Time magazine today in tribute.

And so it is with love.

Divorce — not all that long ago — would see you socially ostracised. Leaving your wife and kids to fend for themselves would end your professional career, and your membership at the invitation-only golf club.

It’s the opposite now. If you’re in love, you can do whatever the hell you like.

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You can even be open about the agony you have caused others. You know they are in pain, and that pains you, but love is love and we all fall victim to its demands eventually.

I consider myself a bona fide romantic, but even I baulk at these particular whims of the zeitgeist.

Love, unfortunately, is fickle and we, unfortunately, are fickle.

A crime of passion is still a crime. The passion is a mitigating circumstance.

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Aterrible inconsistency has developed on our watch. We apply all these requirements to relationships but celebrate those leaving them at the drop of a hat. It doesn’t make sense. Where’s the incentive even to try?

The root cause of all this misery is the Romeo & Juliet vision of love which conquers all. It gained traction in the late nineteenth century — the Romanticism movement — and it has become our new religion.

Combined with the individualism of the age, it creates a terrible mess, and no one is quite sure what to do about it. But there are plenty of us who are willing to exploit the fragility of the system.

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Romanticism is an ideology. It tells us we should believe in love at first sight. It tells us that chemistry is everything: when you know, you know. Everything else — long-term compatibility, geographical logistics, money worries, attitudes towards the nuclear family, lifestyle expectations — all these mere details will fall into place because we are in love and we have found our soulmate.

It’s all decidedly teenage, but as adults we have swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

Yet it’s not so much an expression of individualism. Individualism involves the exercise of autonomy, like making a choice, but this version of love is purely chemical and random.

And the irony is that Romanticism is the reason most relationships come to an end, not least because Romanticism is an ideology which legitimises affairs.

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The more sensible of us know that having an affair is a choice — a selfish one at that — and that the people who have them have their brains set to “affair-ready” mode long before they seize upon an opportunity to start one.

Nothing — not even the Immaculate Conception itself — just happens.

But, more often than not, the language used to justify the inevitable hurt and pain affairs cause to others is the language of the nineteenth century Romantics.

Their love is so giddy and passionate and intense they are not in control of themselves. Gone is their rational mind which can evaluate consequences. They are subjugated by their love.

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Love — it is implied — is a drug addiction.

Lurking behind the veneer of a love which conquers all before it — like some sort of hellish juggernaut, or perhaps a bulldozer — is a plea for mercy. It goes something like this:

“We didn’t have an affair, we fell in love. And I can’t apologise for that because it was not in my control. Love made me do it!”

Love, so the argument goes, makes victims of us all. Except that it doesn’t. It is, in its current guise, high stakes poker and there will be winners and there will be losers. And like a game of Snakes & Ladders, you can be up and then, at a moment’s notice, you can be down.

That’s the consequence of hanging our hat on this particular shoogly peg. The glorious fire of an early days romance peters out eventually. Some of us enjoy the cozy warm embers that remain, knowing they can be prodded occasionally to seduce back some of the original magical spark. Others pine for a firework display.

This will sound harsh, but part of me pities the people who jump from relationship to relationship, from marriage to marriage. I find myself thinking: you’re leaving the party early, you’re leaving before you get to the really good stuff. The intoxication of the initial high is a pretty shallow level of enjoyment, really.

But we are where we are, and this particular formulation of relationship conduct has some way to run yet. And the people who suffer aren’t the ones feeling “re-born” in their new relationship, telling their previous partner and their children and their colleagues — anyone who will listen, really — they’ve never been so happy. No, the people who suffer are those who find themselves tossed aside. They are expected to dust themselves off — “These things happen!” — and make something of the shattered pieces which remain.

And we wonder why family estrangements are so prevalent in the modern age.

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There is an emerging political trend to make certain relationship behaviours criminal offences: coercion and control, emotional abuse, narcissistic thuggery — all the hot topics of the age.

I can’t help thinking it’s putting the cart before the horse. Don’t we need to educate ourselves, first, about what it takes to keep a relationship up and running and, indeed, healthy.

They don’t teach that kind of stuff at school and yet relationships are the foundation upon which most of our lives are based.

It is, again, the consequence of our over-reliance on the Romantic ideal: namely, you don’t need to work at it, or learn about it, because it just is — and if it’s not working, it’s not real love.

Actually, Romanticism (and the assumptions which underpin it) is these days a comfort blanket which robs us of the curiosity needed to learn about building long-term, satisfying relationships.

Our modern romantic culture! One day, they’ll look back and think we were all nuts.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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