Summary of the Future of Love

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In, “The Future of Love: Kiss Romance Goodbye, It’s Time for the Real Thing,” Barbara Graham talks about the delicate subject of love, and its recent alliance with marriage. Graham’s estimation has quite a few valid points, yet, there are still some aspects that can be disputed. As Americans, we crave romantic love; but we have unreal expectations based upon idealized images of love we; earn from fantasies and fairy tales. Americans feel as if this thing that we call love is supposed to happen and last forever. Love id simply too powerful and anarchic, too shattering and exquisite, to be bound by anything so conventional as marriage or a long term domestic arrangement. We expect the passionate love of fairy tales to lead to “happily ever after” in the institution of marriage, and when this fails, we move on and try again. Ironically, the idea that marriage should be based on love-rather than upon social and economic concerns-is a relatively recent practice in Western history. We let movies and the media lead our thoughts on how we should love and why we should get married, never marring for the right reasons. Marriage was designed to serve the economic and social needs of families, communities, and religious institutions, and have little or nothing to do with love. Biochemists are discovering that love and lust have hormonal causes, and their evidence suggests that our biological makeup predisposes us to seek the excitement of short-term relationships. We want love and lust for one another, but we are made to have short relationships, it’s in our genes. Human pair-bonds originally evolved according to “the ancient blueprint of serial monogamy and clandestine adultery” and are originally meant to last four years. Despite all the difficulties, we spend a lot of time analyzing the elements of relationships in order to preserve or perhaps reinvent marriage. We
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