Page 5 - Advanced Romance

2 Advanced Romance*
Since the 1960s people are breaking up or divorcing at rates much higher than previous decades and centuries. And the resultant suffering leads to such extreme emotions. At one moment you love a person more than anyone you’ve ever loved. At the next moment you may hate them more than anyone you’ve ever hated. Multiplied tens of millions of times, the negative effect these extremes have on our national community is gargantuan. Can we decrease the suffering? Is there something left to salvage from the bold experiments of the `60s?
I believe so. I believe that it’s a matter of looking
at romantic love much more objectively. It’s a matter
of applying courageous freethinking to expose fundamentalisms that are camouflaged by the wondrous passions of romance.
One way to maximize freethinking is to be able to see where fundamentalisms—thought prisons—prevent it. The word “fundamentalist” is usually applied to someone whose freethinking is constrained—rightly or wrongly— by religion, but fundamentalisms occur in many other areas. Fundamentalism for our purposes are attitudes that you don’t question because of traditional sacredness, fears of being ostracized as immoral, or due to impenetrable cultural taboos. What I call romantic fundamentalism contains, to some extent, all three areas. It’s sacred in a secular sense. It may be the strongest secular religion in America. It is the promise that you’ll