问答题 11 When we talk about the danger of romantic love, we don"t mean danger in the obvious heartbreak wag—the cheap betrayals, the broken promises—we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible, educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. Every day, thousands of films, books, articles and TV programs hammer home this message—that without romance, life is somehow barren.
However, there are women who entertain the subversive notion, like an intellectual mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. 12 Their empirical side kicks in and they observe that couples who marry in a haze of adoration and sex are, ten years later throwing china and fighting bitterly over who gets the dog.
13 But the women who notice these contradictions are often afraid to speak them in case they should be labelled cynics. Surely only the most jaded and damaged would challenge the orthodoxy of romantic love. The received wisdom that there is not something wrong with the modern idea of sexual love as ultimate panacea, but that if you don"t get it, there is something wrong with you. You freak, go back and read the label. 14 We say: the privileging of romantic love over all others, the insistence that it is the one essential incontrovertible element of human happiness, traced all the way back to the caves, is a trap and a snare. The idea that every human heart, since the invention of the wheel, was yearning for its other half is a myth.
15 Love is a human constant; it is the interpretation of it that changes. The way that love has been expressed, its significance in daily life have never been immutable or constant. The different kind of love and what they signify are not fixed, whatever the traditionalists may like to tell you. So the modern idea that romantic love is a woman"s highest calling, that she is somehow only half a person without it that if she questions it she is going against all human history, does not stand up to scrutiny. It is not an imperative carved in stone; it is a human idea, and human beings are frail and suggestible and sometimes get the wrong end of the stick.