Why we idolize romantic relationships
An attempt to clarify my thinking
It's all very well for us, or me, to say things like "I think we (as a culture, in the West) tend to idolise romantic love and/or marriage", but as a statement that doesn't get us very far. It's a kind of complaint, but it doesn't really offer a solution, especially if you're a single person who is listening to a married person, thinking "well, it's all very well for you to say that, you've got that but I don't". And so today I want to try to sketch out a bit of an argument for why we idolise romantic relationships. I'm pretty sure I'm not saying anything new here, but I’m trying to collate some of my thoughts on how we got here.
Disenchantment leaves most of us without a felt-sense of the divine
As every idea that's making its way around, every man and their dog seems to be channelling Charles Taylor's thousands of pages "A Secular Age" and its derivative offspring. But that's partly because it really is a profound book with a profound thesis. For our purposes, I think it is true that we live an age in which the mental categories which typified previous eras are simply no longer available to us, and part of that secularisation means that our felt-presence of holy things is greatly diminished. So our sense that God is real, despite our affirmations of faith, is more abstract and intellectual and less experiential. This is the effect of disenchantment.
We collapsed the domain of friendship
Even when C.S. Lewis was writing The Four Loves, he could critique people for reading same-sex friendships as sexual. That's true of gay readings of Achilles and Patroclus, of Jonathan and David, and of Frodo and Samwise. [I don't think Achilles and Patroclus were real people, but I also think that you could read the Iliad that way. Jonathan/David I think weren't really friends at all, but Jonathan had a one-sided devotion to David which David never really reciprocated. Frodo and Sam are the best example for this argument, because there's no way in hell that Tolkien considered them lovers.]
But the point is this: we read close friendship as underlyingly sexual because we don't/can't conceive of a friendship that deep and powerful and so we have no other category to reach for. And yet in plenty of past ages, if you read the things people wrote to one another, they clearly did have friendships so deep and intense, and yet they were friendships, not romances.
It's our loss of both the category of friendship, and the societal loosening of friendship ties as well, that again truncates our realms of love.
This might be another post, but there does seem to be a plethora of books and posts and writing advocating for friendship these days, which is great, I think that's a good thing. But there is also a danger that we'll see friendship as the cure-all for the failure of romance, and that's not really true either.
Where early Christianity ennobled the estate of singleness, and made it a real, 'live' option for human beings in society, a single/celibate existence has no rationale in today's society, inside and outside the church
Within Greco-Roman society, which is the area of history I know best, it really is somewhat inconceivable to remain an unmarried adult. Remarriage rates were high, especially for women of child-bearing age. Christianity did change that, and especially from late antiquity the emergence of various forms of professed singleness represent a new phenomenon. But here in 2024 I think the idea of a single and celibate life makes little sense to most people outside the church, and is seen as a niche and somewhat unideal reality within protestant churches broadly. But see my point below.
At least within WEIRD culture, ties to family and family bonds are also weaker than before, and weaker than other cultures.
Western individualism means that family ties are also weaker, both than past times, and compared to more traditional cultures. We are more willing to ignore the demands of family relationships, and think doing so is heroic and authentic. One of the effects of this is that another of Lewis's Four Loves is whittled down.
We turned four buckets into one
All of which serves to 'collapse' our domains of (i) meaningful relationships and (ii) transcendent meaning, into the last remaining bucket: romantic sexual partnership
If we do run with C.S.Lewis for a second, and you lose friendship, diminish familial love, and have a felt absence of divine love, then our only bucket is romantic sexual partnership, and we pour almost all our desires and hopes for satisfying relationship and transcendent meaning into that. Instead of a diversified portfolio, a web of relationships of various kinds and meanings which bind us into a common life with others and with God, we are intertwined or to-be-intertwined with one other individual in a relationship that always turns inward, twisting in and around itself, as if the embrace could yield all we want and need, but actually is suffocating us.
The tension of valuing singleness and marriage
And within church cultures, it's very difficult to both hold up married families and celibate singleness, in a way that honours both, without denigrating the other; as a consequence we're likely to go one of two ways. Protestantism almost always overvalues marriage because it's rejection of catholic patterns of monastic and vowed life at the very least "catch celibate singleness as collateral damage". the danger is typically that we normalise, then lionise, "get a good partner, have some children, live a blissful happy-families existence", and this stereotype matches very few people's existences (if any). I don't think Protestantism is very likely to swing the other way anytime soon, of over-valuing singleness and reintroducing institutionalised forms of vowed celibacy. But, you never know.
But I think my point is that it's hard to hold this balance/tension. It's hard to say, "singleness is valued and precious and an honourable estate" without people taking this as devaluing marriage and children, and likewise it's hard to uphold marriage as valued and honoured, without this sounding like it's devaluing singleness.
The simple fact is, a marriage partner is going to be one of the most influential and important relationships in your life, we shouldn't hide from that fact or downplay it, we shouldn't totalise it either.
Idolising romance when you are married
I also think that it's entirely possible for married people to idolise romance and/or marriage. It just works itself out in different ways. For instance, if you idolise romance and your marriage isn't living up to your idolatrous hopes for it (which is always), then you are going to be crushed by the disappointment; or, you begin to think that the problem is that you just married the wrong person and if you could swap this spouse for a different one, you'd fix things (this, of course, does not work); or in a marriage where things really are bad, the significant gap between what marriage should be like, and the painful and broken reality of where you are at, can drive one to despair and to think, "if my marriage was fixed, everything would be fixed"; or you do enjoy a happy yet flawed marriage and so you think that this is what everyone else needs too and if only they got married, all your single friends would also have their problems disappear.
Can’t we just fix this already?
If there's one thing an undergraduate degree in philosophy taught me, it's how to find problems. solutions, not so much. But let me try to float at least a little in the way of constructive proposals. Mostly I think we need to consciously, individually and collectively, attempt to reverse some of these things. That means:
a reinvigorated and renewed place for friendship-love in our lives. Yes, there's a danger of thinking that robust and renewed friendships will solve all our problems too, but this is at least one piece of a broader puzzle.
a dual commitment to valuing marriages & children, as well as singleness, and recognising that trying to do so is a tension that needs to be kept taut.
a notion of contented discontent. That is, a way for people to be able to say, "I'm not married but I would like to be; I have a desire for a good and I am nonetheless content in its not-yet (and possibly not-ever) fulfilment". Such a project seems a way forward for dealing with "you should just be content" and "your desire to be married is idolatrous" in a more reasonable, measured, and frankly just correct way. I think it takes a fair degree of maturity to grow into a mindset that can say, "Yes, I'd like to be married and I'm not and I'm okay with that even though I still want that."
I think ‘fixes’ of cultural trends and broad problems are easy to pontificate on and much harder to do. It’s all very well to armchair pontificate, “we all need closer non-romantic friendships and third places and social bonds”, but where the rubber hits the road is when you and I log-off, close substack, and actually go and do those things.
Who is a person you can deepen a relationship with today?
Where is a social context you can spend more time cultivating thicker connections this week?
