What’s Modern About Modern Love?

By any chance, do you recall the great Rodgers and Hart show tune from the 1940 musical The Boys From Syracuse, a takeoff on Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors? The number begins with these memorable lyrics:

“Falling in love with love is falling for make-believe
Falling in love with love is playing the fool
Caring too much is such a juvenile fancy
Learning to trust is just for children in school.”

Love may be a many-splendored thing, a source of exhilaration, euphoria, elation and ecstasy, but it’s also a cause of heartbreak, anxiety, jealousy and endless complication. Never more than today.

Most Popular Stories

Most Popular

It’s not a surprise that the most long-standing column in the nation’s newspaper of record is about love. The intended audience—the romantic, the romantically challenged and the romantically confused—comprises most of us, I suspect.

“Modern Love” is, as I’m sure you know, not just a weekly New York Times column, but a book, a podcast and a television show “about relationships, feelings, betrayals and revelations.” There’s even another spinoff: animated videos about love’s joys and tribulations that can make you laugh, cringe and cry.

The stories—“about love, loss and redemption”—are “quirky, profound, head scratching and heartbreaking.” The episodes explore the complicated love lives of real people and unspool the multifaceted forms that love takes: romantic, erotic, filial, parental, platonic, elderly, illicit and lustful.

There are ooey-gooey tales of romance, but mainly there are more complex, more shadowy stories involving casual sex, dating struggles, divorce, estrangement, infidelity, sexual guilt and singledom. Tales of ghosting grief, pining for true romance, the rubble of past relationships and stalking an ex on social media abound.

Begun in 2004, the column appears in the paper’s Styles section every Sunday. Many are less about love than about loss, guilt, heartache, humiliation and disappointment: love that is unrequited or unattainable and obstacles insurmountable. Some of the stories will make you laugh; many will bring you to tears.

With some 11,000 stories submitted each year, the few that are published, one per week, tend to conform to a certain formula.

The successful submissions must be “honest”—read “cynical”—and “authentic,” which means “odd” or even “bizarre.” They must also be emotionally weighty: filled with bite and pain, the characters replete with “baggage.” Thus, readers get a litany of chance encounters, some successful, others not, bitter breakups and deathbed revelations.

Every published account has a hook: “You May Want to Marry My Husband” urges readers to wed her perfect spouse after the author’s impending death. A paternal building concierge helps a young woman deal with her dating life and unplanned pregnancy in “When The Doorman Is Your Main Man.” In “Rallying to Keep the Game Alive,” a couple undergoing midlife stress turns to tennis as a way to address their marital tensions and cement their emotional bond.

There’s invariably a catchy title, like “When Eve and Eve Bit the Apple” or “Misery Loves Fried Chicken, Too” or “The Loneliness of the Locked-Down Single Mother” or my favorite, “What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage.”

There’s also a compelling first sentence:

• “As my friends left college for exciting jobs and law school, I went to Mexico for a guy.”
• “Never count on a man,” her father had told her. “They will always let you down.” So she didn’t, and they still did.

The New Yorker poked fun at those opening sentences, offering these parodies:

• “The charcuterie board was covered with meats, cheeses and a dog-eared letter from my late great-grandfather.”
• “First, he stole my identity. Then he stole my heart.”
• “I didn’t know love until I gave birth and fell in modern love with the obstetrician.”

There’s also a clear narrative arc, typically involving personal growth and self-discovery. Then the pieces conclude with a powerful takeaway:

• “Because real love, once blossomed, never disappears. It may get lost with a piece of paper, or transform into art, books, or children, or trigger another couple’s union while failing to cement your own. But it’s always there, lying in wait for a ray of sun, pushing through thawing soil, insisting upon its rightful existence in our hearts and on earth.”
• “The truth feels like the biggest sucker-punch of them all: it’s not a spouse or land or a job or money that brings us happiness. Those achievements, those relationships, can enhance our happiness, yes, but happiness has to start from within.”
• “You can’t expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can’t expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock.”

Some of the object lessons are platitudes:

• “We can only be as happy as we allow ourselves to be.”
• “Old love is different. More realistic maybe.”
• “Only when we open ourselves to the possibility of loss can we allow for the possibility of love.”

Some, however, strike me as sparkling with insights:

• “Did we find love because we grew up, got real and worked through our issues? No. We just found the right guys.”
• “It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person.”
• “Happy families are not all alike. Some are fractured and misshapen. To appreciate them, you have to adjust your line of sight, your level of expectation.”
• “Ghosting is the most cowardly way to end a relationship.”

Then there are those that make one want to cry out:

• “And there it is. The silence. The sickening silence of another man walking out of my life before getting past the porch door. A silence of my own making.”

What’s strikingly missing from these narratives is any explicit discussion of sex. These are stories of relationships. It’s perhaps not coincidental that about 80 percent of “Modern Love” columns are written by women.

So, what is modern about modern love?

First of all, there is the absence of norms. There’s less social pressure to commit to a relationship or to marry. Also, there’s no rule book. Couples must solve their own relationship dilemmas.

Second, there is hyperawareness. A ghost hovers over all relationships these days. Are we shedding our independence and individuality? Are we settling? Is the other person taking advantage of me? In the words of Sally and Zach Maxwell, two relationship coaches,

Third, there’s the sense of missing out. Thanks to online dating and the Internet, dating pools have grown much larger than in the past. One’s romantic options are no longer limited to one’s acquaintances or one’s friends’ personal contacts.

Then, four, is the heightened expectations associated with romance—the prospect of finding one’s soul mate, a confidant, a passionate lover, even a therapist who can fulfill all of one’s emotional and physical needs.

Fifth is the demystification of love. This society may regard love and romance as among the pinnacles of a happy life, but it also recognizes that truly happy, long-term relationships are as rare as a hen’s tooth. The young today realize that routine is the death of romance and that any long-standing relationship inevitably succumbs to regularity, repetition and, in all too many cases, monotony.

Sixth, modern love is about desire freed from all of the past’s cultural constraints and taboos.

The Belgian-born relationship specialist and psychotherapist Esther Perel argues that modern love, freed from earlier norms and expectations, is expected to meet emotional, psychological and social needs previously met in other ways. We now expect love to serve as a “a bulwark against the vicissitudes of modern life,” provide the passion otherwise missing and make us feel alive. Of course, the idea of finding one’s soul mate, someone who can complete you and fulfill all your needs, is a recipe for dissatisfaction, disappointment and disillusionment.

And finally, modern love is replete with difficult and inescapable personal and cultural tensions:

• How to maintain our individuality and autonomy within a relationship.
• How to keep passion alive over time.
• How to deal with a partner’s inadequacies and annoyances.
• How to overcome any sense of regret or missed possibilities in a consumer society in which are constantly bombarded with other attractions

The sad fact is that while the cultural expectations about love can provide have escalated, in all too many cases, those dreams are dashed. As CNN pointed out last year, “The percentage of Americans who don’t have a steady partner is up 50% since 1986. Americans are less likely to have sex than at any point since 1989.”

Nor can the decline be blamed on the pandemic, since the downward trend began before 2020.

Relationships—sexual, marital and nonmarital—are more transitory and less stable, partly because they involve a profound cultural tension between cultivating closeness and intimacy while also maintaining autonomy, independence and one’s individuality.

Pop psychology has taught us that all relationships, but especially intimate relations, are about power and control. Those that last require an ability to compromise, negotiate and, at times, learn to surrender that few seem to possess.

So, it’s not surprising that many people we seek to fulfill their romantic fantasies vicariously: through streaming videos, scanning online dating profiles and yes, perusing columns like the Times’s “Modern Love.”

Shouldn’t we, at colleges and universities, do more to help our students navigate modern relationships—interactions that no longer have a guidebook or set of prescriptions or a list of dos and don’ts?

Healthy relationship workshops may be OK for some students, but we shouldn’t expect these to be sufficient. After all, navigating modern romantic, intimate and sexual relationships requires much more than an understanding of safer sex, the prevention of STIs and highly abstract lessons about conflict-resolution techniques, consent, active listening, mutual respect and expressing feelings and boundaries clearly.

How about an interdisciplinary relationships course, which would have a literary and historical as well as sociological and psychological dimensions? There are few better windows into relationship dynamics than the novel, especially works like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Middlemarch. Sure, Tolstoy, Flaubert and Eliot knew nothing about online dating or hooking up or sexting. But they understood things about romantic illusions, exploitative and manipulative interpersonal interactions, infidelity, and the vagaries of the human heart that our students need to know.

History, in turn, can help our students understand what is distinctive about modern love—about the genuine gains over the past, such as the way contemporary society has increasingly overcome taboos involving race, religion, sexual orientation and physical disability—as well as the losses.

From sociology, students might learn about the influence of religion, tradition and media on relationship ideals; the social factors that influence relationship formation; the impact of technology on relationship dynamics; changing societal norms around sexual behavior within relationships; relationship transitions, including breakups; alternate relationship structures, including long-distance relationships, open relationships and polyamory; intersectionality and intimate relationships; love scams; and intimate violence and abuse.

Psychology offers students insights into the psycho-biological factors that influence attraction; the physiology and psychology of passion; verbal and nonverbal communication within relationships; conflict resolution; sexual dysfunctions in relationships and therapies; the role of commitment, trust and investment in relationship maintenance and satisfaction; relationship stresses; and the psychology of loss.

In 2014, 10 years after the first “Modern Love” column was published, and after reading some 50,000 submissions in which authors spilled their guts about relationship woes, Daniel Jones, the series editor, offered his reflections on “life’s most mystifying subject.” Rather than dispensing sage advice to the lovelorn, he explored a series of questions:

• To what extent is modern love a product of personal and cultural fantasies, sexual desire (sublimated or not), societal pressures, narcissistic impulses toward consumption and control, and psychological insecurities and emotional neediness?
• How do Americans today find love?
• How has online dating, the emergence of exclusively online relationships, high parental divorce rates and the commercialization of matchmaking altered the way love seekers present themselves and interact?
• Is love primarily a feeling or a choice?
• How much self-sacrifice does love reasonably require?
• What’s the physical and emotional line that divides fidelity from cheating?
• How do partners maintain their individuality within relationships, achieve some level of equity and try to overcome the claustrophobia, monotony, malaise and contempt that long-term relationships breed?

These strike me as precisely the kinds of questions our students need to ask and answer in an academic context, informed by theory, empirical research and literary insights.

Although the word “crisis” is overused, there are good reasons to believe that this society is indeed experiencing a crisis of intimacy. While technology has facilitated virtual connections, it has also, at times, resulted in more superficial interactions and has led to a decline in face-to-face social skills and diminished the depth of personal relationships. There has also been a decline in long-term commitments, evident not just in the increase in divorce but in the proliferation of short-term cohabitation.

Economic pressures, including financial stress and long working and commuting hours, strain personal relationships and reduce the time and emotional energy individuals can invest in intimate partnerships.

Also, contemporary American society tends to emphasize personal achievement, autonomy and self-reliance. While these values have many positive aspects, they might sometimes come at the expense of deep, interdependent relationships.

It’s also true, of course, that contemporary society offers more diverse and flexible forms of intimacy and a broader range of relationship choices and greater acceptance of previously taboo or stigmatized connections.

If we are to address the epidemic of loneliness, anxiety and depression that so many of our students are experiencing and the risk aversion that many feel, let’s do more to help them develop a capacity for deep intimacy.