anyway so i feel like the western obsession with romantic love is symptomatic of the absence of community we experience in our socially isolating society,
it’s the only type of love we’re really “allowed” to have and it’s really sad. i hope everyone realizes at some point that you don’t need to be dating someone to love them, and that you don’t need any romance just to be loved.
It’s harmful in so many ways. It’s harmful and isolating to people who don’t experience romantic love. It’s harmful to people who, for any reason, can’t be in a romantic relationship. It minimizes the importance of other forms of love and trivializes non-romantic relationships. And finally it harms people who are actually in romantic relationships by sending the message that your romantic partner should be the only person to fulfill all your emotional needs and vice versa.
It’s capitalism. In the 1950’s, white middle class people could afford to live in little tiny nuclear families, and corporations realized that if they segmented people that way then each household would have to buy their own lawnmower, their own car, their own whatever. By cutting us off from one another, they discourage sharing of resources and material goods and require that we each buy our own. This is why mutual aid is so critical.
There’s nothing wrong with romantic love. But there’s a lot of other types of love, too, and those are usually the ones that help us build community.
