Is Romantic Love Going Extinct?

“Down with love? Just eat some chocolate, forget the man, and take control of your own life.” –The 2003 movie Down With Love.

Is romantic love going extinct? Perhaps so, given the evidence showing that many millennials (those born after 1980 and the first generation to become young adults in the 21st century) are resisting entering into serious relationships because they may involve love. Considerable numbers of young women, in particular, are rejecting the idea and practice of love, thinking that “falling” under the spell of the emotion (and for another person) is a sign of weakness and vulnerability. The low marriage rate among millennials reflects this “down with love” attitude, something that presents major social and cultural implications for the future.

What’s behind millennials’ evasion of Cupid’s arrows? Many simply do not want to take on the commitment and responsibility that comes with anything or anyone requiring long-term investment. (The generation is also straying away from ownership of cars, homes, and full-time jobs, making their apathy towards or aversion to love wholly consistent with their freelance lifestyles.) With many millennials up to their ears in college debt and children of divorced parents, love is often perceived by members of that generation as a luxury they cannot afford, or as a foolish enterprise on which to embark.

The dodging of romantic love has actually been in the works for some time now, in much part because of the temporary madness that comes with having a big crush on someone else. “Love is constant effort,” one woman in her early 20s told a reporter from the Washington Post on Valentine’s Day 2007, with her friend chirping in “It’s so annoying” and another that, “It’s a waste of time.” Love was impractical, silly, and a sign of vulnerability, these and many other women around their age across the country believed, preferring flings and hook-ups to serious relationships in their romantic lives.

The numbers bore out the fact that both young women and men had critical views of love. A national poll of 18- to 29-year-olds conducted by the Pew Research Center found that almost 60 percent of the respondents were not at the time in committed relationships and that most of them were not interested in being committed to anyone. Friends in serious relationships were contemptuously called “married” even though they remained single, another indication of their scorn for love. “Being emotionally dependent on a lover is what scares these young women the most,” the Post’s reporter concluded after her chat with the three ladies who were determined not to fall into what they believed was a sorry state of childish fantasy and sentimentality.

The decline of romantic love in America appears to have begun in the late 1990s. “If love in America is not dead, it is ailing,” thought Kay S. Hymowitz in 1995, arguing that displaying any intense emotion in this country was considered “uncool.” Writing for the Wall Street Journal and drawing on work by historian Peter Stearns, Hymowitz posited that love, along with other intense emotions like grief and jealousy, was in opposition to the kind of personal detachment that was in favor among Americans, particularly young people. Any and all strong feelings went against the grain of society, a byproduct of a broader dulling of the sensibilities that had accelerated in the early 1970s, in part because of the feminist movement.

College students and 20-somethings appeared to be most anti-love, Hymowitz observed, apt to describe relationships as friendships with little or no reference to romance or commitment. Mademoiselle, the magazine read by many young women, had recently suggested that we were living in a “post-idealist, neo-pragmatic era of relationships” in which the terms “dating,” “boyfriend,” and “girlfriend” were not seen as relevant. Freedom and pleasure had effectively trumped love, it appeared, for Hymowitz not at all a good thing. “In the past, love has had the virtue not only of satisfying our longing for profound connection but of lifting us out of mundane life into enchantment,” she concluded, thinking many young adults were missing out on an essential dimension of the human experience.

For Thomas Sowell, an economist at the Stanford, California-based Hoover Institution, it was simply that most Americans were embarrassed to talk about and/or take on the usual challenges of romantic love, again a function of our reluctance to engage in deep-seated emotions. Like Hymowitz, Sowell felt that our aversion to love was unfortunate, as it limited the potential of individuals and society as a whole. “Love is one of those bonds which enable people to function and societies to flourish,” he wrote for Forbes in 1996, one of the best things about it being that large institutions like governments, corporations, and organized religions did not and could not control it. From his interesting perspective, the ability for someone to love another was an expression of personal autonomy and power, with those foregoing the opportunity because the emotion made them uncomfortable or self-conscious relinquishing one of our fundamental rights.