Is Love the Cruelest Imposition of All?

On the last day of 1966, Saturday Evening Post devoted its entire issue to love, an interesting and perhaps courageous choice by the magazine’s editors given the tremendous change that was taking place in the country at the time. Kicking off the magazine’s love issue was Russell Baker, who had occasionally opined on the subject in his popular syndicated newspaper column. “Love, your magic spell is everywhere, dammit,” his piece began, making it clear that he had strong but mixed feelings about the emotion.

Americans were pressured to be in love, or at least act like they were, Baker felt, with popular and consumer culture loudly and continually hammering home the message that only that could lead to happiness. “What a depressing thing has happened to love in America!” he exclaimed, considering the emotion to have been turned into “the snake oil of the 20^th century.” Not just those in the entertainment business and marketers were at fault, he explained, citing the clergy, physicians, educators, and authors as conspirators in the aggressive selling of love to Americans.

Love could solve any and all problems, we heard from a plethora of trusted sources from an early age, with a more perfect society waiting in the wings if each of us could find that special someone. Psychologists were especially to blame, Baker believed, as it was they who were responsible for probing the minds of citizens to learn who was in love, who was not, and, if the latter, why not. A seemingly successful love life afforded certain professional advantages, not unlike having a college degree. Not being in love, however, most obviously displayed by remaining single, was generally deemed a suspicious and almost subversive activity, with some sort of penalization, such as not being promoted at work, entirely possible.

The trouble with love

Baker obviously saw many problems with what he called the “burdensome command” of love. The biggest one was the impossibility of most people being in love all or even much of the time, a fact that the burgeoning self-help industry was eager to exploit. The message that love took work was an essential part of recently published books like The Technique of Loving, The Chemistry of Loving, and The Physics of Loving, and something that Americans, with their can-do spirit, embraced with gusto.

That research was being used to uncover the secrets of love was also comforting to those trying to find it, Baker believed, as Americans liked science, or the veneer of it, nearly as much as work. Most of us began our cultural immersion in love as teenagers, with “going steady” seen as the normal state of affairs for any respectable young person. The lyrics to pop songs reinforced the convention of love among teenagers, with stolen glances at a Playboy or Cosmopolitan magazine fortifying gender stereotypes and adding sex to the equation.

Young people’s education in love was not yet complete, however. “By college,” Baker continued, “he [or she] is a well-conditioned student of love,” with readings of Freud now augmenting the young adult’s view of romance and sexuality. As suggested by the protest slogan “Make Love, Not War” and the lyrics of songs by popular folk artists like Bob Dylan, counterculture-era students believed in the healing power of love in its broader sense, something that clearly illustrated the flexibility and adaptability of the emotion.

Best be careful what you wish for, Baker warned such idealist youth, as the usual pressures of romantic love were likely in their future. “In America, a married man and woman are expected to be in love day after day, week after week, year after year, for as long as they live,” he wrote, thinking this to be “the cruelest imposition of all.”

Rather than love growing in a marriage, as some believed it did, Baker was convinced it typically diminished within a matter of months after the wedding day. This was not only entirely normal but a good thing, he felt, as being in love was “a terribly difficult and even an agonizing state for most people.” A little love and a lot of patience was the best recipe for a happy marriage, according to Baker, challenging prevailing pop psychology thought by prescribing the same ingredients but in reverse order.

In his caustic thesis of love, Baker even disputed the generally accepted view that being in possession of the emotion was a good thing. He certainly did not think so, citing the common physical symptoms of being in love—loss of appetite, weight, and sleep as well as high blood pressure—as evidence that the state of mind was harmful to one’s health. Wide swings in one’s mental health also frequently came with the onset of love, more reason to conclude that one should try to avoid it like the plague.

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Large quantities of love also wreaked havoc on one’s social life, Baker pointed out, with the smitten individual no longer interested in spending time with other people or doing other things. Likewise, work no longer seemed that important to the man or woman with a bad case of love, as it was difficult to concentrate on anything when one was in the full throes of the emotion. In the worst cases, marriages were ruined, families torn apart, and even lives were taken (sometimes one’s own) in the name of love. Fortunately, “love leaves us alone most of the time,” Baker maintained, leaving us in peace and able to do what had to get done.

Given all these downsides to love, why would anybody in his or her right mind decide to plunge into it? “Even in the worst onsets, it compensates with pleasures so mysterious, so irrational, so inexplicable, and yet so rare and exalting that the finest poets have never succeeded in expressing their joy,” Baker admitted, nicely capturing the baffling nature of the emotion.