In Praise of Love, Lust & Heartbreak

RedTracker| Modern love is infinitely more complex than ‘bombshell bras’ and sending roses for Valentine’s Day. While demographers and religious leaders worry about the future of marriage as an outmoded institution that no longer brings sufficient benefits worth the investment, Cristina Nehring has written ‘A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century.’

Nehring writes that love in our time has been “defused and discredited…. Streamlined, safety-checked, and emptied of spiritual consequence.” Our rites and rituals: courtship, mating, marriage—all these have been attenuated, coupled “with AA batteries and [sold] over the counter.”

Romance in our time, Nehring asserts, has gone flaccid, and it is the task of writers and other lovers of high feeling and good prose style to arouse it, not just in their art but in their lives—their love lives, to be exact. Balzac wrote that “grand passions are as rare as masterpieces.” Nehring’s revision: “Not only are grand passions as rare as masterpieces; they are masterpieces.” Read on at The Nation ‘A Fine Romance’