The Trouble with Love

Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled young people trembling with the unprocessed traumas of their childhoods laid in their poems and letters and journals the foundational modern mythos of love. Although none but one of them lived past their thirties, they touched the lives of generations to come with their art and their ideas about life. We call them the Romantics, keep quoting their poems in our vows and keep paging through their textbook for suffering. Pulsating through our culture as unexamined dogma is their idea that there is a hierarchy of the affections and that...