love

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/twilight-vampires
The Atlantic
"What Girls Want"
December 2008
by Caitlin Flanagan

Somehow I find this article disheartening. It presents a vision of love that I find really annoying. Is this all we can hope for? Of course, it's explicitly about adolescent love, specifically female (American middle-class female?) love. But is even that image the image we should be selling to our children? Can't we tell a better story about how two adults can come to love one another? (Moreover, why is the theme of sex as defilment so compelling to teenage girls?)

Another way of putting what I find distasteful or disheartening is exemplified in the remark that nobody reads like young girls read. I find this somewhat insulting. I want to say, about this and many other claims: Yes it's true, but is it necessarily true? Do we want it to be true? How can we change things?

On a more constructive note:

I'm still trying to work out what love is - what it is for adults to come to love one another. I want to write about love in such a way that Sophocles' comment (that he is glad to be rid of his sexual desires) is not applicable: I want to write about how two self- and other-respecting individuals can fall in love, and what that sort of love would be. Love is not madness.

(I want to say some things about gender also, but they're better said in a coming post about (racial) stereotypes).