The Future Of Love By Barbara Graham Analysis

1029 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Gender issues in today's society

Barbara Graham’s article, “The future of love: kiss romance goodbye, it’s time for the real thing,” claims that because unrealistic expectations for romantic love may undermine marriage, we should develop a new model for love and relationships. Few can deny what Graham, author of the satire women who run with poodles and writer for vogue, silt, common boundary, Utne Reader, and other publications; calls that love yearning is shaped by myths and romantic fantasies. The problems in marriage are real, and Graham’s point of view is true and it could be achievable in reinvent the concept of marital relationship. So, developing a new model for love and relationships is good enough? Grahams point of view should be take into consideration but it will …show more content…

We expect the passionate love of fairy tales to lead to “happily ever after” in the institution of marriage, and when this fails, we move on and try it again. But, the idea that marriage should be based on love rather than upon social and economic concerns is a relatively recent practice in human history (para4-7). While the romantic marriage ideal doesn’t fit with tradition, biological evidence is mounting against it as well. Biochemists are discovering that love and lust have hormonal causes, and their evidence suggests that our biological makeup predisposes us to seek the excitement of short-term relationships (para8-9). Despite all the difficulties, we spend a lot of the time analyzing the elements of relationships in order to preserve or perhaps reinvent marriage. We clearly want to make it work (para10-12). Because confining passionate love to the institution of marriage hasn’t worked very well, Graham ends by suggesting that we ought to revise our model for human relationships …show more content…

Nowadays with the women movement, women have a new view of their role and status in society and many men are still uncertain how to respond to this change. The influence of equality between two gender have changed the dynamics of relationships and the traditional roles of earlier generations have become more diverse with several styles of relationships. This have challenged expectations of marriages and could lead to undermine marriage. So, Conflict and breakdown may occur when one or the other partner changes and the other does not understand how to renegotiate their role within a

Show More
Related

  • The Definition Of Love By Barbara Fredrickson

    1346 Words  | 3 Pages

    "Love can affect you so deeply that it reshapes you from the inside out and by doing so alters you destiny for future loving moments" says Fredrickson but she seems to have forgotten that there always two perspectives to any ideology. It is indubitable that the experiences of love play a crucial role in molding an individual, but it is ignorant to say that only love will cause such change. The reality is that not all relationships and encounters are true "micro-moment of love" and those negative experiences also partake in what creates the identity and thought process of an individual. With the knowledge that an individual 's cell play a crucial role in deciding who to have "micro-moments of love"; such negative experience will be associated with the factual, biological notion of love. Thus causing individuals to feel that the negative experience they had to face and deal with were a result of their body and its biology. The idea that their body and brain, essentially unalterable, were capable of causing them pain and heartache, will hinder them from achieving the love and longing for others that Fredrickson describes. The idea that love is functioning by the orders registered by the individual 's body, makes love uncontrollable. Humans in nature are predisposed

    Read More

  • Analysis Of About Love By Danielle Crittenden

    1355 Words  | 3 Pages

    The meaning of life and the true meaning of happiness can be pin-pointed simply by: Grow up. Get married. Have children. These three ending sentences form the basis of the main argument in “About Love”, an excerpt from “What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman” by Danielle Crittenden. Crittenden does not limit the use of her emotional appeal to repeated use of terms like “love”, “friendship” and “independence”. One of the strongest qualities supporting the thesis of “About Love” is Crittenden’s ability to use both connotative and denotative language. Crittenden goes on to say “Too often, autonomy is merely the excuse of someone who is so fearful, so weak, that he or she can’t bear to take

    Read More

  • Monogamy and Marriage: The Battle Between Biology and the Buck

    4694 Words  | 10 Pages

    Actually monogamy had developed long before religion became interested. According to Fisher’s estimate, nearly every human society has been monogamous to some degree (69), and she claims that human beings have a biologically natural preference for mo...

    Read More

  • Early Twentieth Century Literature: Perkings, Chopin, Fitzgerald

    1158 Words  | 3 Pages

    The early, twentieth century was not a positive time for females and marital relationships. As depicted through countless novels, there were two main female roles in society and neither created much opportunity for females. Whether a woman was a humble housewife or a mysterious mistress, there was controversy in every aspect of both roles. These roles also placed females in oppressive relationships that almost always decreased the qualities of honesty and loyalty that are necessary in relationships. From the beginning of the twentieth century all the way up until now, the treatment of females thrust into these roles has caused controversy and problems in countless marriage and all throughout our society.

    Read More

  • Laura Kipnis Against Love Essay

    1234 Words  | 3 Pages

    Mature Love In Laura Kipnis Against Love, what I believe love to be is uniquely questioned and probed in every manner. Kipnis yanks at every part of a relationship that is, according to her, inevitably bound to fail. Unfortunately I believe she mostly writes about the negatives of marriage and infidelity rather than love. It is troubling to agree with her uncomfortable views on marriage and coupledom becoming a sort of renunciation of personal desires, but I think Kipnis is brave in creating this polemic suggesting the way love has been programmed into us by modern society, as an all encompassing, fantasy type of love, all about one person forever.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in Society

    1030 Words  | 3 Pages

    Warren Farrell is a well educated man who focuses his attention on gender. In his essay “Men as Success Objects,” he writes about gender roles in male-female relationships. He begins, “for thousands of years, marriages were about economic security and survival” (Farrell 185). The key word in that statement is were. This implies the fact that marriage has changed in the last century. He relates the fact that post 1950s, marriage was more about what the male and female were getting out of the relationship rather than just the security of being married. Divorce rates grew and added to the tension of which gender held the supremacy and which role the individuals were supposed to accept. “Inequality in the workplace” covered up all of the conflicts involved with the “inequality in the homeplace”(Farrell). Farrell brings to attention all ...

    Read More

  • The Troubles of Being a Woman

    2177 Words  | 5 Pages

    In today’s society, women tend to feel pressured into finding a spouse before the opportunity to fall in love passes by. Unfortunately, love is not the only reason for two people to get married. Support and security provide a person with the comfort of not being alone for the rest of their lives, however, many fear time may run out if they do not act fact. In Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman, Marian McAlpin displays struggles in her decision to commit to her fiancé; Peter. Although she admires him, something just isn’t quite right. In the Over...

    Read More

  • Traditional Wives verses Stay at Home Wives

    1063 Words  | 3 Pages

    “Like most wives of our generation, we’d contemplated eventual widowhood but never thought we’d end up divorced” (Hekker 278). Traditional wives married for love and to follow th...

    Read More

  • Janie's Perfect Marriage In Their Eyes Were Watching God

    776 Words  | 2 Pages

    Human beings are not isolated individuals. We do not wander through a landscape of trees and dunes alone, reveling in our own thoughts. Rather, we need relationships with other human beings to give us a sense of support and guidance. We are social beings, who need talk and company almost as much as we need food and sleep. We need others so much, that we have developed a custom that will insure company: marriage. Marriage assures each of us of company and association, even if it is not always positive and helpful. Unfortunately, the great majority of marriages are not paragons of support. Instead, they hold danger and barbs for both members. Only the best marriages improve both partners. So when we look at all three of Janie’s marriages, only her marriage to Teacake shows the support, guidance, and love.

    Read More

  • Marriage in The Ceiling by Kevin Brockmeier

    898 Words  | 2 Pages

    Brockmeier’s short story represents a damaged marriage between a husband and a wife simply due to a different set of values and interests. Brockmeier reveals that there is a limit to love; husbands and wives will only go so far to continually show love for each other. Furthermore, he reveals that love can change as everything in this ever changing world does. More importantly, Brockmeier exposes the harshness and truth behind marriage and the detrimental effects on the people in the family that are involved. In the end, loving people forever seems too good to be true as affairs and divorces continually occur in the lives of numerous couples in society. However, Brockmeier encourages couples to face problems head on and to keep moving forward in a relationship. In the end, marriage is not a necessity needed to live life fully.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Radical Idea Of Marrying For Love By Stephanie Coontz

    798 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the article, “The Radical Idea of Marrying for Love” author Stephanie Coontz argues that love is not a good enough reason to get married. People shouldn’t marry just because they love one another, Coontz suggests that perhaps marriage should be based on how well a couple gets along and whether or not if the significant other is accepted by the family. One will notice in the article that Coontz makes it very clear that she is against marrying because of love. In the article is a bit of a history lesson of marriage and love within different cultures from all over the world. Coontz then states her thesis in the very end of the article which is that the European and American ways of marriage is the

    Read More

  • Sociological Analysis of Divorce

    1157 Words  | 3 Pages

    Humboldt Journal of Social Relations 32.1, TRANSLATIONAL APPLIED SOCIOLOGY (2009): 158-83. JSTOR.Web. 11 May 2014. Chalmers, Jennifer H. "Romantic Love: Is It a Realistic Goal for Marriage Therapy?" Romantic Love: Is It a Realistic Goal for Marriage Therapy?

    Read More

  • Postmodernism's Effect on Marriage and Family

    1828 Words  | 4 Pages

    Marriage and family life has been changing over the past few decades. Not only has the idea of family and marriage changed, but the way marriage and family are perceived has changed. With the transition from modern times to postmodern times, the typical life has developed in to more of an isolated society, than ever before. The concept of unity and close ties has become almost nonexistent, with the development and progression of technology. Communication has become less personal and less intimate, eliminating the idea of creativity. With the elimination of creativity, because of the development of less personal communication, the chances of meeting someone has become less personal and mo...

    Read More

  • Cause and Effect Essay – The Causes of Divorce

    901 Words  | 2 Pages

    However, the divorce rates trend to continually increase nowadays, thus it might be argued that divorces can take place easier than in the past. There are three main causes of divorce: changing women’s roles, stress in modern living and lack of communication, which are highlighted below. The first significant cause of the recent rise in the rates of divorce is that women completely change roles. In the past, men have to earn whole money to afford the expenses of family, whereas women only do housework, hence women have no money leading to depend on husbands’ money. Because of these situations, it is too difficult for most women to separate from their husbands.

    Read More

  • Romantic Love Is a Poor Basis for Marriage

    607 Words  | 2 Pages

    Marrying because of romantic love is ill-fated because love is merely an emotion, and emotions are just a response of the limbic system of the brain being stimulated by the body’s attempt at regulating neural processes and the release of pheromones and chemicals. The release of such chemicals are caused by a random sequence of events, mainly the increase of one’s heart rate alongside the increase of respiration rate. This sequence of events is what can cause the “falling out of love” experienced by many, because the release of dopamine and phenylethylamine is not permanent and the high experienced quickly fades. For the feeling of love to last a steady chemical benefit of serotonin and oxytocin are required.

    Read More

More about The Future Of Love By Barbara Graham Analysis

Open Document