very informative :)

The above reads as a thinly-veiled attempt to morally validate your own choice to seek self-actualization, mental wellness, or whatever label you have attempted to quasi-scientifically put on your lifestyle which apparently consists of a string of disloyal acts of fornication.

Did you come from a broken home?

For someone who claims to neutrally examine all your options, you seem pretty set on your path of sharing the joys of sleeping with one person, and later sleeping with someone else, and then patting yourself on the back for your admirably accurate and healthy world view. The fact that there are people out there whose perceptions of self worth are so low that they would ever subject themselves to a second date with you after hearing of your self-gratifying lifestyle is quite sad to me.

My favorite quote of yours from this article is that "there's more evidence that what you love won't hold still for long." So, I take it from this that you are interpreting divorce statistics as some justification for reading the future of all your pre-failed relationships? In the words of someone else who posted to Psychology Today, there are holes in your argument you could fly a plain through.

You cannot foresee the future. Neither can you foresee the future of the gullible saps who think you have anything better than life-degrading bile to spew in one blog post after another. You talk about the inevitability of love's failure but do not even define it. Love is a choice to put someone else's needs above your own, and divorce statistics only suggest to me that there are a lot of people out there as morally lost as you are--they do not demonstrate the inevitability of love's failure and as a scientist you should understand that.

My advice to romantics who are tired of getting burned is to, by the first or second date, discern whether or not the person you are dating is so twisted as to share values as harmful, self-serving and shortsighted as Jeremy Sherman PhD's here. Model a successful relationship after your parents, assuming they are still together. If not, find people who are in a happy and long-term relationship. Do not model your love life after Jeremy Sherman, PhD. Don't throw away your self-respect.

It is sad that you share this load of hooey under the guise of science. This is not science. This isn't even sane, although it self-congratulates itself as one of the sanest ways to live.

Thanks for writing. You raise a very important point about scientific methodology as applied to psychology, one that doesn't get nearly enough attention in these pages or anywhere.

Egon Brunswick points out that science demands controlled experiments in which only one variable is tested at a time. But psychology is too complex to be amenable to that approach because we never do anything for just one reason and it never has just one effect. Controlling for all but one; testing for all relevant variables--we've got statistical methods that help with multi-variate analysis but it's not perfect. Between data and conclusion there is always room for interpretation. Psychology aspires to be as hard a science as chemistry but there are limits. It often pretends it can dispense with bias but it doesn't succeed as readily as chemistry would. It ends up more dependent on philosophy which has had to develop a methodology for shopping among assumptions, and figuring out which biases are and should be operative.

The passion with which you write is evidence less of your commitment to science than of the passion you would bring to your interpretation, which is no doubt different from mine. I do know that when I was married I subscribed to romantic fundamentalism, and a bias against ambigamy. I've treated marriage as success and divorce as failure. When a friend divorced, I felt like a winning contender in the race to high-figure anniversaries as though that was the real goal. I don't know that I had it in me to rail as forcefully against people who didn't subscribe to my philosophy. Still, I wouldn't put it past me to subscribe wholeheartedly to romantic fundamentalism again. It is a great a source of binding force, necessary to keeping relationships together and alive, which is very often a very good thing.

Best,

Jeremy

Jeremy~
You observe that my passion about this issue is less evidence of my commitment to science and more of a commitment to my interpretation. While I suppose it's hard to completely segregate my emotions about the science and about the morality, or to label 40%-60% or some other crude emotional quantifying, I assure you I have never before been upset with someone for engaging in, or supporting, the lifestyle you seem to support.

After some introspection, what I feel is irking me is that you claim to be working in favor of "sanity" and cultivating an "accurate" perception of reality. In fact, the desirability of the perspective you advocate for is a pure question of values, not mental health. The hurt that someone feels when someone breaks up with them is not a mental illness. We should not seek to avoid this pain by eliminating the standards of honesty and loyalty that led to the expectation of trustworthiness and fidelity. That is what really bothers me about psychology as applied by some psychologists, they claim neutrality when in fact all they are really contributing is validation of immoral acts, eliminating the standards that lead to guilt, instead of eliminating the behaviors that do not meet the standards. Values are inherent in any system that seeks to guide human behavior, and they should be made more explicit.

Your understanding and candor of the limitations of psychology is somewhat refreshing. However, not until you admit that your description of sanity and your wish to avoid the hurt felt by romantics is purely a question of a value judgment and morality, not so-called psychological well-being, will I be satisfied that you truly understand the limitations of the work you are doing.

The crushing hurt of being left by someone who led you to believe that they truly loved you is completely sane, and it can be worked through and perhaps be a learning experience so the next time, you choose someone who is more trustworthy.

Furthermore, this crushing hurt is psychological evidence against the interpretation you are advocating. Hopefully, you will at least share my belief in the moral "treat others as you would like to be treated." Nobody likes being betrayed. Making love releases Oxytocin, which contributes to a bond of a feeling of love and trust. Therefore, even if you share with your dates that you believe in this sort of "Romanticynicism," by being affectionate with them you are, whether you admit it or not, building a bond of trust and a natural psychological hope that this person will be around for the long-term, and then leaving them becomes a hurtful act of betrayal.

Whether this hope is partially rooted in culture or whether it is partially rooted in an evolutionary-psychology-type plan to raise offspring as a team is really moot, because there is no denying it exists, and your hope to eliminate it, rather than work around it, with Romanticynicism is contrary to common sense. Why develop a bizarre theory to validate sleeping with someone you are not prepared to love for the long-term, when it is within your power simply to choose not to get involved too seriously until you are ready to commit? If we are going to refrain from hurting others as we hope others will refrain from hurting us, it is not too much to ask of ourselves to hold ourselves to a romantic ideal.

Therefore, if we are going to use psychology as a tool to better cope with the contrary moral position you seem to support, we should admit that up front, not to advocate that this ironic age you speak of is inevitable, thus rendering romanticynicism as the sanest way to live one's life. I guess it is like the chicken and the egg, are you truly helping people cope with the ironic age, or persuading people to create and perpetuate it? I feel you are engaging in the latter, which is outside the psychologist's role. (passion = 90% science, 10% interpretation of science).

I agree with Allison. The article is about embracing the natural ambuguity of love and life. To maintain a relationship you must be open and accepting of feelings that stray from romantic ideals at the same time that you seek to nurture the romanticism that feels so good and promotes a bond. Love is a natural phenomena but we must work to understand it and keep it alive. I am divorced and it very much saddens me that I was unable to keep with the romantic ideal I so diligently pursued but I am much more confident now in my ability to love fully. Change is a constant condition so for love to be unconditional does not allow for adaptability in a changing growing relationship. The ideal of romance may be held unconditionally in your heart but the actual practice of romantic love must be conditional to survive. Other kinds of love may last forever as even death does not take love from our hearts but romantic love is an evolving feeling that we tend to in a way that promotes an honest bond, whatever that may be. I still love my ex-husband. I am not romantically in love with him.

The interpretation Allison, Two pennies, and Becky gleaned was consistent with what I was attempting to say. It is consistent with my life history too. I think I was misunderstood by Ben.

The customer is always right, and even if he's not you'll do better if you act as though he is. I'll assume then that at least a percentage of my readers missed my point and that therefore there's room for improvement. I'm delighted to be read at all in this word-soaked world and especially delighted that some get what I'm saying and even resonate with it.

Ben seems to assume that people who don't enter monogamy as always hurtful, always unconscious and misguided. I like Sharon Old's take on them in this poem, not because it defends them definitively, but because it implies a tension. Olds is not one of them. She can't be one of them. She's sees benefits in being them, but also knows the costs are more than she could bear. I like looking at things from opposite angles simultaneously, not attempting to tip simply to one side or the other nor to blend or harmonize into some perfect middle path, and the poets often help.

Sex without love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
Gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth, whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

-- Sharon Olds

Enjoyed the article immensely.
I agree that it's important for us to try to keep the romance alive in our romantic relationships and try to cultivate the relationship fully, but also at the same time, understand that all relationships end at some point or another. I agree immensely on the idea that "love may feel unconditional but it is actually conditional". Love always comes with conditions; the most basic condition of love is that the love must be reciprocated. If it's not reciprocated, then very soon the other person will stop too. After all, loving someone who doesn't love us back in an unconditional way surely is not a sane thing to do!