Why Romantic Love is Never as Nice as it Should Be

Has romantic love supplanted religion in our culture? A Jungian insight into why romantic love makes us miserable, and how to fix that.

“We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and so - we aspire. Groundlings, we can sometimes reach as far as the gods. Some soar with art, others with religion; most with love. But when we soar, we can also crash. There are few soft landings. We may find ourselves bouncing across the ground with leg-fracting force, dragged towards some foreign railway line. Every love story is a potential grief story. If not at first, then later. If not for one, then for the other. Sometimes, for both.” - Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

I have a confession to make. I’m not great at love. Or, at least, I haven’t been.

For a long time I tried really hard to do better: I read books on the complexities of romantic love, I bought courses on how to make relationships last, followed all the right Instagram accounts, understood my attachment style (the worst kind), looked into alternatives to the staple monogamous arrangement (not for me), figured out my love languages (physical touch, gifts, quality time), worked on my trauma, worked on my ass, and drunkenly blamed Hollywood and Instagram and Cosmopolitan for perpetuating ridiculous ideals that no one can live up to.

And while some of these paid off, I still felt like I was slapping children’s band-aids on a deep, open wound. Something about our current version of romantic love felt off - like no matter how good you got at the game, you could never really win it. Why is it that this particular type of attachment can make us soar so high, but also fall so low? Could it be that a deeper, more mysterious psychological mechanism was at play, without our knowledge?