Surrounded by divorce

its an odd notion. Divorce. It sounds fierce and surrounded by wolves. There is nothing to delight in. Its not like a wedding only dressed in black. ( well perhaps the attending friends may now wear only black). We owe to the middle ages the 2 worst inventions of Humanity-Romantic Love and Gunpowder. The dangers of romantic love-well we don't mean the danger in the obvious way-the cheap betrayals and broken promises-we mean the dark danger that lurks when sensible educated women fall for the dogmatic idea that romantic love is the ultimate goal for the modern female. This idea is a particular monster because although it is in fact quite new, it feels old. Its phony patina of age gives it an immutable quality. The very few voices that qualify it are so quiet that they get entirely drowned out by the noise of a thousand films, poems, books and articles that shout for its dominant truth. Its credentials are bolstered by the ancient and unimpeachable sources-It was Plato who said that Humans are like two sides of a flat fish-endlessly searching for their other half. And then there is Shakespeare, who still has the last word on everything even though he has been dead for 400 years-who gave us the sonnets and Much Ado and Antony and Cleopatra-even though admittedly the last one did not turn out so well. Throw in Byron and Yeats and Auden and the conclusion is that that Romantic love surely must be the highest human goal;the sources are irrefutable. There are women who entertain the subversive notion that like a mouse scratching behind the skirting board, that perhaps this higher love is not necessarily the celestial highway to absolute happiness. Their empirical side kicks in and they observe couples that marry in a Haze of adoration and sex are 10 years later throwing china and fighting over who gets the dog. Not sure what the answer is-leave that one with me.