Humans have always been willing to go the distance for true love. Leander swam the Hellespont to get to his beloved Hero. Isolde left her noble husband to rescue Tristan, the man of her heart. Lancelot sacrificed his vaunted place at the Round Table for the sake of the beautiful Guinevere.

Nowadays beautiful love stories are in short supply. That’s not surprising, because a great love story requires obstacles, and we’ve done away with those. Everything is permitted now (except for excessive fecundity), and if there is the occasional holdout (like, say, the wife who isn’t willing to accept that her husband is gay and just needs to follow his heart), we pooh-pooh them into obscurity. Rejoice, young lovers! Your time of trial has ended! Frolic and bask in the joy of unfettered, unencumbered, uncensored romantic love!

There’s Always a Morning After

The reality of this erotic paradise? Porn addictions, libido pills and more people alone than ever. It would seem that, by laying the sex buffet with every imaginable lascivious delight, we’ve caused people to lose their appetites. With cheap, processed sex accessible from every flickering screen, we find ourselves embarking on a new kind of romantic quest: one in which sexual desire is itself the quarry. Type “rekindle love” into Amazon, and check out the more-than-2,000 results. Remember the story about the poor schmuck who got so fed up with his wife’s lack of desire that he made up a spreadsheet to prove how wronged he was? That guy is in good company, at least if this New York Times feature is any indication. Yet, for all the struggles of the married, we also have more people than ever who wish they were married and aren’t.

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