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Sex, Love, Marriage, and Misogyny

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Meaning of Life, Human Nature, and Delusions

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Abstract

As explained in Diane Ackerman’s 1994 book Natural History of Love, in most “post-Neolithic” (agricultural) societies, there is a clear link between the notion of romantic love and teleological narratives, including those about a cosmic purpose of life and the related concept of “meant to be.” She provides several examples of this, from art in ancient Egypt and philosophy in ancient Greece to studies of organized religions and stories about the troubadours of the European Middle Ages and to fascinating facts about the Victorian era. She argues that the Western vision of romantic love mainly derives from ancient Greek thought, noting that “to Plato, lovers are incomplete halves of a single puzzle, searching for each other in order to become whole.” This is shown in Plato’s The symposium, which includes the following famous fable: “originally there were three sexes: men, women, and a hermaphroditic combination of man and woman…these primitive beings had two heads…two sets of genitals, and so on…threatened by their potential power, Zeus divided each one of them in half, making individual lesbians, homosexual men, and heterosexuals…but each person longed for its missing half, which it sought out, tracked down, and embraced, so that it could become one again.” She explains that this “is an amazing fable, saying, in effect, that each person has an ideal love waiting somewhere to be found…each of us has a one-and-only, and finding that person makes us whole…this romantic ideal…appealed so strongly to hearts and minds that people believed it in all the following centuries, and many still believe in it today.”

Love is our true destiny…we do not find the meaning of life by ourselves alone – we find it with another.

(Thomas Merton)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

    (Epicurus)

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“Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?”

(Epicurus)

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Anatomy, Howard University College of Medicine, Washington, DC, USA

    Rui Diogo

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  1. Rui Diogo
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Diogo, R. (2022). Sex, Love, Marriage, and Misogyny. In: Meaning of Life, Human Nature, and Delusions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70401-2_5

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