The Rules Of Love, Reconsidered

Adam and Eve, like every couple since, had their problems. But wanting to be with other people was not one of them. “Why were Adam and Eve able to love each other so fiercely?” Rich Cohen wrote in The Times. Because, he answered, they had no choice.

Romantic love is a myth, Mr. Cohen said, adding that the plague of our time is “too many choices, too many channels, too many potential hookups — it’s made it just about impossible to choose, and if it’s just about impossible to choose, it’s just about impossible to love.”

But even with only one temptation, Eve still left Adam. She sought knowledge and autonomy. Once she found both, she returned because she desired a relationship, Bruce Feiler, the author of a book about the couple, wrote in The Times.

“She becomes the first to commit the ultimate modern act of not accepting the meaning of others but insisting on making meaning yourself,” he said in the book.

The couple struggled with what Mr. Feiler called the “central mystery of being alive: being unalone.”

But the modern understanding of love might be backward. “You don’t choose a partner because you love him,” Mr. Cohen wrote. “You love that partner because you chose him.”

People tend to hold contradictory ideas about love. “We glorify love as effervescent, then are disappointed when it evaporates,” Mr. Feiler wrote. “But love is not a moment in time; it’s the passage of time.”

He said the ability to continually revise a relationship’s narrative might be the most underappreciated ingredient for long-term success.

“Love is a story we tell with another person,” he wrote. “It’s co- creation through co-narration.”

For some people today, though, telling the tale requires more than one co-author. Susan Dominus wrote in The Times Magazine that open marriages “are not just for people who were more interested in sex, but also for people who were more interested in people.”

These couples, like Eve, also do not accept the meaning of others. When they open their marriages, they rewrite love’s rules, many of which aim to mitigate jealousy.

“Most monogamous couples labor to avoid that emotion at all costs,” Ms. Dominus wrote, “but for the philosophically polyamorous, jealousy presents an opportunity to examine the insecurities that opening a relationship lays bare.”

Kevin and Antoinette Patterson investigated that emotion immediately after they met 15 years ago.

“I don’t have many jealousy triggers,” Mr. Patterson said. “But I don’t like it when someone my wife is seeing takes the parking spot in front of my house.”

For others, opening their relationships wasn’t as easy but came with unforeseen benefits. Crystal A., who withheld her last name, told The Times that she and her partner don’t take each other for granted now that they are polyamorous.

“Instead, we choose each other over and over because we want to,” she said, “not because we are simply on autopilot.”

That exact concept is just as critical for the monogamous who hope to survive all of today’s temptations.

“Love is bringing imaginativeness to the unimaginable,” Mr. Feiler wrote. “It’s not a choice you make once but over and over again.”