When I was 17, I fell madly in love. We’d been casual friends for a few years, but on May 5, 1979, while we were hanging around a campfire with some other high school seniors, she slipped her hand into mine, and that was my first taste of pure bliss. I treasured being a camp counselor, but that summer I stayed home from camp and worked as a janitor in a movie theater so I could go to the Howard Johnson’s lunch counter every day and chat with her while she worked.
We were separated for a year at different colleges, but then she transferred to join me at the University of Chicago, where, within a few months, she dumped me. My ensuing agony was laced with a young man’s vanity. I was suffering but also kind of proud of myself for being capable of suffering that much. I remember going to the mall in Water Tower Place and buying some French cigarettes so I could suffer like Albert Camus.
I was transformed by my time in college classrooms, but that love affair might still have been the most important educational experience of my youth. It taught me that there are emotions more joyous and more painful than I ever knew existed. It taught me what it’s like when the self gets decentered and things most precious to you are in another. I even learned a few things about the complex art of being close to another.
Most important, that relationship gradually taught me that one of the most important questions you can ask someone is “What are you loving right now?” We all need energy sources to power us through life, and love is the most powerful energy source known to humans.
Love is a motivational state. It could be love for a person, a place, a craft, an idea or the divine, but something outside the self has touched something deep inside the self and set off a nuclear reaction. You want to learn everything you can about the thing you love. (They say love is blind, but love is the opposite of blind.) You want to care for and serve the thing you love. Your love is propelling you this way or that. You want communion with the thing you love.
“The deepest need of man, then,” the psychologist Erich Fromm once wrote, “is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.” Picture a couple kissing, a carpenter rapt while working his craft, an astrophysicist at full attention gazing at the cosmos, a nun at prayer. Those are people transcending the boundaries of the self.
To be loveless is to be on autopilot and disengaged from life. Love, on the other hand, fuels full engagement. “A person’s life can be meaningful,” the philosopher Susan Wolf once wrote, “only if she cares fairly deeply about some things, only if she is gripped, excited, interested, engaged, or as I earlier put it, if she loves something.” Pay attention to those words — “cares,” “gripped,” “excited,” “engaged,” “loves.” One great way to live is to go around with a posture so openhearted that you find things to be wholehearted about.
If you want to know about me, know the things I love — my kids, my wife, America, God, friends, New York City, the Mets, writing, the Chesapeake Bay, reading intellectual history, playing sports with great enthusiasm and mediocre talents, Montana, teaching. My list goes on, and I bet you have your own.
I’ve come to appreciate people who are ardent about life. To paraphrase that great philosopher of love, St. Augustine: Give me a man or a woman in love. Give me one who may be far away in the desert but who yearns and thirsts for the springs of passion. Give me that sort of person. She knows what I mean. But if I speak to a cold person, a suspicious person, a mistrusting person or a calculating person, he just doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
I’ve composed this little homage to love because Americans seem to be having less of it. Think of the things people most commonly love — their spouse, kids, friends, God, nation and community. Now look at the social trends. Marriage rates hover near record lows, and the share of 40-year-olds who have never been married is at record highs. (Cohabitation rates are up, but that doesn’t come close to making up for the decline in marriage.)
Americans are having fewer kids. Americans have fewer friends than before and spend less time with the friends they have. Church and synagogue attendance rates have been falling for decades. The share of Americans who said they feel patriotic about their country is down, especially among the young. From 1985 to 1994, active involvement in community organizations fell by about half, and there is no sign of a recovery.
In 2023 a Wall Street Journal/NORC survey asked people about what values were “very important” to them. Since 1998, the shares of Americans who said they highly valued patriotism, religion, having children and community involvement have all plummeted. The only value Americans came to care more about, the survey found, was making money.
You might call this the Great Detachment. Look at what’s happening, for example, to high school dating. The evidence clearly shows that fewer young people are getting the kind of profound education I got at the end of high school. The share of 12th graders who said they have dated fell from about 85 percent in the 1980s to less than 50 percent in the early 2020s.
My own experience suggests most young people want loving connection but they are anxious about how to go about getting it, in part because they’ve never had any practice. But some of the decline in romance is driven by sheer lack of interest. In 1993, according to an analysis of the Monitoring the Future Study, 83 percent of female 12th graders said they were likely to choose to get married. By 2023, only 61 percent of 12th-grade girls said that — a 22-percentage-point drop.
And some of the causes of the romantic recession are social and economic. Over the past four decades, the share of people in a relationship has fallen over twice as fast among people without a college degree compared with those who have one. Roughly half of the men under 40 who never went to college are romantically unattached. People without a college degree have less earning potential than college grads and are 2.4 times as likely to say they have no friends.
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But economic forces can’t explain everything. These trends are not just about who people want to date and marry; we’re seeing a systematic weakening of the loving bonds that hold society together — for community, for nation, for friends and on and on. What’s going on?
My short answer would be that you can build a culture around loving commitments, or you can build a culture around individual autonomy, but you can’t do both. Over the past six decades or so, we chose autonomy, and as a result, we have been on a collective journey from autonomy to achievement to anxiety.
In the 1960s and ’70s, Americans rebelled against the conformity of the ’50s. They put tremendous emphasis on personal freedom, but they also put tremendous emphasis on love. Think of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and all those soupy songs — “All You Need Is Love.”
Then in the ’80s and ’90s, Americans took that desire for individual freedom and focused it on the realm of life where it’s easiest to feel autonomous: your career. In 1990 Dr. Seuss published a book that is still commonly given as a graduation present. It’s called “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!,” about a boy’s lifelong climb up the ladder to success. Along the way, you notice he has no family, no friends, no attachments to a place. By 1990, this seemed to many like a normal way to envision a good life. I used to ask my college students why they weren’t having romantic relationships, and their No. 1 answer was that they didn’t have time; they were working too hard.
Then in this century there has been a great loss of faith. A loss of faith in the work grind. A loss of faith in one another, which shows up as plummeting levels of social trust. This has produced the well-documented surges in anxiety, loneliness and a fear of emotional intimacy, especially in young adults. As Faith Hill wrote recently in The Atlantic, “Generational researchers have described Gen Z as a cohort particularly concerned with security, averse to risk and slow to trust — so it makes sense that a lot of teens today might be hesitant to throw themselves into a relationship, or even just to admit they care whether their dalliance will continue next week.”
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty,” Oscar Wilde observed. Anxious people are naturally slow to invite more vulnerability into their lives. The crusade for maximum individual freedom seemed liberatory back at Woodstock, but over the past half-century, we’ve taken it to its logical conclusion, and it has produced what the journalist Derek Thompson calls the antisocial century.
When you look at these trends through a political lens, the power of the autonomy ethos becomes clearer. In general, conservatives believe in economic freedom (low taxes, fewer regulations) but social obligations (faith, family, flag). Progressives tend to favor economic obligations to reduce inequality but more social autonomy to live whatever lifestyle you choose.
As you’d expect, then, liberals are more likely to value moral freedom and living out their authentic values in the way they see fit, while conservatives are more likely to attach themselves to the traditional sources of moral community. Conservatives are more likely to join religious congregations, more likely to consider themselves very patriotic, more likely to volunteer in their communities and more likely to give to charity.
These different attitudes toward autonomy show up especially in the realm of marriage and childbearing. In the 1980s there was very little gap between the shares of liberal and conservative 25-to-35-year-old women who had children, according to the General Social Survey. But by the 2020s, 71 percent of conservative women in that age group had children, compared with only 40 percent of liberal women. That’s an astounding 31-percentage-point gap.
An NBC News poll asked young people to name the life goals that were important to their personal definition of success. Defying old stereotypes, young men were more likely to prioritize family goals like getting married and having kids than young women. The contrast between young men who voted for Donald Trump and young women who voted for Kamala Harris was especially stark. For men 18 to 29 who voted for Trump, the most important life goal was having children. The fourth-most-important life goal for these male Trump voters was being married. For women in that age cohort who voted for Harris, by contrast, being married came in 11th on their list of important life goals, third from the bottom. Having kids came in 12th, second from the bottom. (Becoming famous was the least important life goal for both groups.)
According to a Pew Research survey, 52 percent of conservatives said that the decline in marriage was a negative development for America. That view was shared by only 23 percent of liberals.
No, I am not saying that everybody has to get married. Marriage is not for everybody. Life is messy, and many people who seek marriage don’t happen to find the right person. We all know many single adults who lead densely connected, wonderfully fulfilled lives.
But on average, married people are happier than unmarried people. The University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, the San Diego State psychologist Jean Twenge and colleagues wrote a report for the Institute for Family Studies, which found that married women ages 25 to 55 were far more likely to say that life was enjoyable most of the time. Married women with children were only about half as likely as unmarried women to say they often felt lonely.
According to the General Social Survey, 93 percent of liberal women who were married with children said they were happy. Only 63 percent of liberal women who were unmarried and childless said they were happy. As Wilcox wrote in an email to me, “We’re now seeing a stunning 30-percentage-point difference in happiness between liberal women who are married with children and those who are single and childless.”
The same basic patterns apply to men, as well.
I want to reiterate something. These are averages. Be careful how you apply social science data to your individual life, because your life is filled with things social science can’t see: your unique circumstances, tastes, spirit.
What I am saying is that ancient wisdom and modern research are not wrong. If you want to lead a fulfilling life, fill it with loving attachments. George Vaillant studied human development over a long career while leading the Grant Study at Harvard. The central conclusion of his life was pretty basic: “Happiness equals love — full stop.” You don’t have to commit to any single one of the attachments, even marriage, but if you want to flourish, you do have to prioritize loving attachments over individual autonomy, and over the past few generations, our culture has forgotten that core truth.
If you lead a life designed to maximize personal independence and autonomy, you’ll get to live a relatively unrestricted life. But you’re more likely to live a low-energy life, slower to harbor those great loves for people, places, God, vocation and nation that arouse fervent passions and yield ardent lives.
If, on the other hand, you resist the autonomy ethos and put loving passion at the center of your philosophy of life, you will find yourself tied down by all sorts of obligations — to things like a spouse, kids, community, God and a vocation. But your love for these things will constitute fires in the heart, producing great vitality, full engagement, an increase in personal force. It is one of the weird paradoxes of life that the constraints you choose are the ones that set you free.
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