Summary
As restaurant prices double for the day and the world turns pink and fluffy, it's easy to be cynical about February 14th. Romance is a marketable commodity, partly because most of us grow up convinced that our most important aim in life should be to find true love, believing that the perfect partner is out there waiting, if only we can identify him or her, and then it will be hearts and flowers all the way to the grave. You don't have to be starry-eyed to argue that this vision of romantic love is a good thing; it holds families together, it inspires hard work and virtuous behaviour - and it affects the chemistry of the brain in a way that is similar, it seems, to cocaine. There is an alternative point of view; romantic love was invented a mere five hundred years ago and has been a nuisance ever since. In this view, a couple's aspiration to remain together and faithful until death do them part (which gets more ambitious as people tend to live for so much longer) is an unrealistic ideal; it under-values both shorter-term and less exclusive relationships, and it causes unnecessary family breakdowns over infidelities that ought to be forgiven - if not indeed permitted. Is Saint Valentine the harbinger of human happiness - or the devil in disguise? Witnesses are Katie Fforde, Prof Simon May, Dr Julia Carter and Andrew G Marshall.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a program from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.9 | Good evening, it's Valentine's night, when the world and his would-be wife go out or maybe stay in looking for love. |
| 0:10.6 | It's a thoroughly modern pursuit. |
| 0:12.5 | For most of human history, we would no more have married for love than picked a warhorse for the length of its eyelashes. |
| 0:19.0 | Fathers chose their daughter's husbands for family advantage. |
| 0:22.2 | It worked some of the time, like love. Romantic love was invented by those great |
| 0:26.8 | sentimentalists the Victorians and made more widely possible by industrial prosperity and female |
| 0:31.6 | emancipation. Now, finding it, keeping it, has become the central purpose of a fulfilled life. |
| 0:37.6 | What was once regarded as a dangerous form of madness to be got over as quickly as possible |
| 0:41.9 | is now expected to last an ever longer lifetime. |
| 0:45.6 | A good thing is love the cement that holds relationships, families, societies together, |
| 0:50.7 | the basis of all virtue, or an unrealistic ambition, excluding of other forms of human |
| 0:56.3 | contact, the source of friction, jealousy, pain, disappointment. What should we make of love? |
| 1:03.2 | A question for Valentine's Day and our moral maze tonight. Our panel, Melanie Phillips, |
| 1:07.5 | social commentator on the Times, Claire Fox from the Academy of Ideas, |
| 1:15.3 | Professor Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at Edinburgh University, |
| 1:21.4 | and the only Y chromosomes on the panel are carried by Shiv Malik, co-founder of the Intergenerational Foundation. |
| 1:23.7 | Love, Mona, to cornerface. |
| 1:27.3 | I think it's what we all search for. It's what gives meaning to life. |
| 1:28.7 | Sheth? |
| 1:33.4 | I think it's devilish to dupe people in the sense that true love is all that it's somehow sort of paramount. |
| 1:34.4 | I think my generation's falling foul of the search for the perfectly dealt hand. |
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