The Infrastructure of Love

The Beatles once sang in a tune, 'money can't buy me love'.    You can argue otherwise, but I tend to agree with the Fab Four.  Strictly speaking, love can and does happen, even when the lovers are penniless.

But there is no doubt that money does enable love.  It allows the proper setting of romantic atmosphere - candlelit dinners, adventurous travel, lavish gifts, and whatever else the love-struck human with available cash can conjure to please the object of their affection.

This begs the question whether the current depression will have any effect on love.  Will we love less? Will love be less successful?  Or will love conquer all, and usher in a new age of non-commercial romance?

Hope and our romanticism makes us believe the answers should be No, No, and Oh Yes.  The pragmatist in us tells us the answers likely will be No, Yes, and Not In This Life Bubba.

We won't love less.  Nothing can stop the love.  Not even Bernie Madoff.    But love won't be as easy to realize, without the usual props that money helps provide.  And we are too attuned to wrapping love in gifts to ever stop commercializing it.

So, during this economic crisis, will we continue to feel love, but act on our feelings less often, making fewer commitments?  Maybe.  

I could be wrong, and we may enter into a period of wildly enthusiastic love as a means of escaping our problems.  Love can work that way, and as emotional crutches go, it's got to rank above excessive drug use and hyper-evangelistic religion.  And unlike those two common fallbacks in a crisis, over-indulging in love has fewer immediate pitfalls.  Love is unlikely to kill your liver in a month, or lead you to give all your money and belongings to a cable channel televangelist.

Or, we may be temporarily doomed to romantic dreaming, until we again have the means to build the intricate, intimate, infrastructure of love.

Hurry the recovery!