Of all the things we humans do voluntarily, it seems that romance causes the most pain. We experience untold amounts of suffering, from the first insecurities of how to approach the opposite sex, to the pain of getting rejected, to the confusing stages of courtship where we don't know if we're wanted or not, to the actual relationship where all our baggage surfaces, and we learn (hopefully) how to distinguish between our baggage and our projections, to the horrible loss of leaving or being abandoned, to the lonely years of old age where companions are hard to find.
Given that evolution promotes lifeforms that flourish, and weeds out lifeforms whose nature creates a lot of internal stress and disharmony, I have to wonder how long our romantic period will last. After all, it's only been a century or two that we have lived with this concept of romance being the primary force that determines our mate. Is romance an evolutionary "mistake", and only after many generations of hard lessons will we find a better way of loving each other?
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