It has its reasons.(Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion)(Book review)

Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion, edited by Daniel Jones (Three Rivers, 400 pp., $14.95)

ONE of my week's guilty pleasures is the "Modern Love" column appearing each Sunday in the New York Times "Styles" section. A first-person confession from a different writer each week, "Modern Love" offers two delights for the schadenfroh connoisseur: first, the unaffected egotism of the authors, who find their personal problems fascinating enough to merit exposure to the entire world; and second, genuinely atrocious writing. Just to give you an idea, one time a professor of creative writing (!) clued us in on just how interesting and open-minded she is with the line, "Some people might say I have a boundary problem." One will look in vain for a more perfect specimen of vapid psychobabble than "boundary problem": Having myself now used the phrase many times, I can attest that nothing stupefies an audience faster than, "You see, I think I may have a boundary problem." The more gravely the phrase is uttered, the more satisfying the results.

Evidently, I'm not alone in relishing "Modern Love": Its editor has collected 50 of its essays in a volume that he describes as a "literary time capsule" of love in a world of online dating, gay adoption, and Viagra. Having read the whole thing, I recommend sticking to the weekly column. Lightly diverting once a week, the columns when collected become simply depressing. Just as a nudist colony makes one thankful for clothes, so does Modern Love make one thankful for personal reticence. Most people stripped naked just aren't that attractive, whether inside or out.

The book does show that for everything that's new about "love in the new millennium," we're still stuck on the same merry-go-round. Longing, ecstasy, jealousy, decay, fury, loss are central to Modern Love, just as they have been central to pretty much everything ever written on the subject of love. What has changed is not so much the gadgetry (email, blogging, text messaging) or even the brave-new-world medical advances (sperm banks, Viagra), but the authors' loss of any vocabulary to express themselves. In essay after essay, we get the same barren, bloodless mush: resolutions to "own your own decisions," warnings against getting into a "cycle of blame," ways to find "paths to completeness as a person," and, oh yes, counsels on what to do when you meet someone with a "boundary problem." (Perhaps I am one myself: I don't think I ever met a boundary I didn't like.)

This language is often called--following the late cultural critic Philip Rieff--"therapeutic." It has become so ubiquitous that it sometimes seems impossible to discuss life's most important matters--love, death, and suffering--in any other. It certainly was impossible for the contributors to Modern Love. The book is like a modern version of the Septuagint Bible, which, according to legend, was produced by 70 scholars who independently arrived at an identical translation. Miraculously, the 50 contributors to Modern Love all managed to write in the same voice.

Completely absent from their minds is any notion of love as a source of real conflict or danger. No spurned Didos immolating themselves here: Our therapeutic language assumes that love is in no way dangerous, destructive, or even erotic--which is to say, it pretty much assumes love out of existence. These authors--who, the editor promises, are "modern"--won't even see love as part of the cold, rational calculus of Darwinian competition; instead, they grimly chalk ...