The new ideology of marriage needed its mythology and Shakespeare supplied it. Protestant moralists sought to redeem marriage from the status of a re… - Germaine Greer

Military mythology has to pretend that real men are in the majority; cowards can never be allowed to feel that they might be the normal ones and the heroes are insane.

Spirituality, by which I mean the purity of a strong and noble nature,
with all the new and untried powers that must grow out of it — has
not yet appeared on our horizon; and its absence is a natural consequence
of a diversity of interests between man and woman, who
are for the most part brought together through the attraction of
passion; and who, but for that, would be as far asunder as the poles.

If we could present an attainable ideal of love it would resemble
the relationship described by Maslow as existing between self-realizing
personalities. It is probably a fairly perilous equilibrium: certainly
the forces of order and civilization react fairly directly to
limit the possibilities of self-realization. Maslow describes his ideal
personalities as having a better perception of reality — what Herbert
Read called an innocent eye, like the eye of the child who does not
seek to reject reality. Their relationship to the world of phenomena
is not governed by their personal necessity to exploit it or be exploited
by it, but a desire to observe it and to understand it. They
have no disgust; the unknown does not frighten them. They are
without defensiveness or affectation. The only causes of regret are
laziness, outbursts of temper, hurting others, prejudice, jealousy and
envy. Their behaviour is spontaneous but it corresponds to an
autonomous moral code. Their thinking is problem-centred, not egocentred
and therefore they most often have a sense of commitment
to a cause beyond their daily concerns. Their responses are geared
to the present