Today, the exalted place of the insular couple continues to be encouraged and trumpeted. Once you "find another person" (in Jennifers words), that person becomes the center of your life. Everyone and everything else becomes secondary.

Consider, for example, the advice doled out by sociologist Pepper Schwartz. She is the author of a stack of books and was coauthor for many years of the "Sex and Health" column for Glamour magazine. In her book Veer Marriage, Schwartz describes what she believes to be the ideal form of contemporary coupling. Partners in a peer marriage, she notes, "give priority to their relationship over their work and over all other relationships. . . . Their interdependence becomes so deep . . . they have to be careful not to make their own children feel excluded."

Schwartz proudly describes Jerry and Donna, an exemplary peer couple. Says Jerry, "I don't like to do things with other people. We just like being together. We do Siskel and Ebert when we're at the movies. We do the Frugal Gourmet when we cook. We are just our own show." The "only danger" Schwartz sees to this intense togetherness is that "the couple's isolation inhibits their ability to get good advice about their relationship." Therefore, they should socialize occasionally with "other like-minded couples."

Sociologist Linda Waite and columnist Maggie Gallagher put it this way: "A wife should spend weekends with the family, not friends." Also: "A man or a woman should put his [sic] spouse first before the demands of parents, friends, or other family members."

Rachel Greenwald has a program, to be exact, as described in her mate-seeking manual: «Find a Husband After 35 Using What I Learned at Harvard Business School». If you are serious about finding a husband, cautions Greenwald, there is something important you must do: "Stop interacting with people who are not supportive of your quest for a mate, people who facilitate your single status."

I hope I have conveyed enough to make the point that the way coupling is envisioned in contemporary American society is not universal, it is not timeless, and it is not human nature. Instead, the reigning American worldview may well represent one of the narrowest construals of intimacy ever imagined. Where once the tendrils of love and affection reached out to family, friends, and community, reached back to ancestors, and reached up to the heavens, now they surround and squeeze just one other person— sometimes to the point of asphyxiation.

Actually, I'm not against coupling. Some of my best friends are coupled. Coupling itself—in contrast to the fetishized way we practice it now—is in fact timeless. My problem is not with our current interest in coupling or our valuing it, but in our overvaluing it and our undervaluing so many other important relationships and life pursuits. We seem to have lost all perspective on the many ways to lead a good and meaningful life.

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