The Way We Love Now

Brittany Liebenow

Mr. Glenn

AP Language Arts

13 July 2009

4th Response

In “The Way We Love Now,” Ross Douthat reveals how, despite the public’s love of scandalous romance, responsibilities and pressures drain today’s relationships of spark and compassion. Douthat uses examples from two different essayists, Cristina Nehring and Tsing Loh. Although these women have different points to make about dying love in today’s society, they both trace it back to pressure on families causing the love to seep out of relationships. While this is true on many levels, Douthat also makes an excellent and shockingly true distinction between the upper and lower classes regarding relationships. Although upper class citizens seem to support wild and reckless love, they tend to be more conservative with their own relationships. The lower class, on the other hand, tends to indulge in wild relationships and have many more children. Douthat uses these two points to prove an excellent realization. Upper class citizens who could benefit from having a more reckless love life do not, and lower class citizens who could benefit from being more conservative about their love lives do not. In essence, Ross Douthat argues that relationships may not be living up to peoples’ expectations because of the expectations of love and relationships already established in social classes.

Ross Douthat does a good job of arguing his points by using the outside opinions of well-known essayists. Without these examples, however, I find that his ideas do not make much sense. Even while reading through the second and third time, I find myself having to refer back to the first few paragraphs where the examples begin. This is also fairly difficult because I believe that Douthat could have done a better job of not making those first few paragraphs so complicated and jam-packed. His sentences are long and filled with rich vocabulary, but, because of all the different examples he throws in, the vocabulary does more to confuse than impress the reader. The structure of this article was also very hard to follow. Douthat seems to be so excited with his ideas that he forgets to organize his thoughts in an understandable way. The tone in this essay was not very strong. From what I could gather, Douthat uses an ironic tone. Although this tone is slight, Douthat supports it well by pointing out that love among different social classes today is very ironic.