Some eight years ago, a French journalist and historian named Raoul de Roussy de Sales visited America to learn more about the country and write about what he discovered. De Sales was following in the footsteps of his countryman Alexis de Tocqueville and those of other previous visitors to the United States who had ultimately made keen observations of the national charecter. Like Tocqueville, de Sales was able to perceive American attitudes and behavior in a way that no native could. While living for some time in New York, the Frenchman was particularly struck by how problematic the subject of love was in the country. ''Nowhere else can one find a peole devoting so much time and so much study to the question of the relationship between men and women," he wrote in a piece titled "Love in America " for the Atlantic Monthly in 1938, thinking that, "nowhere else is there such concern about the fact that this relationship does not make for perfect happiness." For de Sales, love was a lot like democracy; both were great in the theory, but each was also something that did not work too well in actual practice. Because they were both complex concepts and neccessarily involved more than one person, love and democracy were difficult to manage and coordiante, he felt, making it highly likely that beither would function especially well even with considerable effort.
While many American critics had observed that the ways in which love were depicted by Hollywood gave the romantically invovled too high or simply wrong expections, de Sales remarked how the movies had created a false impression to foreigners like himself. Based on the American movies he had seen in France before coming to the United States, he had beed led to believe that the only reasons for love. Furthermore, love was wholesome and genuine inAmerica, he had assumed, with real life couples living happily ever after much like the charecters in the pictures did following whatever onstacles the screenwriter had put in their way to make the story interesting. Not love-struck, he concluded after listening to local New york stations. "No country in the world consumes such a fabulous amount of love songs, "he thought ,the music and advertisements on the radio melding together to create a seamless blend of romantic commercialism."In America the idea seems to be that love, like much else, should be sold to the public, because it is a good thing," de Sales wrote, our idealised view of the emotion just another part of the nation's "optimistic outlook on life.
Altough most observers of the national scene considered the advent of modernity to be the catalyst for Americans' love problems, de Sales argued that it was specifically the arrival of psychoanalysis on our shores. Before Freud,"America lived in a blissful state of puritanical repression," he wrote, with "love, as a sentiment, glorified and sanctified by Marriage." The popularization of Freud's theories made love appear to be real and attainable as long as one made some mental adjustments, however, and this was the source of the pronlem.
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