“Lisa A. Phillips has found herself in a strange position as of late: trying to convince her students that romantic love is worthwhile. They don’t believe in overly idealizing partnerships or in the clichés fed to them in rom-coms; some have declared that love is a concept created by the media. Phillips, a journalist who teaches a SUNY New Paltz course called “Love and Heartbreak,” responds that of course relationships aren’t all perfect passion, and we should question the tropes we’re surrounded by.

But also: Those tropes began somewhere. Across cultures, people describe the experience of falling for someone in quite similar ways, ‘whether they grew up with a Disney-movie IV in their vein,’ she told me, or ‘in a remote area with no media whatsoever.’ The sensation is big, she tells her students; it’s overwhelming; it can feel utterly transcendent. They’re skeptical.”