Yes, Western traditional concepts of “love” are very toxic.

For one, people confuse love and sex — they have nothing to do with each other: those who think they do have merely been brainwashed by our culture. And for that reason, people who look for “great sex” in a long term partner are looking for the wrong thing.

You wrote, “Men are taught that it’s a woman’s job to serve them.”

Perhaps some are. I wasn’t. But my mother and sister were very nurturing to me, and that spoiled me, and made me think that a woman’s role was to nurture me. It took me a long time to grow out of that (I did grow out of it).

With so much nurturing going on today by the schools, I fear that the upcoming generation will be worse, but that young people will expect the world to nurture them — and they do, with “safe spaces” and so on. Today’s college campuses are all about protecting emotional frailty rather than emotional and intellectual growth.

Young people need to develop independence — from very early. They need to learn that the world is not fair. They need to feel that their survival is at stake — so that they don’t over-focus on trivialities like Facebook and text conversations about silliness and instead start thinking about how they are going to survive when they get out of school.

Cultures used to have rituals for young men, such as put them in the woods for a week with a knife and a blanket, and expect them to survive. We need a modern version of that — and one that is focused not on helping men mature, but on helping young people mature. It seems that in our movement toward equality, men are becoming more like women than women are becoming like men: we are moving toward frailty.

Yes, the idea that a man is there to take care of a woman is anachronistic. Women still look for it though. That’s why they seek tall men — to protect them. And men are trained to look for appearance first and foremost. It’s all toxic.