It has its reasons.

Modern Love: 50 True and Extraordinary Tales of Desire, Deceit, and Devotion, edited by Daniel Jones (Three Rivers, 400 pp., $14.95)

ONE of my week's guilty pleasures is the "Modern Love" column appearing each Sunday in the New York Times "Styles" section. A first-person confession from a different writer each week, "Modern Love" offers two delights for the schadenfroh connoisseur: first, the unaffected egotism of the authors, who find their personal problems fascinating enough to merit exposure to the entire world; and second, genuinely atrocious writing. Just to give you an idea, one time a professor of creative writing (!) clued us in on just how interesting and open-minded she is with the line, "Some people might say I have a boundary problem." One will look in vain for a more perfect specimen of vapid psychobabble than "boundary problem": Having myself now used the phrase many times, I can attest that nothing stupefies an audience faster than, "You see, I think I may have a boundary problem." The more gravely the phrase is uttered, the more satisfying the results.

Evidently, I'm not alone in relishing "Modern Love": Its editor has collected 50 of its essays in a volume that he describes as a "literary time capsule" of love in a world of online dating, gay adoption, and Viagra. Having read the whole thing, I recommend sticking to the weekly column. Lightly diverting once a week, the columns when collected become simply depressing. Just as a nudist colony makes one thankful for clothes, so does Modern Love make one thankful for personal reticence. Most people stripped naked just aren't that attractive, whether inside or out.

The book does show that for everything that's new about "love in the new millennium," we're still stuck on the same merry-go-round. Longing, ecstasy, jealousy, decay, fury, loss are central to Modern Love, just as they have been central to pretty much everything ever written on the subject of love. What has changed is not so much the gadgetry (email, blogging, text messaging) or even the brave-new-world medical advances (sperm banks, Viagra), but the authors' loss of any vocabulary to express themselves. In essay after essay, we get the same barren, bloodless mush: resolutions to "own your own decisions," warnings against getting into a "cycle of blame," ways to find "paths to completeness as a person," and, oh yes, counsels on what to do when you meet someone with a "boundary problem." (Perhaps I am one myself: I don't think I ever met a boundary I didn't like.)

This language is often called--following the late cultural critic Philip Rieff--"therapeutic." It has become so ubiquitous that it sometimes seems impossible to discuss life's most important matters--love, death, and suffering--in any other. It certainly was impossible for the contributors to Modern Love. The book is like a modern version of the Septuagint Bible, which, according to legend, was produced by 70 scholars who independently arrived at an identical translation. Miraculously, the 50 contributors to Modern Love all managed to write in the same voice.

Completely absent from their minds is any notion of love as a source of real conflict or danger. No spurned Didos immolating themselves here: Our therapeutic language assumes that love is in no way dangerous, destructive, or even erotic--which is to say, it pretty much assumes love out of existence. These authors--who, the editor promises, are "modern"--won't even see love as part of the cold, rational calculus of Darwinian competition; instead, they grimly chalk every setback to the parties' lack of emotional maturity.

Take, for example, Stephen, who is sexually involved with Angelina, who is married to someone else and dating both Stephen and another man named Tristan. This is now called polyamory and it sounds exciting. Indeed, it can hardly fail to be exciting; yet poor Stephen makes it out to be exceedingly banal. The whole premise of polyamorism is that love is per se harmless and risk-free. Let Stephen explain: "I see Angelina about four days a week, and on days when I don't see her we talk on the phone. She's negotiating with her husband to spend a night each week at my apartment. She'd like to see a situation where I come over for big family events, like Thanksgiving and New Year's." Stephen is wistful because he really likes Angelina and misses her when she's not around. But don't feel too sorry for him, because he definitely has options: "Recently a woman I've always liked, who lives in New York, confessed that she would like to tie me up the next time I was in town." Angelina at first says she'd be jealous, but after thinking it over decides that it would "probably even [be] good for us." Stephen doesn't tell us what happens next, but the editor of this compilation reports: "Five months after this essay appeared, Stephen and Angelina broke up. Then they got back together. Then they broke up again. Then they got back together before finally breaking up for good."

Then there's the couple who wrestle with the idea of having children because the woman carries a gene for a serious disorder. In the course of exploring this painful decision, even this level-headed couple start to wonder whether a desire for children is a problem that they need to "work on": "Why don't we just adopt? This is an unsettling question because it points to what must be our selfishness. But the idea of creating a life from our two bodies seems to us a consummation of sorts. Maybe this means we need to work on our relationship--that we already, dangerously, see having children as a way of fulfilling something missing between us." Children completing a family? It's practically a thought crime!

The contributors also have a weird lack of curiosity about what the best form of love might be. If you want to know why right-thinking people are shocked that anyone would oppose gay marriage, it is not because they are so wedded to the cause of gay rights but because they cannot even wrap their minds around the idea that some loves might be better than others. Says Larry: "I still don't believe marriage is the only path to happiness or completeness as a person, but it's the right thing for us." Inspiring! But not quite as inspiring as his marriage proposal to his girlfriend: "I said ... something about love and commitment and not going anywhere and here's these rings I got you, and if you want actually to make it official, that's cool, and if you don't, that's cool, too." There's no doubt the recipient of this passionless declaration deserved it.

Suspended incongruously in this slough of despond and self-absorption are a handful of good essays, mostly involving children. If you can slog through 350 pages of banality, you will find 15 or so pages of gut-wrenching essays about the sudden loss of a young child, a mother's suicide on her daughter's 16th birthday, and other variations on the theme of abandonment. There's nothing modern about those topics, of course. Is it a coincidence that they're the only essays worth reading in this collection?

Sarah Bramwell is a writer living in New York.