Part II – The Flames and Shadows of Romantic Love

The following is Part II of a three-part blog post. Look for Part III next Sunday.

At first, I thought I was doing something rebellious and new by refusing to pursue romantic love, by following my Disney-themed dream instead of my hormones. I even thought of myself as cool and nonconformist as I spurned the notion of romantic love, thinking that what Allison and I experienced was better. After calming down—and humbling myself a little bit—I decided that the love Allison and I share wasn’t necessarily better, just different. And it definitely wasn’t new or nonconformist. Through my studies, I’ve learned that marrying for reasons other than romantic love is pretty vintage—and I’m not talking exclusively about loveless marriages either. Yes, romantic love has been around for a long time as well, but it was never the top reason to get married like it is now (in Western culture, at least). While I haven’t had nearly as much time to research the topic as many of today’s professional anthropologists, I’ll try to provide a brief—and therefore limited—history of romantic love.

Some of the earliest records of romantic love come, as can be expected, from ancient Greco-Roman sources. Though affairs were common amongst upper class citizens, the lovesickness so associated with romantic love was considered a form of madness, and even fondness between husband and wife was frowned upon (Coontz, 2005, p. 16). As backwards as it may seem, extramarital affairs were even considered the highest form of love in twelfth and thirteenth century aristocracies (p. 16). Marriage, to them, was a political and economic pursuit—love just wasn’t a player. In various cultures, the upper classes usually used marriage to hoard wealth and resources, only marrying when one stood to gain something by it (p. 6).

Marriage in the lower classes was a bit different, but love was seldom the main reason to get married. Consistently, and across cultures, marriage in the lower classes “spoke to the needs of the larger group. It converted strangers into relatives and extended cooperative relations beyond the immediate family or small band by creating far-flung networks of in-laws” (Coontz, 2005, p. 6). Into the Middle Ages, lower class marriage was largely utilitarian. Many lower class people probably considered love in marriage a bonus, but few could afford the luxury of seeking it out. Potential spouses would consider each other’s skills and assets as much as they would consider personality and attractiveness (p. 6). Back then, husband and wife wouldn’t pursue separate careers; they became business partners, and courting resembled a job interview much more than it does today.

Even though romantic love was never necessary for marriage until very recently, so many people in Western culture are convinced that it’s the only way to go. Unfortunately, I know this firsthand. When Allison and I were engaged, we decided to share my unconventional experience of being both gay and Mormon with the rest of the world through the Voices of Hope Project (Marston, 2014). While the vast majority of responses were positive, there were many instances where people we had never met came out of the woodwork to tell us that our love wasn’t real, that our marriage was doomed, and that I needed to “be true to myself.” (Because they, complete strangers, knew me so well that they knew I wasn’t being true to myself.) These people were convinced that a gay man couldn’t possibly love a woman. They told us our marriage, without romantic love, would at best be a dreary middle school shuffle—not the Disney waltz I dreamed of. They regarded romantic love as the most necessary thing for a happy and successful marriage.

Luckily for us, we didn’t give a sizzling sassafras about what they said. While romantic love is great, I certainly wouldn’t call it necessary for a happy marriage. I’m not even mad; I just find it ironic that the people so convinced that Allison and I were ignorant could be so ignorant to the world around them.

There are still some cultures today in which romantic love is definitely not the norm. It’s not just because they haven’t been “enlightened” yet—as my ethnocentric antagonists might assume. Romantic love simply is not the global ideal. Many modern, African lower and middle class communities “consider too much love between husband and wife … disruptive because it encourages the couple to withdraw from the wider web of dependence that makes the society work” (Coontz, 2005, p. 18). Women caught in the throng of romantic love will often deny loving their husbands when asked, since it’s considered inappropriate. So when you get down to it, these marriages may also be loveless—it’s hard to know.

In India, however, this is the formula: “First we marry, then we fall in love” (Coontz, 2005, p. 18). Most marriages in India are still arranged, so there’s no chance for the passionate Western romance culminating in a fairytale wedding. But love still exists in many Eastern marriages—it just isn’t the romantic love we Westerners have put on a pedestal. Johnson, who has a particular fondness for Eastern cultures, explains:

In Eastern cultures, like those of India or Japan, we find that married couples love each other with great warmth, often with a stability and devotion that puts us to shame. But their love is not “romantic love” as we know it. They don’t impose the same ideals on their relationships, nor do they impose such impossible demands and expectations on each other as we do. (1983, p. xi).

Easterners seem to be able to love their spouses and to find fulfillment in their marriages without the nebulous and complicated “romantic love” that we, as Westerners, are used to. When you stop and consider it, romantic love as we know it hasn’t even been the norm in the West for very long, so it’s odd that we’re “used to” it in the first place.

Amid utilitarian marriages, romantic love first became idealized in Western society in the Middle Ages as “courtly love,” to be practiced mainly between knights and ladies of the court (Johnson, 1983, p. xiii). Here is likely where one romantic archetype was first introduced: the pursuing male and the pursued female. This courtly love wasn’t quite romantic love as we know it though; it was characterized by a worshipful and chaste obsession, and often the lady would be married to another man. The knight and lady would treat each other as divine, so they believed that sex, a base and worldly desire, was unfit for their transcendental love experience (p. 46)—something probably no Westerner would agree with today. I’m not sure how much courtly love was actually practiced in the Middle Ages, since it was so impractical, but it was certainly the ideal.

After its courtly phase, romantic love evolved into a sort of poetic love—the type of love that pervaded poetry in the Renaissance. Poetic love is largely characterized by conflict, specifically the conflict the poet feels as he struggles between his earthly, romantic passions and his desire for a higher, more spiritual love experience. As a Christian that believes marriage continues in the Resurrection, I personally cannot identify very well with these Renaissance poets, since I believe there’s something divine about these bodies and the emotions they experience. Much of the rest of Christianity, from what I understand, believes that bodily experiences are inherently baser than spiritual ones—hence the struggle of the Christian Renaissance poets.

Petrarch, a Renaissance poet, gives us a good example of this conflicting, poetic love in his sonnets for Laura.

If my life find strength enough to fight
the grievous battle of each passing day,
that I may meet your gaze, years from today,
lady, when your eyes have lost their light,
and when your golden curls have turned to white,
and vanished are your wreaths and green array,
and when your youthful hue has fled away,
whose beauty makes me tremble in its sight,
perhaps then Love will overcome my fears
enough that I may let my secret rise
and tell you what I’ve suffered all these years;
and if no flame be kindled in your eyes,
at least I may be granted for my tears
the comfort of a few belated sighs. (Shore, 1987, p. 17).

Since, in this sonnet, Petrarch has yet to even admit his secret love to Laura, we can see the remnants of courtly love in his poetic love. He highlights and idealizes her beauty without seeming to know her personally, as was seen in courtly love, but we see poetic love in how he centers mostly on his own struggle. Petrarch talks about his fight, his fears, his suffering, his comfort—but never hers. Laura is kept at a distance—chaste, beautiful, and idealized. Petrarch even calls her a “goddess” in a later sonnet (p. 99), and hopes that she’ll be there to guide him into heaven (p. 101). This is poetic love at its finest.

Still, before the seventeenth century, most Christian writings only used the word “love” to refer to God or neighbor, not spouse (Coontz, 2005, p. 21). Poetic, romantic love still wasn’t the norm for the masses, like it is today—the lower classes didn’t have the luxury of dancing to the beat of romance. However, in the seventeenth century, activities that typically took place in the “extended household,” such as “eating, drinking, toilet, and sleeping,” began to take place “within the much narrower confines of what might be called the ‘marital space’” (Vernon, 2010). Married couples became much more exclusive not only at home, but in the way they displayed affection as well.

The bodily intimacy … which formerly marked the spiritual intimacy of friendship now became more narrowly associated with the realm of husband and wife. Friendship was being pushed out to the margins of public life, and marriage was taking its place as one of the only forms of vowed kinship that society would recognize. (Hill, 2015, p. 39).

This is where we see the beginning of some of today’s stereotypically romantic displays. For example, before this shift, it was considered normal for two close male friends to share a bed, but today such a practice would be labeled romantic and assumed sexual in nature.

In the eighteenth century, Western culture tipped even further when it experienced a radical shift in thinking called the Enlightenment. During the Enlightenment, romantic love “overwhelmed our collective psyche and permanently altered our view of the world” (Johnson, 1983, p. xiii-xiv). Love became the most important part of a marriage, and young people were now free to choose whomever they wanted to marry, when before their marriages were typically arranged by family members (Coontz, 2005, p. 5). Marriage used to be considered far too important to be left to the decision of young people, especially if that decision would be based on something as transitory as romance. Now Western civilization was faced with the challenge of marrying for love, but marrying stably as well. As Coontz puts it, “For the next 150 years, societies struggled to strike the right balance between the goal of finding happiness in marriage and the preservation of limits that would keep people from leaving a marriage that didn’t fulfill their expectations for love” (p. 5). In other words, with the right implementation of romantic love, marriage became a lot happier, but much less stable.

Despite the instability of romantic love, marrying for love certainly had its benefits. After the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth century, marriage for love began to erode social boundaries. Marriage was “increasingly defined as a private agreement with public consequences, rather than as a public institution whose roles and duties were rigidly determined by the family’s place in the social hierarchy” (Coontz, 2005, p. 147). There wasn’t such an impassible line between the social classes anymore. Another benefit was that male dominance in the household was drastically curbed, now that women had more freedom in choosing their husbands. Women’s rights began to develop because marital decisions were now founded on love and reason, not on the husband’s will alone (p. 149).

Then, in the early twentieth century, Western romantic love took on a heavier mantel of exclusivity. Unfortunately, same-sex friendships declined to the shallow levels that are commonly seen today, and romantic partners became a priority higher even than family (Coontz, 2005, p. 207). By the mid-twentieth century, industry had advanced so much in North America and Western Europe that a family could thrive on a single spouse’s income, and the “male breadwinner” archetype was introduced into romantic love. Soon after this, as must naturally follow the right to choose whom to marry, people began to demand the right to divorce (p. 8). Women were winning increasingly more rights, and this “male breadwinner” business just wasn’t cutting it for them. Thus, romantic love simultaneously made Western marriage more fair and fulfilling, as well as more optional and fragile (p. 301).

And that brings us to romantic love as we know it. Our culture’s ideal today is that marriage be based on romantic love, an “intense, profound love,” and that “a couple should maintain their ardor until death do them part” (Coontz, 2005, p. 15). Just like the memory of my Disney dream, romantic love has been reimagined and reformed with every new thinker until becoming what it is today. I do think there are a lot of helpful and fun pieces to today’s version of romance—for example, Allison and I have fun going on dates, giving each other things, and being close—but there are also many unrealistic and harmful expectations in today’s ideal of romantic love. A good example of current cultural expectations surrounding romantic love is seen in Taylor Swift’s hit single, “Wildest Dreams”:

Say you'll remember me standing in a nice dress,
Staring at the sunset, babe
Red lips and rosy cheeks
Say you'll see me again
Even if it's just in your wildest dreams …
You see me in hindsight
Tangled up with you all night
Burning it down
Someday when you leave me
I bet these memories
Follow you around. (Swift, 2014).

Here, Swift doesn’t even pretend that this passionate romance will lead to a committed relationship. Her idea of romantic love is based on the desire to be deified by her lover—she wants him to think of her as an ideal, not a person. She defines romantic love as treating another person as deity, coupled with sexual and passionate encounters. Johnson sums up this harmful perception of romantic love when he says that romance is egotistical, “For romance is not a love that is directed at another human being; the passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, our own fantasies” (1983, p. 193).

I agree that this can be the case—that romantic love can be selfish, obsessed with who we want a person to be instead of focused on who that person actually is. That is the facet of romantic love that ruins relationships, the reason why knights and ladies kept their distance, unwilling to let the other reveal him- or herself as human. This telling of romantic love certainly coincides with the physiological approach as well: that romance is just a neurochemical drug addiction designed to propagate the species.

But this can’t be everything. Where does the dancing come in? The roses? The gifts and acts of kindness? I see those things all the time—I’ve done them myself with Allison! That can’t all just be a ruse to get the other person to idealize you. So what is it?

As it turns out, it’s the real love hiding behind romantic love.

References

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