Romantic Love

We may also gain significant insight by reviewing the historical origins of romantic love. Perhaps when romantic love was new, it was more transparent and revealed more of its intrinsic nature. The roots of romantic love can be found in the twelfth century as practiced by the knights and ladies of the courts of Europe. Romantic love burst upon the scene seemingly out of nowhere and spread throughout the countryside in the songs of the wandering troubadours. This new feeling did not go unnoticed. It was discussed at great length by the ladies of court. Gradually, the popular insights into the nature of love were formulated into a series of statements which became known as the "Rules of Love" (Capellanus, 1184).

Love as practiced in this age was an attempt to reify feelings and heighten desire. As enacted by lovers on the heights of passion, it was an attempt to deify desire. It was romance founded upon impossibility. It represented an all-consuming passion. It did not provide the basis for marriage, but was a banner for bravery on a knights quests. He dedicated his life and his deeds to his lady. She followed him with her attention and thoughts. He lived now not for himself, but for her. He braved deeds and fought in battles and tournaments for her glory. The nobility of love gave meaning to his adventures and his routine.

Romance was an exalted state: a love potion brewed by destiny. As Kephart (1972, p. 109) wrote, "It was the destiny of every lady to meet the knight of her dreams; and for every knight there was one fair lady.'' All nobles wanted to experience this new feeling called "love." Indeed, the "Rules of Love" even made experiencing love into a norm (Capellanus, 1184).

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The "Rules of Love" were formulated by the ladies of court so as to present the nature of this new feeling. Love was defined as ''a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon" the beloved (Capellanus, 1184, p. 28). The nature of love was codified by a series of rules which were agreed upon as expressing the essence of love. I believe that we can detect four basic themes running throughout the 31 "Rules of Love."

First, love was felt to be sporadic: an emotion of constantly varying intensity. ''It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing. If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives. It is the difficulty of attainment makes it prized" (Capellanus, 184)

Secondly as depicted by the code, love is exclusive. Three of the 31 rules expressly mention jealousy as increasing love. A fourth rule says that "No one can be bound by a double love," and a fifth that "a new love puts to flight an old one."

The "Rules of Love" also institutionalize courtship. There is an emphasis on inviting, courting, and hoping.

Love is 'impelled by the persuasion of love.'

It is a 'stranger of avarice.'

'That which the lover takes against the will

of his beloved is without relish'

Love is based on the 'giving of hope.'

Finally, romantic love of the twelfth century was all-consuming. It concentrates one emotionally and psychologically, occupying one's full attention.

One regularly turns pale in the presence

of his beloved.

The heart palpitated.

He eats and sleeps very little.

Love can deny nothing to love.

Every act ends in the thought of the beloved.

Thinks of nothing except what he thinks

will please his beloved.

Is constantly and without intermission

possessed by the thought of his beloved

(Capellanus, 1184, p. 35).

Much of this romantic love consists of a focused attention on the other. This is why jealousy is so threatening to the conception. Whenever the knight might roam, the lady was always with him. It was a love maintained in the mind's eye.

Despite the oddity of some off this, we can see how Romantic Love is clearly part of our emotional heritage. It was a love which insisted upon hope rather than force. Yet it was a romance which kept its distance; a romance which circumstances and convention would never permit fully. It was a romance which fed "on obstacles, short excitations and partings . . .'' (De Rougemont, 1956, p. 292). Although courtly love might actually be consummated sexually, it was never consummated in desire and allowed to routinize as a basis for society. It was kept on a pinnacle of intense infatuation: never allowed to fully bloom, but cultivated nonetheless. Despite this romantic love's sporadic and fleeting nature, the knights and the ladies of court sought to intensify and prolong its passion. Perhaps this is why they defined love as a kind of "inborn suffering."

Passion means suffering, something undergone, the mastery of fate over a free and responsible person. To love love more than the object of love, to love passion for its own sake, has meant to suffer and to court suffering . . . there is the secret which Europe has never allowed to be given away; a secret which it was always repressed (De Rougemont, 1956, p. 50).

This is a conclusion which clearly shocks our sensibilities, since Romantic Love is so much a part of our emotional heritage. Eros is in legend the god of desire, but is it passion that we crave? De Rougemont (1956) in Love in the Western World wrote:

All Pagan religions deify desire . . . they could not do otherwise than make Eros into a god; Eros was the most powerful force within them, the most dangerous and the most mysterious, the most deeply bound up with the event of living . . . . [But] what have we to fear from desire? It loses its absolute hold over us the moment we cease to deify it (p. 312).

In other cultures, there was not such a schism between desire and the social order as there was in Christian Western Europe. In the East, a dictum that desire produces suffering and that one should give up all attachment to desire extended to giving up any temptation to combating desire. Unlike other areas subject to the pagan influence, romantic love thrived in the cultural atmosphere of Western Europe. It spread through the feudal kingdoms fueled by codes of love which would keep it from being routinized into a normal part of life. "It has been our dramatic luck," commented De Rougemont (1956, p. 318), "to have opposed passion with the weapons foredoomed to foster it."

The aescetic flavor of organized Christianity provided the ideal cultural backdrop for a romantic love based on institutionalization, the heights of desire. The lady and her knight sought to keep love on a razor's edge. Passion became the quest. Having started with an impossible love, they sought to savor every last bit of feeling. The "Rules of Love" provided a way to heighten a feeling: a way to add spice to life.

This is all interesting nostalgia, but what relevance and understandings does it offer for our modern age? Do the four basic elements of the "Rules of Love" -- sporadic emotion, an exclusiveness of attention, courtship, and total preoccupation -- show us something of ourselves and the nature of love? Is there an understanding here that is more clear because we can look at it in the past?

It is probably that for most of those at court, love originated as a diversion. Yet passion soon got out of hand. The more intense romantics soon moved beyond the routinized flirtation of the Rules of Court and took the myth more seriously. They saw it as more than just a "Game of Love" -- they found in it a path to meaning. For in this love and this longing, they found something finer: a desire, an image of themselves . . . and of life.

The one essential trait to be desired in a lover (Capellanus, 1184) which was a prerequisite to the experience of love, was a "good character" -- someone one could aspire to, or more accurately, someone one could aspire with. One then sought to turn the world into something befitting the image of the beloved. Love went beyond the day-to-day and testified to an infinity of perfection. While love was not allowed to become the basis for normal life, this love somehow seemed stronger than death: a different system of meaning. In the challenges of the quest, the knights braved death and experienced an awareness they had never sensed before -- they were doing it for her. In their tales, the ladies glimpsed a vision they had kept tucked in their hearts.

Romantics chose vision which flew in the face of reality. No matter how impossible the task, it was but another challenge to which one must rise. Yet, they sought to create a vision which was more real than real. At its peaks, romantic love developed the fever of mysticism. Still, it was a very real road fraught with challenges, death, and sufferings. It is a path which is most curious for ''love" to have taken.

Why does Western Man wish to suffer this passion which lacerates him and which all his common sense rejects? . . . The answer is that he reaches self awareness and tests himself only by risking his life -- in suffering and on the verge of death . . . . European romanticism may be compared to a man for whom suffering, and especially the sufferings of love, are a privileged mode of understanding (De Rougemont, 1956, p. 51).

Such an analysis reads like a summation of Freud's insights upon Eros and the whole of the human (Western) psyche. De Rougemont (1956) continued:

Of course, this is only true of the best romantics among us. Most people do not bother about understanding about self awareness; they merely go after the kind of love which promises the most feeling. But even this has to be a love delayed in its happy fulfillment by some obstruction. Hence, whether our desire is for the most self-conscious or simply the most intense love, secretly we desire obstruction . . . . Happy love has no history -- in European literature (p. 52).

When we unleash feelings, we unleash more than just love. As Rollo May (1969) has noted, we open the gates also to the daimonic and the shadow side. As De Rougemont said, 'Eros ceases to be a demon only when it ceases to be a god" (Lewis, 1960, p. 17). By deifying Eros, romantic love immediately creates problems because passion has two sides. There are the heights of desire and there is also tragedy. It is romance based upon the intangible. In the Western romantic tradition, it is the impossibility or the obstruction which gives our accounts of love their ''romance.'' Romeo and Juliet would not be remembered if it were not for their tragedy. There is Don Quixote who sought to love Dulcena past all flaws. And in Tristan and Iseult which became the base for the Wagner opera, we find that "the myth of passionate love is all contained in the legend as set down by the 12th century poets" (De Rougemont 1956, p. 20). De Rougemont considers the Tristan myth as the representative myth of romantic love. Again, it is a tale of love potions, destiny and fatal love. De Rougemont (1956) made a startling conclusion which holds true not just for Tristan and Iseult but for many lovers in our romantic heritage even if they are not familiar with this legend:

Tristan and Iseult do not love one another . . . . What they love is love and being in love. They behave as if aware that whatever obstructs love must ensure and consolidate it in the heart of each and intensify it infinitely in the moment they reach the absolute obstacle, which is death. Tristan loves the awareness that he is loving far more than he loves Iseult the Fair. And Iseult does nothing to hold Tristan. All she needs is her passionate dream. Their need of one another is in order to be aflame, and they do not need one another as they are. What they need is not one another's presence, but one another's absence. [Italics Original]

The love is mutual in the sense that Tristan and Iseult 'love one another', or, at least, they believe that they do. Certainly their mutual fidelity is exemplary. But the unhappiness comes in, because the love which 'dominates' them is not a love of each for the other as that other really is. They love one another, but each loves the other from the standpoint of self and not from the other's standpoint. Their unhappiness thus originates in a false reciprocity, which disguises a twin narcissism (p. 41). [Italics Original]

Such a "twin narcissism" is far from uncommon. Romantic love as generated in feudal Europe was based on absence, an image in the mind, a passion for passion. It is small wonder that later observers including Stendhl, 1822, would discount romantic love as only a projection (Ortega y Gasset, 1957). Much of our romantic love is the disguised "twin narcissism.'' It is the "love of love" and romance where the person is merely incidental. As Buber (1947, p. 21) wrote, "Many celebrated ecstasies of love are nothing but the lovers delight in the possibilities of his own person which are actualized in an unexpected fullness."

It is the love of love as an actualizing force which overshadows the person being loved. In this way, love is self-love fulfilled by proxy. Love gives one the security in which to bloom. Love never really moves past a self-orientation into a "we." The actualizing force is never really discovered to contain self, other, and all of life, but is treated as only a means. Love and Other remain projections of Self. But as Browning ("the ends of Being and ideal Grace') noted, love is moving into a different realm than just what self "wants."

Don Quixote is an example which might easily support the idea of love as projection. Surely there is nothing which Dulcena could ever say or do to make him a disbeliever. His love is untainted by reality. In such lies its beauty . . . and its fatal flaw.

Yet the matter might have turned out quite differently if Don Quixote had but fallen in love with someone else who shared his vision. Perhaps theirs would have been a love

Where each asks from each

What each most wants to give

And each awakes in each

What else would never be

(Muir, 1960 p. 117).

Don Quixote's love is a total commitment of faith. We must wonder at the power of such love to awaken grandeur in even the humblest. Love at its best is mutual support and growth: where "each awakes in each . . . ."

Yet, so often it is our experience that love awakens life in the loved only to crucify the lover. One can easily see why so many have regarded romantic love as only projection: a matter of simply waiting for someone to unleash one's dream upon. However, not all love is tragic.

The problem with dealing with romantic love only as a projection is that the theory of projection is essentially a discounting mechanism. We use the term "projection" only when the attempt to create a self-fulfilling prophecy is unsuccessful. Only when love fails or proves to be ridiculous do we refer to it as "projection." If the-same process of casting our dreams and hopes is successful, we don't call it "projection." We call it the mutual creation of meaning.

Guggenbuhl-Craig (1979), in a chapter entitled "Romance as Fantasy," noted that much of romance hinges on the enactment and realization of latent abilities. Their fulfillment and growth is not a matter of projecting one's wishes onto another, but of realizing and cultivating real aspects of a person which have not been given a chance to bloom. Romance is thus an exercise in mutual realization of fantasy. It does not simply reduce one to another's projections.

He used the example of a child whose parents may sense a talent in the child. They then give the child an opportunity to develop and explore that ability. This is different from projection where the parents force their hopes on the child. It is the recognition of a real ability in the child which is encouraged and loved into fruition. Creative fantasy emphasizes "becoming" and the creation which is loved and supported to realization.

Van Den Berg (1961) argued that we retain this fragile theory of projection because it allows us to maintain the common denominator of our cultural meanings and at the same time discount all alternative meanings. Despite the poverty of such an approach, this allows us to

act while keeping our world intact and unchallenged by extra-individual meanings. Yet it is precisely the nature of romantics and lovers to offer and even want to celebrate these alternative meanings: to seek sources of inspiration and meaning outside our agreed upon common denominators.

Warmoth (1981) suggested that we might better understand "peak experiences" as the creation of a personal myth. Romantic love is certainly a peak experience providing an outlet for the personal mythos and the creation of meaning. If there is too great a discrepancy between each individual's myth and the Other's and they are not capable of arriving at a larger understanding or a new synthesis, then the relationship is going to have problems.

In many ways, romantic love turns away from the world and offers us new meanings from the inside out. It is an attempt to make dreams real. From the depths of each individual, an effort is made to touch the ''real" world and enact a meaningful creation. This is the heart of romantic love: sharing of meanings which have laid dormant awaiting an opportunity for life in the light of day. This is the reason that romantic love shakes us to the roots of our souls. This is why a lover becomes such a part of self. This also accounts for the pathological nature of some loves, as well as other loves which are our birth in beauty.

Many of the characteristics of Romantic love noted in the "Rules of Love" can be accounted for by noting Romantic love's relation to the mutual creation of meaning. It is the spinning of another world. Romantic love withdraws from the world at large; focuses its attention inward; and then seeks to shape the outer world in the image of the newly perceived reality. It is a phenomenon of attention and the focus of will.

Romantic love is a matter of attention. Ortega y Gasset (1957) noted, there is a definite relation between love and the phenomenon of hypnosis. "Falling in love" is a hypnotic magic. It creates a new reality more real than the life to which one had been accustomed to previously.

But "Is love blind" or is it a matter of "each awaking in each"? Abraham Maslow (1962) addressed this question directly:

. . . the lover perceives in the beloved what no one else can, and there is no question about the intrinsic value of his inner experience and of the many good consequences for him, for his beloved, and for the world. If we take as an example the mother loving her baby, the case is even more obvious. Not only does love perceive potentialities but it also actualizes them. The absence of love stifles potentialities and even kills them . . . . All personalogical and psychotherapeutic experience is testimonial to this fact that love actualizes and non-love stultifies, where deserved or not.

The complex and circular question then arises here, 'To what extent is this phenomenon a self-fulfilling prophecy?' as Merton has called it. A husband's conviction that his wife is beautiful, or a wife's firm belief that her husband is courageous, to some extent creates the beauty or the courage. This is not so much a perception of something that already exists as a bringing into existence by belief.

And yet, even beyond all this complexity, the lurking doubts remain to those who hope ultimately to drag all these problems into the domain of public science. Frequently enough, love for another brings illusions, the perceptions of qualities and potentialities that don't exist, that are not therefore truly perceived but created in the mind of the beholder and which then rest on a system of needs, repressions, denials, projections, and rationalizations. If love can be more perceptive than non-love, it can also be blinder. And the research problem remains to nag us, when is which (pp. 98-99)? [First Two Italics Mine]

Being loved or loving creates another reality. Beyond projection and illusion, bringing into existence by belief must involve a path that one is yearning or at least willing to walk. The potentiality must be capable of realization . . . of being acted upon. Not only must the potential exist, but it must be one which both are willing to choose to enhance.

The lover withdraws from the ordinary world and creates/actualizes a world of love held in the mind's eye. Romance is thus always floating between the real and the dream: between becoming and the heights of vision.

Agape