The irresistible appeal of the romantic ideal; Pursue love with less hubris, impatience and intolerance to risk, says Simon May

February 13, 2014 3:53 pm

The irresistible appeal of the romantic ideal

By Simon May

Pursue love with less hubris, impatience and intolerance to risk, says Simon May

Today millions of people celebrate one form of love and one only: romantic love, the love that speaks the language of erotic desire.

As we settle down to our candlelit dinners – or, as singletons or conscientious objectors to Valentine’s day, wander past packed restaurants envying or pitying the serried rows of couples – we might ask: why do we so privilege romance?

Why, for example, do we not have a St Francis day for love of nature? Or a world friendship day named after Aristotle (who considered friendship the supreme form of love)? Or an anniversary when love between parents and children is celebrated with more than the card and flowers given, one-sidedly, on Father’s or Mother’s day?

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Indeed, why do such alternative love festivals sound faintly absurd to our contemporary ear?

The answer lies in the unique promise of romantic love, as it has been conceived of since the late 18th century, to satisfy five modern and, taken together, western ambitions.

The first and most important is to find salvation from everyday suffering and banality through a great ideal – and to do so outside traditional religion. The tremendous popularity of the romantic ideal, of two people finding ultimate joy and meaning in a cocoon of oneness, has in effect privatised salvation.

Second, there is the ambition to subvert traditional relations of class, power and more recently gender – and what better than the heedlessness of romantic love to do so?

Third, romantic love accords with the great prestige attached to passion in modern times. Passion has become a test of a life fully lived – a life in which we are more than calculable and calculating strivers for carefully defined goals. It dignifies our highest goals in a way that, for ancients such as Aristotle, only reason could.

Fourth, there is the libertarian urge to assert ourselves through our romantic choices as radically autonomous individuals. We see our romances as central to forging, charting and, crucially, endorsing our evolving identity.

And, finally, romantic love plays the starring role in reclaiming sex and the body and their immense pleasures from the denigration to which they were subject for centuries.

No other form of love – and certainly no other contemporary ideal, whether equality or freedom or ecology or world peace – could credibly promise to address so many fundamental goals in one go.

Of course, such extravagant expectations are easily disappointed. Many couples, finding just one of them unmet – such as the crazily close linkage that exists between sex and love – will give up on their romance, either “moving on” to the next one or else settling for practical companionship.

But do not believe those who say that romance is on the wane because it is too arduous; or because people cannot deal with the shame of repeated failure; or because internet dating, with its limitless opportunities, is turning love into a cold commodity.

Ideals and ideologies do not collapse merely by failing. Rather, they decay when the ambitions that nurture them disappear. And the ambitions that have nurtured romantic love for two centuries are too deeply rooted in the western mind to disappear soon.

Above all the desire for salvation, which romantic love is charged with satisfying, is alive and well. This is the desire to find within the romantic cocoon the security, identity, meaning, respect for our individuality and redemption from life’s messy imperfection that were once sought primarily in God.

To say this is to say more than that romantic love has become our new deity. In addition – and this is the real danger – human love has become modelled on the specific characteristics of the Judaeo-Christian God. In particular, it is expected to be unconditional, enduring and purely selfless in its devotion to the wellbeing of loved ones. But to claim that humans can love in this way is hubris.

Moreover, love is widely regarded not as a rare skill, as the Greeks saw it; nor the supreme virtue in need of endless cultivation, as St Augustine saw it. It is seen rather as a blessing that we all expect to find. And find quickly.

Here is a Valentine’s day resolution for romantic love: pursue it with less hubris, less impatience and less intolerance to risk.

And free it from the stranglehold of sex. An erotic relationship can flourish without constant consummation – as it did, gloriously, in the era of medieval courtly love.

Above all, we must understand that love is conditional. It is a desire for one whom we experience as indestructibly grounding our life – as offering us a promise of rootedness in the world – and to whom we therefore yearn to devote ourselves. To assume it is unconditional is to play God. And that always ends badly.

The writer is visiting professor of philosophy at King’s College London and author of ‘Love: A History’