Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled youths reeling from the unprocessed traumas of their childhood laid down in their poems and books and magazines the foundations of modern romantic fiction. Although none of them lived past the age of thirty, they affected the lives of future generations with their art and their views on life.
We call them Romantics, they keep quoting their poems in our vows and keep flipping through their books of suffering.
Transcending our culture as an unexamined dogma is their view that there is diversity in love and that romantic love sits at the top as the organizing principle of our emotional lives, the goal and end of our existential longing. It is a religion that even people with amazing ability to think critically in other areas of life tend not to doubt. And yet when we let our hearts be big enough and real enough, we find that there is but a porous and porous membrane between friendship and love, that companionship is a form of closeness, that family can mean many different things and look many different ways; we find that romantic love is a powerful relationship not between perfect people but between self-righteous people and the same assumptions – the most powerful mythic material created by the creative imagination.
Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935) offers a sobering antidote to the cult of romantic love in a passage from A Letter of Sorrow (public library) – a posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a successful explorer in your lifelong journey and how to free yourself to reach who you really are. You write:
Romantic love is a rare product of Christian influence century after century, and everything about its essence and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit designed by the soul or imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks fit, when they happen to come.
But every suit, as it is not eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, beneath the mortal garments of beauty we have built for ourselves, the real body of the person we have clothed shows.
So romantic love is a way of disappointment, unless this disappointment, accepted from the beginning, decides to change constantly, always sewing new suits in the workshops to constantly renew the appearance of the person who wears them.
The standard love model in this sense is the conflict of the deepest, truest love – the kind that Iris Murdoch perfectly describes as “the hard-hitting realization that something outside of yourself is real … the discovery of truth.” Romantic love, Pessoa observes, is a flight from reality to fiction, self-consciousness to the other:
We have never loved anyone. What we love is the impression we have of someone. It is our mind – ourselves – that we love.
[…]
The relationship between soul and other, expressed by uncertain and variable things like shared words and advanced gestures, is deceptively complex. The act of coming together is not coming together. Two people say “I love you” or think about it and feel it, and each has a different perspective, a different life, maybe even a different color or fragrance, in the invisible money that makes up the work of the soul.
Couples with Iris Murdoch on how to see clearly and love pure, then revisit Martha Nussbaum's litmus test to know if you really love someone and Simone de Beauvoir on how two souls can work together for the best.
