How romanticism ended love – 01/23/2024 – Balance

Falling in love with someone seems like such a personal and spontaneous process that it may sound strange – and even a little insulting – to suggest that something else (which we might call society or culture) might play a secret and crucial role in governing our relationships in their lives. more intimate moments.

Our loves unfold against a cultural backdrop that creates a powerful notion of what is “normal” in love; it subtly guides us where we should place our emotional emphases, teaches us what to value, how to approach conflict, what to get excited about, when to tolerate and what can legitimately irritate us. Love has a history and we navigate –sometimes somewhat helplessly– its currents.

Since the mid-18th century, we have lived in a highly differentiated era in the history of love that we can call romanticism. It emerged as an ideology in Europe in the minds of poets, artists and philosophers, and now it has conquered the world, potently (but always silently) determining how a merchant’s son in Yokohama will approach a first date, how a screenwriter in Hollywood will shape the ending. of a movie or when a middle-aged woman in Buenos Aires might decide to separate from her civil servant husband of 20 years.

No relationship exactly follows the romantic template, but even so, its broad contours are often present – ​​and can be summarized as follows:

Romanticism is deeply hopeful about marriage. He tells us that this marriage can have all the excitement of a love affair. The loving feelings we are familiar with at the beginning of a relationship are expected to prevail throughout our lives.

Romanticism united love and sex. Previously, people imagined that they could have sex with people they didn’t love and that they could love someone without having extraordinary sex. It has become the indicator of the health of any relationship.

Romanticism proposed that true love should mean the end of all loneliness. The right partner would understand us completely, possibly without needing to speak to us. He would intuit our souls (romantics place special value on the idea that our partner can understand us without us having to say anything…).

Romanticism believed that choosing a partner should be a matter guided by feelings, not practical considerations. For most of history, people had entered into relationships and married for pragmatic and logical reasons: because his plot of land was next door to hers, because his family had a thriving grain business, or their parents adopted the same interpretation of sacred texts. From such “rational” marriages resulted loneliness, rape, infidelity, beatings, coldness and screams heard behind the children’s bedroom doors.

For romanticism, rational marriage was not at all reasonable; Therefore, what replaced it – the marriage of feelings – basically never had to answer for itselfO. What matters is that two people are attracted to each other by an overwhelming instinct and they know, in their hearts, that it is right. In the modern era, the more reckless a marriage appears to be (perhaps they have known each other for six weeks; one of them has no job or both are barely out of their teens), the safer, in fact, it can be considered, because the apparent “recklessness” it is taken as a counterweight to all the errors and tragedies permitted by the unions of old.

Romanticism manifested a strong disdain for practical matters and money. Currently, we don’t like these elements to be predominant in our minds when it comes to relationships, especially in the early days. It seems cold – or unromantic – to say that you’ll know you’re with the right person because the two of you are a good match financially or because you agree on things like using the bathroom and attitudes about punctuality.

Romanticism believes that true love should involve delighting in a lover’s every aspect of him. True love is synonymous with accepting everything about someone. The idea that your partner (or yourself) may need to change is considered a sign that the relationship is in crisis; “You will have to change” is a desperate threat.

We can, at this point, boldly declare: romanticism has killed love and that has been a disaster for our relationships.

We are surrounded by a culture that offers a well-intentioned but fatally distorted idea of ​​how relationships can work. We are trying to apply an unhelpful script to a tremendously complicated task.

This romantic script is normative and, at times, illusory. To be considered normal in the age of romanticism, many of the following must happen:

• Our lover should be our soulmate, best friend, father, driver, accountant, household coordinator and spiritual guide.

Furthermore, we do not need an education in love. We may need training to be a pilot or a neurosurgeon, but not a lover. We will learn this along the way by following our feelings.

Knowing the history of romanticism should be comforting — because it suggests that many of the problems we have with relationships don’t come from our ineptitude or our regrettable partner choices. Knowing the history invites another, more useful idea: we are not solely to blame, we have been given an incredibly difficult task by our culture, which then had the temerity to present it as easy.

It seems crucial to systematically question the presumptions of this view of love – not to destroy it, but to save it. We need to come up with a post-romantic theory of couples, because to make a relationship last, we have to be almost disloyal to the emotions that got us into that relationship in the first place.

We need to replace the romantic template with a psychologically mature view of love that we can call classical, which encourages in us several unfamiliar but, hopefully, effective attitudes. Among them, realize that:

• We are quite flawed, and so is our partner, it is immensely beneficial for a couple to increase the amount of tolerance and generosity in circulation;

• We will never find everything in another person, nor he in us, not because of some peculiar flaw, but because of how human nature works;

• We need to make tremendous, and often somewhat artificial, efforts to understand each other; and that intuition cannot take us where we need to go;

All these attitudes and others belong to a new and more hopeful future for love.

This is an edited version of the text originally published by The School of Life, a school founded by Alain de Botton