Romantic love is a total love dominated by the element of thrill or excitement, but it is more than that. It is a total pattern of love behavior and relationship which is said to have come into our Western culture with the Moorish occupancy of the Iberic peninsula, the French troubadour complex of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the Celtic myth of Tristan and Iseult.
Characteristics of the pattern are: (1) individual freedom and social irresponsibility in choice of partner, sometimes with ideas of predetermined “affinity” or mysterious destiny; (2) exclusive concentration of feeling upon one love partner; (3) the man’s preparedness to seize and take the woman, if necessary, from any other possessor; (4) the honoring of love, sometimes by unnecessary sexual restraint, sometimes by a glorified adultery ); (5) idealization, aesthetic appreciation, and worship (but yet possession) of woman by man; (6) adventure and braving of dangers in the process of courtship; (7) aesthetic and dramatic settings for courtship.
Sociologists have long believed that the romantic complex, while contributing new values to our culture, has also greatly intensified the problems and pains of modern marriage. Although its European advent dates from the twelfth century or even earlier, romanticism gained new power and diffusion with the late nineteenth century and its age of individualism.
The popular magazine, the short story, and the motion picture have found romantic plots the best material for the vicarious satisfaction of the masses of the people. In America especially, with its democracy, its mobility of population, and its breakdown of family authority, young people have been encouraged to follow the caprice of their feelings in choosing a life partner.
Young marriages with insufficient foresight have contributed to the high divorce rate. Romance in earlier days connoted extramarital love (ideally, and to a large extent actually, without sexual intercourse). Marriage was arranged; hence only outside of marriage could people make true love choices. But in modern days romance has come to be the ideology of the marriage choice itself. It has received aid and encouragement from our traditional mores because it apparently helps to keep sex within marriage and to relegate eroticism to an inferior level in the scale of values, subordinate to the great moving thrills of excited love.
Actually the romantic complex may have helped to break down the traditional sex mores, but if so that has been an indirect result. The romantic idea in its complete form stands for monogamous love but does not demand the indissolubility of marriage. The net influence in America seems to have been to channel marital discontent into the pattern of divorce and remarriage, which some have called “serial polygamy,” as against the older and more European pattern of “simultaneous polygamy.”
Of course the American love ideal is extreme romanticism in courtship with two qualifications: (1) abstention from intercourse until after marriage, and (2) lifelong sexual fidelity to one and the same partner. Romanticism as understood in continental Europe is rather more a total way of life without these two qualifications. It is against this European background that we must view Denis de Rougemont’s scathing denunciation of romance as a whole, calling it the “cult of passion.” He ascribes to it a large part of the evils and suffering of the modern world, and even views nationalism and war as “the transplanting of passion into politics.”
He recommends, instead, “Christian love and marital fidelity.” He admits that fidelity is also irrational or “absurd” in Tertullian’s sense, that is, a value or faith chosen for its own sake. But fidelity, he says, is constructive, for it values a particular person, the chosen partner, and the relationship to that partner, rather than a particular kind of feeling; it is concerned with objective realities more than with a dream.
Unlike many American moralists, de Rougemont is concerned not so much with degrees of physical intimacy as with a broader ethical issue: is it better to live opportunistically, finding values in whatever life happens to offer from time to time, or to set oneself a goal, to take a stand, to limit one’s experiences for the sake of the chosen goal? He urges the latter scheme of values, which he calls creative, and attacks “the general belief in spontaneity and manifold experience.”
Are de Rougemont’s recommendations relevant to America? They deserve our thoughtful consideration, but for a somewhat different reason than in Europe. It may be that there is a basic conflict within our version of the romantic complex. Is it humanly possible to condition people so intensely to the romantic way of thinking during youthful courtship and then to demand that this attitude shall be finally put aside after the honeymoon or that two distinct personalities (the partners) keep in perfect step with each other as they gradually settle down to conjugal love?
The remedy for marital disillusionment is not only to avoid setting up illusions in courtship but also to use such art and skill within marriage that some of the alleged illusions become realities. This can be done, and other chapters of this book will suggest ways and means. The major criticisms of American love life made by thoughtful scholars pertain mostly to the way love is handled after marriage and to the conditioning which parents give to their children.
Thus many authorities agree that (1) American husbands are preoccupied with business and do not give enough actual time and thought to comradeship with their wives; (2) there is too little psychological intimacy between American husbands and wives, too little appreciation between mature men and women as persons, apart from erotic attraction, too much differentiation of their interests; (3) too much — or the wrong kind -of domination of American boys by their mothers; (4) a tendency of each sex to treat the spouse, in some way or other, as a child.
Perhaps one of the most neglected needs of the courtship period is that for rich, understanding contacts with people who are already married. Our social customs tend to separate adolescents sharply from adults and to preoccupy them with the problems of their current adolescent world. Courting couples would do well to spend more time discussing and investigating realistically the problems of married life.
It is surprising how little those already married will really talk to the unmarried youth. They leave this too much to the professors. Every young person should have the opportunity to observe and understand a number of happy and successful marriages. Ideals which are set up in terms of these concrete observations are less likely to be illusions.
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