Love in the Western world - to borrow Denis de Rougemont's useful term - has come to mean, in the popular imagination, romantic love almost exclusively. Pure emotion, passion, "love at first sight" - we so take for granted the import of romantic love, it may come as a surprise to learn that the very concept of "love" based upon emotion as a high value, and not as an outlaw passion, is relatively new in the history of mankind.
Romantic love isn't so much a love that defies conventions, for romantic love is of all love types the most conventional, as a love that arises with seeming spontaneity: unwilled, undirected by others' suggestions or admonitions, raw and unpremeditated and of the heart; not cerebral and not genital. Romantic love is forever in opposition to formal, cultural and tribal prescriptions of behaviour: arranged marriages, for instance, in which brides and their dowries are possessions to be handed over to a bridegroom and his family, or in which titled names are wed in businesslike arrangements that have little to do with the feelings of individuals.
Arguably the most celebrated of late-20th-century public figures, Diana, Princess of Wales, would seem to have been a martyr to such an arrangement; her political marriage to Prince Charles ending in dissolution and divorce, and her "quest for personal happiness" (i.e., romantic love) ending in a grotesquely public death on a Parisian boulevard. In the ancient world, romantic love would seem to have been virtually unknown, and rarely celebrated. Our generic term "love" didn't exist. The sentiment of romantic love as we know it was the homoerotic love of older Greek men for boys; marital love, which surely existed, seems oddly not to have been much honoured, at least in surviving literature. Plato's elaborately extended metaphor of the republic, or the perfectly balanced state, discusses marriage primarily as mating; by contrast, Plato's Symposium celebrates homoerotic love in the most blushingly romantic terms. How different this is from the extramarital erotic attraction of heterosexuals, which results in devastation and violent death.
In Euripides's Hippolytus, for instance, the young Queen Phaedra falls in love with her husband's illegitimate son, who rejects her, and causes her to commit suicide; Phaedra is no romantic, but rather the victim of an ungovernable, unwished-for passion imposed upon her by Aphrodite. Such sexual desire is akin to a curse. Where to the classical mind the intervention of eros in human affairs signals chaos, disaster and retribution, to the more modern, romantically inclined sensibility, eros is the very engine of life's story, a seemingly inexhaustible fund of fantasies of (mostly heterosexual) desire. The adulterous tale of Sir Launcelot and Queen Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur, in Sir Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur strikes a startlingly contemporary note, though written in 1469; the illicit romances of Heloise and Abelard, Tristram and Isolde and other medieval lovers concentrate upon an intensity of genuine feeling not found in earlier literature. By the 14th and 15th centuries, in aristocratic European societies at least, eros had become a fine art, worthy of a courtier's fullest attention. Not coarse sexuality, but a refined gentilesse is the ideal of these romances; the love of the courtier for his lady, usually another man's wife, has been interpreted as a secularization of the medieval cult of the Virgin Mary, a "feminisation" of the patriarchal Roman Catholic Church.
These tales are inevitably from the male perspective: the lady is saintly, and of an unearthly beauty; or, in later refinements, the lady is cruel, even diabolical, and the courtier's passion becomes his punishment. In subsequent centuries in the West, romantic love has triumphed as a sort of private, personal mystique linked with a high cultural value. The quintessential romantic-minded heroine is Flaubert's Emma Bovary, a finely drawn portrait of a woman doomed to unhappiness in love. Emma is corrupted not by any actual man but by her reading; she yearns to locate, in the world, the elusive image of romantic passion. The problem with such yearning, Flaubert suggests, is that it invariably leads to disappointment.
At least one major American novelist, F Scott Fitzgerald, wrote of virtually nothing except romantic love (and its unforeseen consequences), and it might be argued that writers as diverse as Carson McCullers and Jack Kerouac are essentially celebrants of homoerotic romance. John Updike, that intrepid explorer of love's wilful illusions, would seem an American heir of Proust in both the poetic precision of his style and his fascination with erotic infatuation. Updike's preoccupations bring to mind a question of de Rougemont: "Without adultery, what would happen to imaginative writing?".
COMING of age for most of us has to do with falling under the spell of the culture's seductive promises about love: to grow up in the 50s, as I did, was to be bombarded with images of every kind of romantic love idea. Advertisements presented unfailingly pretty, feminine girl-women in various stages of bliss, always male-related; Hollywood movies dramatised the predominant - possibly for women the only - story of significance, the love story. Apart from these images of individuals fulfilled by romance, there were few others, and none as glamorous. (What images of the intellectual life, for instance? The artistic life?) Of course, these are cliches, and yet - what power cliches possess when we're young and vulnerable. "Romance" for me somehow became disembodied from any particular figure or icon and attached itself to the quest for adventure, the wild exploration itself. Luckily for me, I can't be disappointed in this "romance" precisely because it's purely abstract and imaginative.
Romantic love, that most precarious and gossamer of emotions, will surely survive the millennia that gave birth to it as long as a reasonably affluent civilisation endures, for the secret of romantic love is economic: it's a luxury only some can afford, just as a refined taste in food is a consequence of a plentiful food supply. Is romantic love illusion? Delusion? An ideal dream? Just as the majority of humankind will continue to believe in gods of various denominations when no actual gods have been sighted, so men and women will continue to fall under the spell of romantic love and to shape, or misshape, their lives to that end.
Biologists may grimly describe for us the mammalian underpinnings of courtship, mating, bonding, fidelity (where there is in fact fidelity) - but, being human, knowing full well, as the song warns us, that "falling in love with love is falling for make-believe," we are the species that demands to be lied to, in the nicest ways. - New York Times service
Joyce Carol Oates is the author, most recently, of The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque