Product Code Database
Romance and romantic love came to encompass a number of ideas about love, which are interrelated for historical and cultural reasons:
In psychology, romantic love is considered to be a motivation or drive, which is distinct from (but related to) the concept of attachment.
The terms "romance" and "romantic love" are used with multiple definitions, which can be contradictory at times. (2026). 9783031089565, Springer, Cham. ISBN 9783031089565: "It was only after several years of work that I began to realize fully the confused and contradictory reactions the subject of romantic love evoked in the writers of scientific literature." The Philosophy Arthur Lovejoy once wrote that "The word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing."; Lovejoy is quoted in a discussion of romantic love
Collins Dictionary defines romantic love as "an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc., so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones." The concept of romantic love also came to represent the idea of Individualism choice in marriage and Sexual partner, although it's rarely realized fully and can be a source of both gratification and disappointment in relationships.
People who experience little to no romantic attraction are referred to as "aromantic".
The term is often used to distinguish from other types of interpersonal relationships (conjugal, parental, friendship), and in contrast to the modern interpretation of platonic love (which precludes sexual relations). The notion that romantic love only occurs within a relationship of some kind, however, has been called a misconception. It has also been argued that romantic love can actually be "platonic" in some cases, for example, as in the case of a romantic friendship which involves passionate feelings without sexual desire.
In academic fields of psychology, the term "romantic love" might be used in reference to any of the common definitions (courtly love, romantic idealization, being in love, etc.). The psychologist Dorothy Tennov once criticized the reactions to romantic love in the scientific literature as "confused and contradictory".
Some of the earliest literature containing themes considered "romantic" in a more modern sense was written by France poets known as Troubadour—initially often exploring themes of unrequited love, and emphasizing the worship of a lady (a "cold, cruel mistress"). Poets like Chrétien de Troyes were encouraged by royalty to compose works exemplifying certain ideals (now called "courtly love"), particularly in the town of Poitiers, where Andreas Capellanus also came to write The Art of Courtly Love. Courtly love then became emphasized as a theme for chivalric romance. The French romans was anglicized into "romance", and initially the term "romantic love" referred to those attitudes and behaviors of courtly love.
Courtly love involved themes elevating the status of the woman, of passionate suffering and separation, and a transformation of the lovers to another plane of existence. This is said to have originated from the troubadour poetry and the work by Capellanus, although they were also influenced by even earlier works. Often, stories inspired by this tradition are depictions of tragic or unfulfilled love. Some examples of "romantic love" stories in this vein are Layla and Majnun, works of Arthurian legend (i.e. Lancelot and Guinevere), Tristan and Iseult, Dante Alighieri and Beatrice (from La Vita Nuova), Romeo and Juliet and The Sorrows of Young Werther. Rather than always being pessimistic, however, others expressed an early "humanistic" perspective on passion—that is, idealizing "human love" in contradiction to religious ideals or social interference—as in the happy ending found in Aucassin and Nicolette. The modern romance novel as it's known today (e.g. by Jane Austen) emerged during the 18th-century period of the larger movement.
Modern depictions of this type of love story are in Twilight (Edward Cullen and Bella Swan), and Star Wars (Anakin Skywalker and Padmé Amidala).
The courtly and romantic traditions are said to have influenced attitudes towards love in Western culture, attitudes which continue to be present in the modern day. The cultural movement is critiqued for promising a kind of "story-book" or "fairy-tale" love when the stories themselves actually involve depictions of suffering and tragedy, perhaps making the culture "blind to love's madness". According to the cultural critic Denis de Rougemont, "Happy love has no history— in European literature. And a love that is not mutual cannot pass for a true love."
Stanton Peele, who pioneered the concept of "love addiction", has criticized the romantic cultural ideal as being "less critical and evaluative"—therefore underlying "unhealthy extremes" he says of addictive relationships, lovesickness, and limerence.
Peele adopts the view of Erich Fromm, that love "chiefly engages a person's concern for others".
Romantic love is a Motivation typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual. It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions. It is a suite of adaptations and by-products that arose sometime during the recent evolutionary history of humans.
Romantic love in this sense might also be referred to as "being in love", passionate love, infatuation, limerence, obsessive love, eros (ancient Greek concept) or eros/mania (love styles). Romantic love is not necessarily "dyadic", "social" or "interpersonal", despite being related to pair bonding. Romantic love can be experienced outside the context of a relationship, as in the case of unrequited love where the feelings are not reciprocated. People in love experience motivational salience for a loved one (focused attention, associated with "wanting" a rewarding experience), which is mediated by dopamine activity in the brain's reward system. Because of this and other similarities, it has been argued that romantic love is an addiction (which can be positive when reciprocated), but academics do not agree on when this is the case, or on a definition of "love addiction".
Some authors also consider companionate love and attachment to be romantic love, or consider romantic love to be an attachment process. According to a contemporary model of the brain systems involved with romantic love, the attachment system is active during the early stage of romantic love, in addition to the later stages of a relationship. The attachment system has been associated with oxytocin, which has been found circulating in people experiencing romantic love. Oxytocin may be a source of salience for a loved one, due to its activity in motivation pathways in the brain. Oxytocin is projected from the hypothalamus to reward areas, which is believed to modulate salience in response to social stimuli. Endogenous opioids are also believed to be involved with romantic love, associated with the hedonic (or "liking") aspect of rewarding experiences.
An fMRI experiment of people who were in happy, long-term relationships but professed to still be "madly" in love with their partners found that the participants showed brain activations in dopamine-rich reward areas (interpreted as "wanting" or "desire for union"), but also in an area rich with opiate receptors ("liking"). Unlike people who were newly in love, these participants also did not show activity in areas associated with anxiety and fear, and reported far less obsessional features (intrusive thoughts about a loved one, uncertainty and mood swings—features which are compared to infatuation or limerence). Usually romantic love inside a relationship lasts for just about a year or 18 months.
Lee has stated that the elements of romantic love may actually correspond to several of his love styles: eros (erotic love, or love of beauty), mania (comparable to limerence, obsessive love or love addiction), and ludus (game-playing, non-committal love). Of these, eros and mania most correspond to the experience of "falling" in love. A manic lover falls in love with somebody inappropriate in many cases (a stranger, or even somebody they don't actually like), and tends to experience relationship difficulties. Mania is most closely compared to eros, the romantic style in search of an ideal physical type. Eros lovers are more self-assured and tend to fall in love in a less chaotic way. Eros is considered to be more positive than mania.
The most common romantic theme in the literary tradition is tragedy or self-destruction, and Lee associated the ideology of courtly love with the mania love style in particular. According to Lee, Western culture came to view mania as a legitimate basis for mate selection through the courtly and romantic traditions. This replaced the medieval Christianity doctrine that marriage should focus on family values and child care.
Tennov identified key components of limerence, including:: "To the degree that your reaction to a person is limerent, you respond to your construction of LO's qualities." (p. 33); "Limerence's most reliable attribute ... is the intrusiveness of the preoccupation with LO." (p. 42); "Uncertainty about LO's true reaction is an essential aspect of your own limerence." (p. 57)
According to Tennov's research, limerence is normal (despite being a madness); however, she also encountered people who had not experienced it (whom she calls "nonlimerent") and were in fact unaware the stories depict a real phenomenon. Tennov indicated limerence may be experienced by 50% of women and 35% of men, and a 2025 survey found that 64% of people had experienced it and 32% "found it so distressing that it was hard to enjoy life". In Tennov's conception, limerence can be reciprocated and result in a relationship, but there must be obstacles (as in Romeo and Juliet) for a mutual preoccupation to intensify.
Tennov complains in her book (and as recently as 2005) that not only are some people unaware the phenomenon is real, but that the scientific community does not properly distinguish it either. Terms like "romantic love", "passionate love" and "being in love" are all used to refer to limerence, but also to other things. Another type of attraction pattern frequently described to her by informants (who also felt they were "in love") was a more companionate style she calls "affectional bonding", which emphasizes compatibility of interests, mutual preferences, ability to work together and pleasurable sex. Some informants would also speak of "obsession", yet not report intrusive (unwanted) thoughts, only "frequent and pleasurable" ones.
The Sociology John Alan Lee has also commented on semantic issues, like how mania & eros are frequently confused, being lumped together as "romantic love". Lee complains that his research was reviewed by Elaine Hatfield in A New Look at Love inside her chapter on passionate love, when several love styles 'are not "passionate" at all!' Limerence has been compared to Lee's mania, with both Tennov & Lee having taken inspiration from courtly love.
In her 1988 book chapter, "Passionate and Companionate Love", Hatfield considers a litany of concepts ("being in love", limerence, Lee's mania & eros, and so on) together under "passionate love", and this more general idea became accepted in love research.: "The terms passionate and companionate are intentionally broad headings, and both subsume many of the more precise varieties of love that can be found in the taxonomies of Lee and Sternberg." Later research, however, showed that the Passionate Love Scale has overly broad questions, measuring both obsessive and non-obsessive components. It is possible to experience love feelings either with or without the obsessive element, and both ways have different trajectories in a relationship. Passionate love with obsession is only associated with satisfaction in short-term relationships, whereas love without obsession may sustain over a longer period.
A 2013 study found that unrequited (unequal) love was four times more frequent than equal love, although little research has attempted to study or differentiate it.
It has been claimed on the basis of certain Ethnography reports that romantic love is limited to Western culture, and does not exist in tribal societies throughout the world. For example, the anthropologist Audrey Richards lived among the Bemba people in the 1930s, and once told them a folk story about a young prince who "climbed glass mountains, crossed chasms, and fought dragons, all to obtain the hand of a maiden he loved". The Bemba, however, became bewildered by the story, prompting an old chief to ask the question "Why not take another girl?" Margaret Mead studied the Samoans, and also believed that deep attachments between individuals were a foreign idea to such societies: "Romantic love as it occurs in our civilisation, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa." The tribal mentality, according to Nathaniel Branden, is that the family ought to exist for the optimization of physical survival. The individual is subordinate to the tribe "in virtually every aspect of life", with emotional attachments given little importance.
A 1992 cross-cultural study by William Jankowiak and Edward Fischer, however, found that the experience of romantic or passionate love was in fact universal, or near-universal. This study looked at 166 cultures with relevant ethnographic reports, folklore and other available material from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. Romantic love was indicated as present in a culture if at least one account was found of either personal anguish and longing, Love song or folklore highlighting romantic involvement, elopement due to mutual affection, a native's affirmation of passionate love, or an ethnographer's affirmation of romantic love. On that basis, passionate love was documented in 88.5% of cultures. For the other 11.5%, the authors believed the lack of record was probably due to ethnographic oversight rather than a genuine absence. It is therefore argued that although not everyone falls in love, it is the case that in almost every culture some people do, even in those cultures where romantic love is muted or repressed. Despite being evolved and a cross-cultural experience then, the phenomenon is still influenced or constrained by culture in a variety of ways. The attitudes towards it and specific practices can vary drastically from culture to culture. Chinese culture, for example, does not have a "romantic love" culture equivalent to the United States. It was considered "Bourgeoisie", and even outlawed during the Cultural Revolution.: "Has the Western romantic tradition made us blind to love's madness? China has no equivalent tradition. In fact, during the Cultural Revolution, 'romantic love' was outlawed - considered by the communist elite to be a 'bourgeois' indulgence. ... It would seem that for many Chinese students, they would as much want to fall in love as develop a psychiatric illness.": "In the late 1920s and 1930s, however, free love was under attack from radical quarters for its bourgeois limitations and from conservative quarters for eroding social morality and the institution of marriage and family. In this period, sexuality came out of the shadow of romantic love and became an acceptable social topic. Nevertheless, more and more voices emerged to condemn free love/free sex as the threat to social mores. Political ideologues called for a total commitment to the nation by subordinating the romantic love to imperative of revolution. The attitudes toward love and sex became conservative and restrictive. In the People's Republic of China, established in 1949, Communist officials imposed strong controls on love and 'inappropriate' sexual activity. A puritanical sexual 'primness' became definitely established. The new values denied romantic love and affirmed the importance of the collective over the individual." The puritanical injunctions have long since been dismantled, however, a "shyness" remained in the culture, which is not identical to that of the West. Divorce is allowed, but arrangement is also common, and there's much talk of "protecting the family". A cross-cultural survey in the early 1990s found that Chinese people thought Western ideas about love were inaccurate, and that Chinese participants linked "passionate love" to concepts like "infatuation", "unrequited love", "sorrow" and "nostalgia". Many seemed to as much want to "fall in love" as to develop a mental illness.
In behavioral genetics, one tool which is valuable for determining genetic influence is the twin study, which compares identical Twin (monozygotic, who are genetically identical) and fraternal twins (dizygotic, who are only 50% genetically related, like other Sibling). The differences between the two types of twins are used to estimate how much of a given trait is Heritability (how much the individual differences in a group, i.e. variance, can be accounted for by genetic differences between individuals), and how much is environmental. Environmental contribution is further split between shared environment (which makes family members more similar) and nonshared environment (which makes them different, but for mathematical reasons also includes measurement error). A twin study has investigated genetic and environmental influences using the Love Attitudes Scale, developed to measure Lee's love styles.: "Lee complained about the ahistorical nature of most and the limited information that he felt could be derived from a rating scale: "There are no satisfactory shortcuts. Only elaborate instruments such as the Love Story Card Sort can distinguish between rich ideologies." ... Needless to say, Lee lost his argument against the use of rating scales. ... Sometime after completing the writing of his chapter for The Psychology of Love, but before its publication, Lee apparently accepted the ubiquity of rating scales, as witnessed by a gracious and complimentary letter to us." This study found that individual differences in love attitudes are almost exclusively due to environmental influence, with genetic factors having very little influence for most love attitudes (from most-to-least heritable: mania, storge, pragma & eros), and even no influence at all for others (ludus & agape). The authors interpret the result as meaning that love styles may be influenced by one's childhood familial environment (for shared environment) and unique experiences with parents, peers, adolescent and adult lovers, and so on (for nonshared environment). Of these, the influence from the nonshared environment was larger than the shared environment. According to Lee's earlier observations, typical eros lovers recall a happy childhood, while typical manic lovers recall an unhappy one.
Using the Love Attitudes Scale, romantic love styles have also been Correlation with different personality measures: eros (with agreeableness, conscientiousness, extraversion & secure attachment), mania (with neuroticism & anxious attachment), and ludus (with avoidant attachment). For other love styles: storge (friendship love, with agreeableness & insecure attachment), pragma (practical love, with conscientiousness & insecure attachment), and agape (selfless love, with secure attachment). The formation of attachment styles is complicated, often being attributed to childhood, but with twin studies finding both genetic and environmental contributions. There's also a problem called a person–situation debate, where people can have different attachment styles with different people, for example, an avoidant partner can make a secure partner feel and act anxious. Lee identified a kind of transitional love style he called "manic eros", where the lover is "moving either toward a more stable eros or toward full-blown mania". Some are typical erotic lovers under a temporary strain (moving toward mania), while others are typical manic lovers with a self-confident and helping partner (moving toward eros).
The theory is used to explain the phenomenon of romantic friendships which involve passionate feelings without sexuality, and other instances of "Platonic love" attachments and Infatuation. Some documented examples are intense, but non-sexual bonds between Native American men, schoolgirls falling "violently in love with each other, and suffering all the pangs of unrequited attachment, desperate jealousy etc." (historically called a "smash"), and women who considered themselves to be otherwise Heterosexuality experiencing limerence for an older woman (a love madness compared to "hero worship").
Self-expansion is used to explain the "strong attraction" of romantic love, including intense varieties of passionate love or limerence, when the rate of expansion is rapid and approaches the maximum total possible from all sources. Additionally, self-expansion explains how even unrequited love can be a desired experience.
Early research on interpersonal attraction identified five predictors of attraction, incorporated into the theory by the Arons.
According to self-expansion, attraction should result from the opposite of these five predictors (because, for example, similarity would seem to minimize self-expansion—resulting in less attraction). Therefore, the Arons propose that these are five preconditions which make a relationship possible, whereas attraction according to self-expansion increases when an opposite condition is present. For example, a person may be attracted to similarity when it provides the basis for effective communication or predictability, whereas differences provide the basis for self-expansion: new challenges, new experiences, new resources, etc. Self-expansion also suggests that people would prefer to maximize admirable characteristics (rather than matching), and that people would occasionally violate social norms as an opportunity for autonomy.
Passion seems to decline when interactions with a love object become frequent, showing that both propinquity and distance can facilitate attraction. Accordingly, in the tradition of medieval romance, the love object was always inaccessible, and modern people still seem to be "obsessed with the unknown, mysterious lover".
Passionate love or Infatuation love is said to thrive under the uncertainty of intermittent reinforcement, in situations with only irregular meetings between lovers, or with ambiguous and changing perceptions over whether one's love is returned. This type of situation resembles a slot machine, for example, where the rewards are designed to be always unpredictable so the gambler cannot understand the pattern. Unable to Habituation to the experience, for some people the exhilarating high from the unexpected wins leads to gambling addiction and compulsions. If the machine paid out on a regular interval (so that the rewards were expected), it would not be as exciting. Uncertain reciprocation has also been interpreted in terms of attachment anxiety. Helen Fisher believed that obstacles and confusion heighten romantic ardor (as in Romeo and Juliet) because dopamine neurons fire in anticipation of an expected reward which is delayed.
The "cold, cruel mistress" or "hard-to-get girl" is a recurring theme in the history of love literature, with the observations sometimes cynical or satirical. Socrates: "you must not offer it to them when they have had enough—be a show of reluctance to yield, and by holding back until they are as keen as can be for then the same gifts are much more to the recipient than when they are offered before they are desired". Ovid: "if you feel no need to guard your girl for her own sake, see that you guard her for mine, so I may want her the more". Andreas Capellanus: "The easy attainment of love makes it of little value; difficulty of attainment makes it prized." Bertrand Russell: "The belief in the immense value of the lady is a psychological effect of the difficulty of obtaining her, and I think it may be laid down that when a man has no difficulty in obtaining a woman, his feeling toward her does not take the form of romantic love."
Sigmund Freud believed that romantic love was generated by suppressed (or repressed) sexual desire: "It can easily be shown that the psychical value of erotic needs is reduced as soon as their satisfaction becomes easy. An obstacle is required in order to heighten libido; and where natural resistances to satisfaction have not been sufficient men have at all times erected conventional ones so as to be able to enjoy love. This is true both of individuals and of nations. In times in which there were no difficulties standing in the way of sexual satisfaction, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilizations, love became worthless and life empty".
The intensity of romantic love—why we become "fools for love"—can also be explained using the handicap principle, which solves a contention between "honest" and "fake" signaling. When real Emotion evolve, a niche is created for sham emotions which are less risky to express (like fake facial expressions). An honest signal can evolve without becoming worthless (because of competing fakers) only if it's too expensive to fake. One example in nature is the Peacock Tail: a cumbersome display which consumes nutrients. Only a healthy peacock can afford it, so it may have evolved because it was a handicap, signaling health to females of the species. According to the psychologist Steven Pinker, the way to a person's heart is to declare you're in love "because you can't help it", so romantic love might have evolved to signal true commitment.
However, "romance" should be distinguished from "commitment", when "commitment" is meant in the sense of a continued willful involvement after passionate feelings fade. According to the Psychotherapy Robert Johnson, Western culture has these two things "completely confused", because "If we are committed only to follow where passion leads, then there can be no true loyalty to an individual person." The values of romance—that "passion" and being "in love" are the most important, and ought to be sought after—therefore tend to be in conflict with the values of commitment.
A deceived spouse is said to be one intensifier of love madness (i.e. limerence), and this has a tendency to pull people out of their committed relationship when it happens. Helen Fisher believes that a brain architecture contributes to this, where a person can feel deep attachment for a spouse while simultaneously feeling intense romantic love for somebody else, just as sexual desire can be felt for still others. Infidelity is normally forbidden in the West, but some other cultures are more tolerant, or they define infidelity differently. John Alan Lee defines some love styles as "mixtures" (ludic eros & storgic ludus) where partners are allowed sexual liaisons, which he attributed to preference.
In Robert Sternberg triangular theory of love, "romantic love" refers to passion plus intimacy, but without commitment. Sternberg defines this in reference to Tristan and Iseult: a tragic love story, said to be the quintessential Courtly love of the Middle Ages, and the source from which all romantic literature has sprung. In this story, the two drink a love potion by mistake when Iseult is due to be married to Tristan's uncle, a king, and they become clandestine lovers. A drama ensues when their affair is discovered, Tristan is exiled, and eventually they die. Tristan (which means "child of sadness") is royalty himself, and kills a relative of Iseult's earlier in the story; Tristan and Iseult claim not to even "love" each other, aside from the potion. Iseult exclaims: "You know that you are my lord and my master, and I your slave."
Critics of romance have claimed that Tristan and Iseult have a kind of "love of death" (or "liebestod"), rather than loving each other, and use the story as an allegory to claim that passion leads to suffering. Irving Singer, a philosophy professor, has stated that the legend was not intended by its original authors to be interpreted this way, but that "only an inveterate optimist could fail to recognize the devious ways in which reality destroys love (and sometimes lovers as well)".
It was not until the 18th century that people began to marry for romance. During this period, Romanticism emerged with new perspectives on individuality and egalitarianism, and through the 19th century it became a cultural question whether passion, love and companionship could become a basis for marriage. New norms were adopted, but romantic attitudes later waned and became tame throughout the Victorian era in Europe. During the 18th and 19th centuries, Puritans also dominated the culture in post-revolutionary America, with an anti-romantic tradition. Romantic love really only flourished as a basis for marriage at the end of the 19th century and into the 20th, when men and women socialized more equally, when dating replaced other structured courtship practices, and romance became more secular and Consumerism.
During the 20th century, a "transformation of intimacy" occurred, where intimate relationships became less restricted by Law, Social custom and Morality, and feminism paved the way for new kinds of relations between men and women. The rise of the romantic marriage also coincided with the rise of divorce then, due to this heightened expectation, sensitivity to incompatibility, and increasing legal freedom. The Sociology Anthony Giddens calls a major development of this period the "pure relationship": where a relationship is entered for its own sake based on emotional communication, and only continued for as long as both parties are satisfied with the rewards derived from it. A "discourse of intimacy" emerged in the 1960s and '70s, promoted in Self-help book as an attempt to ameliorate problems which were a consequence of the restructuring of personal relationships on marriage. Previously, marriage was a Contract obligation which only required adherence to law (and "romance" is seen as something one "falls" into, not an act of will); therefore, a new concept of "commitment" emerged, with the "pure relationship" marriage requiring a new kind of willful involvement previously unconceived of. Much of the discourse also focused on communication as a means to intimacy and a cure for conflict. According to David Shumway, a professor of cultural studies, one of the problems is that as with "romance", "intimacy" is elusive to define. This new conception meant something more than "companionship": it also came to entail emotional, economic, and political equality of the partners, or what Giddens calls a "democratization" of personal life and emotions.
The clinical psychologist Frank Tallis has criticized the romantic tradition as a disappointment, citing studies which actually show higher satisfaction among arranged marriages than marriages for love. In Asia and other Eastern cultures where arrangement is preferred, it's assumed that a couple will fall in love, but after their marriage, and often they do. About half of arranged couples claim to stay together for love, albeit probably not for romantic love.
Bertrand Russell, a Philosophy considered influential in the 20th century, has been critical, but also optimistic about the prospects of romantic love. Despite his assertion that romantic love is only found in the difficulty of its obtainment, he also called it "the source of the most intense delights that life has to offer", and thought it important that it was socially permitted. Russell, however, critiqued the cultural movement that romance ought to be essential for marriage: "Whether the effect has been as good as the innovators hoped may be doubted. ... In America, where the romantic view of marriage has been taken more seriously than anywhere else, and where law and custom alike are based upon the dreams of spinsters, the result has been an extreme prevalence of divorce and extreme rarity of happy marriages." According to Russell, "it should be understood that the kind of love which will enable a marriage to remain happy and to fulfil its social purpose is not romantic but is something more intimate, affectionate, and realistic". In his view, it's good that romance can lead to marriage, but as a necessity it's "too anarchic", and "forgets that children are what make marriage important".
The anthropologist and renowned love researcher Helen Fisher believed the current drive for a more passionate romance in Western partnerships (what she called a return to an "antique habit"—something she believed is natural and evolved) is good news. However, she argued in favor of a longer, more drawn out "pre-commitment" stage prior to marriage, which she called "slow love", for the purpose of becoming familiar before making a lifelong commitment.
In 2016, Victor de Munck and David Kronenfield proposed a cultural model for romantic love in the United States, developed with studies of people in upstate New York and New York City. The authors believe the cultural model is used as a reference standard for relationships by their informants: "People do not fit the model as much as our model can be used to explain and predict what people think, feel, and do." The American model "is unique in that it combines passion with comfort and friendship": "For successful romantic love relations, a person would feel excited about meeting their beloved; make passionate and intimate love as opposed to only physical love; feel comfortable with the beloved, behaving in a companionable, friendly way with one’s partner; listen to the other’s concerns, offering to help out in various ways if necessary; and, all the while, keeping a mental ledger of the degree to which altruism and passion are mutual." It's not claimed by the authors that everyone holds this model or that everyone opts for this type of relationship, only that the model is common or prototypical and most people know it at least implicitly. The model is tested with two case studies of informants who describe their difficulties finding a partner who meets all of these different criteria (passion, plus comfort and friendship).
In his 2008 book, British writer Iain King tried to establish basic rules for the early stage of romance, as an improvement over the old maxim "all's fair in love (and war)". He concludes on six initial rules, inspired by what he calls the "Help Principle", which he argues is one good basis for a mutual relationship: " Help someone if your help is worth more to them than it is to you."
Helen Fisher has advocated personality matches and online dating services for introductions, which she believed are effective. Contrary to previous research, however, a 2025 study found that couples who met online were actually less satisfied than those who met offline. The difference could be explained by the people meeting online tending to be less similar, or the overabundance of choice in online environments leading to less confident selections, or because of the proliferation of so-called "swipe culture", which focuses more on gamified appearance-based interactions over actual matching algorithms and profile preparation.
In a speech given by Aristophanes in the Symposium, Plato presents an early idea of "merging"—the idea that love is a completion of the whole, or a reunion with one's "other half" (from which one has been separated). Later, this idea became prominent in the Romantic movement. In the Greek legend recounted by Aristophanes, humans are born incomplete and yearning for their other half, because they were originally double-headed creatures with four arms and four legs but Zeus cut them in two as a punishment for pride.
Aristophanes, however, is not viewed as a "spokesperson" for Plato in the dialogue; the speech is ironic. Socrates advocates a different account, that true love is the knowing of absolute beauty (as a metaphysical entity or idea) in which goodness is possessed, rather than only some specific instance of beauty. In Plato's theory of forms, a particular instance of a thing (such as a specific cat) only exists as an imperfect copy of a unique ideal form created by God. This ideal form is "real", whereas a particular is only "apparent". According to Socrates, only a philosopher can possess supreme knowledge of absolute beauty and therefore come to satisfy his version of love.
By possession of "the good", Socrates explains that the goal of love is "to procreate and bring forth in beauty", related to the love of immortality. Although only a philosopher's ascension can truly lead to a perpetual possession of the good, Socrates states that people also try to achieve immortality through physical means (by having beautiful children), spiritual means (by creating wisdom and virtue), or a combination where the physical beauty of another begets spiritual beauty. This particular passage of the Symposium is striking for its foreshadowing of courtly love, in which the love of the troubadours inspired them to bring forth spiritual beauty in the form of poetry, music, and noble deeds in the service of a lady.
Socrates himself is also said to be suggestive of both the troubadour's lover and their beloved, in different respects. He resembles the troubadour lover in that he defers to a woman, Diotima, as his "instructor in the art of love" and the source of his doctrine. However, Socrates also resembles the troubadour's beloved in his role as the object of affection, particularly of the young man Alcibiades, who states "I had no choice but to do whatever Socrates bade me. . . . I was utterly disconcerted, and wandered about in a state of enslavement". Diotima states that Socrates' love for young men prevents him from knowing absolute beauty, for if he could, he would spend all his time contemplating their beauty instead.
Plato's concept of love in which the lover achieves transcendence through nonsexual adoration has also been interpreted as a positive conception of passionate love—usually only between men at the time, because love and marriage were thought of as separate in ancient Greece. The ancient Greeks did have a concept of passionate, romantic love, but it was typically viewed as a madness and only depicted in literature.
The term "courtly love" (French: "amour courtois") was coined by the French medievalist Gaston Paris, in 1883. Under his influence, scholars at the time began to discuss the concept of a "code" or "body of rules" which supposedly pervaded medieval culture. This was further developed by C. S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love (1936), in which Lewis defined its characteristics as humility, courtesy, adultery, and the religion of love. This original formulation of the concept held that courtly love involved fundamentally illicit or adulterous attitudes—exemplified by the works of Chrétien de Troyes (e.g. Lancelot, the Knight of the Cart). This kind of idea was also advanced by the cultural critic Denis de Rougemont in his influential book Love in the Western World (1939), a literary analysis of another story de Troyes was involved with creating ( Tristan and Iseult).
The original formulation has been criticized, because in reality the phenomenon was less unified, and the scholarly discussion about this became increasingly diffuse over time. Irving Singer says "I am convinced that the definition of courtly love formulated by Paris and Lewis is very misleading. But rather than eliminate the term from scholarly discourse, I think it is wiser merely to redefine the concept in a way that will accommodate the great diversity of attitudes toward love in the Middle Ages."
Singer summarizes the philosophy of courtly love as the following cluster of ideas—which often appear together, but are not necessarily present in any given author of the period:
Initially, courtly love emerged in Provence (Southern France) as a type of literature (poetry) created by poets known as the troubadours. In this earlier southern form, courtly love was often Unrequited love. Adultery was only introduced as a theme when the phenomenon moved northward to Aquitaine, and later England. A regular feature was the conflict between early humanistic ideals (where pleasure and desire can be a source of goodness) and the religious precepts of the time. Medieval Christian doctrine generally condemned sexuality as a source of pleasure. All was seen as subordinate to spiritual love (God's agape, and one's love of God in return); willfulness was even more Sin than fornication.
In the Western tradition (drawing from Plato and Aristotle), Christian religious love was defined in terms of a union with God. According to a strand of Christian mysticism, one actually merges with God in a manner reminiscent of Aristophanes' myth, although this was criticized by the orthodoxy who maintained that man can only be wedded with God while each remains distinct.
The concept of "fin'amors" ("pure love" or "true love") was then invented by the troubadours, combining elements of Christian mysticism with Neoplatonism from the Middle-East. According to Singer, the troubadours would not have thought of themselves as socially subversive. Rather, fin'amors (in its initial southern form) contextualized love in the hierarchical medieval world as subservience to a lady, who was even sometimes a legal sovereign. However, in its failure to subordinate itself to God, fin'amors encouraged self-sufficiency—seeking from human beings what according to Christianity only God provides.
The Albigensian Crusade later terminated the activity of the troubadours in Provence, although their poems lived on and spread as a cultural influence.
The earliest figure in the movement was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing in Geneva, who was mainly important for his "appeal to the heart" (then called "sensibility", meaning proneness to emotion). Rousseau is known for having political ideas which influenced the French Revolution—but also kinds of totalitarianism. His philosophy additionally influenced the writings on love, by those such as Marquis de Sade, Stendhal and Immanuel Kant. Rousseau was an enthusiastic proponent of romantic love and harmonious marriage.
The Romantics admired strong passion of any kind; hence, romantic love was approved of, particularly the unfortunate kind. Initially, the movement emerged mainly in Germany, influenced by the novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book is a tragic love story, reprising themes of courtly love. Werther falls in love with Charlotte, who is engaged and then married to another man, Albert. Werther then becomes increasingly disturbed and eventually commits suicide, by shooting himself with a pair of Albert's pistols. Readable on Internet Archive. Charlotte does not die with Werther, but he thinks she will join him after death in some kind of transcendent union. The book inspired Copycat suicide—rumored to be an epidemic, although this was probably exaggerated. One woman drowned herself in a river behind Goethe's own garden, and another killed herself with a copy of the book in her pocket. The book's power issues in part from its inspiration in a true story of Goethe's own unrequited love, and although Goethe did not commit suicide, he had an acquaintance who did.
It can be argued, however, that Rousseau and Goethe were more so precursors for their influence, rather than being representative of the movement as a whole. Furthermore, while many Romantics were optimistic (or "idealist") about the prospect of romantic love, others were more pessimistic (or "realist") and did not believe in it. Among critics of Werther, for example, romantic optimists viewed the story as a tragedy of love being thwarted by the interference of an intolerant world; however, romantic pessimists viewed the character as merely a neurotic young man who kills himself as a result of psychological disabilities. Goethe himself seemed willing to entertain either interpretation.
Romantic idealism had its peak in the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose yearning for love is a recurring theme—evidently the most vivid aspect of love he seemed to experience. In an exemplary passage on merging, Shelley states that love is "that powerful attraction towards all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void and seek to awaken in all things that are a community with what we experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood; if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood. This is Love."
Shelley, however, became pessimistic at the end of his life, with a despair that even bordered on a "love of death". Bertrand Russell has claimed that Shelley's kind of optimism rested on "bad psychology", because it was only the obstacles to his desire that led him to write poetry. Russell nevertheless advocated that society ought to permit romantic love, despite his cynicism.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a pessimistic philosopher whose principal work was in the 19th century. In a sense, Schopenhauer's philosophy of love mingles with Aristophanes' myth; however, rather than being spiritual or divine, Schopenhauer explains love as nature's Reproduction device, so merging serves a biological end. Passionate love is the agency by which the will carries this out, merely deluding the lovers into thinking one another is unique and worthy of their obsessive attention. According to Schopenhauer, once coitus satisfies the need for propagation of the species, the lovers' passion immediately dissipates without lasting joy. As a result, Schopenhauer denies the likelihood that passionate love would lead to a happy marriage, prompting a pessimistic dilemma: if a marriage is to be happy, it would be for reasons other than love (e.g. arrangement); however, this runs counter to the demands of the will.
|
|
