I am not in love with her..I am in love with the idea of her…
Have you ever heard anyone say this? I have and probably said it myself too. This nicely illustrates how sometimes we can be searching for the feeling of love and what it means to be “in love” rather than loving the other person for who they are.
We cannot be wholly responsible for our projections as collectively we have been sold an idea or value system within our culture that has impacted on how we approach and experience romance and love. This week I have taken inspiration from Robert Johnson’s Book, “We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love.” (2013)
Johnson illustrates how the western notion of romantic love emerged in our culture around the twelfth century. Initially this cultural phenomenon was called “Courtezia” translated is “courtly love.” Courtly love was based on a completely new view of love and relationship. Under the influence of certain religious ideas of that era, courtly love idealised a “spiritual” relationship between men and women. Courtly love was an antidote to the masculine attitude present in our culture today as it idealised the feminine. Under the laws of courtly love, each knight agreed to obey his lady in all things having to do with love, relationship, manners and taste. Within her realm she was his mistress, his queen.
There were three characteristics of courtly love that may support us to understand it. (1) no sexual intimacy; the intention was to create an idealised, spiritual relationship, designed to lift them above the level of physical cravings (2) No marriage, the lady was usually married to another nobleman. The knight adored her, served her and made her the focus of his spiritual aspiration and idealism, but he could not have an intimate relationship with her. To do so would be to treat her as an ordinary mortal woman, and courtly love required that he treat her as divinity, as a symbol of the eternal feminine and of his feminine soul. The third requirement was that the courtly lovers keep themselves aflame with passion, to suffer intense desire for one another, yet strive to spiritualise their desire by seeing the other as symbols of the divine archetypal world and by never reducing their passion to the ordinaries of sex or marriage.
The ideal of courtly love so caught the western imagination that it became the driving force behind a flow of poetry, song, love stories and plays. The French love stories were called Romans which was anglicized into “romance”. In these romances were all the great themes that form the basis of our romantic literature. The knight sees a fair lady and is overwhelmed by her beauty and goodness; he worships her ever after as the embodiment of his inner ideal, his inner vision of the eternal feminine. Though filled with an intense desire for her, he never touches her, yet goes through great adventures, makes incredible sacrifices in her honour , to live up to the sense of nobility that she inspires in him- she is not just a woman- she represents feminine in her divine essence.
Our word romantic and our romantic ideal have come down to us through the romances. Romantic love is “story-book” love. But this is a story that all of us try to live out in our own ways within the down to earth world of human relationships and human practicality. Despite our sexual revolution and our tendency to sexualise every relationship, we still seek the same psychological patterns in our romances: the desire for another who is more than a woman or a man, the symbol of something so perfect and divine that he/she inspires a passion that goes beyond physical attraction, beyond love, ecstasy. The other that provides new life, special meaning, intensity and wholeness. Such ideals offer a risky approach to relationships, yet they underlie our patterns of courtship and marriage to this day! No wonder we have been waiting for the knight in shining armour or the fair maiden to come along! These ideals and values within our society are taken into our subconscious and can plant a seed of discontent that never finds the perfection it is seeking…because it doesn’t exist.
Such beliefs are hallucinating and have the ability to overtake us and actually we never chose them. We have subliminally taken them in from novels, fairy tales, movies, from the psychological air around us and they have become engrained in our psyches. We all know that we are supposed to “fall in love” and that our relationships must be based on romance- nothing less will be enough. As men and women, we are sold what we are supposed to feel in a relationship and what we are entitled to demand from the other, rather than having our own individual expectations- if it doesn’t match the collective then we can very quickly become disappointed and perhaps draw premature conclusions about the suitability to the other- or in other cases have elevated expectations that long term are not sustainable or right for us.
Does it take the spark away from romantic love to analyse it or explore its existence in reality? There is truth and value in romantic love. Within every ideal there is power and profound reality. Sometimes we can misunderstand the truth behind the ideal, or live it on the wrong level or put it in the wrong place. Yet the truth is there to enrich us and move us closer to our own wholeness. However, what may be of benefit is to hold the difference between human love as a basis for a relationship and romantic love as an inner ideal.
Carl Jung, psychoanalyst once quoted a medieval alchemist who said “ only what is separated can be properly joined.” When two things are muddled together, they need to be separated, distinguished, and untangled so that they can live in harmony. Perhaps this explains why once relationships or marriages have moved through the romantic phase that it becomes difficult for both or one party to live in the realm of human love and the affair supports the craving, desire and satisfaction for the romance. This is where psychotherapy can be of value, to separate out the entangled threads of our lives, values that are confusing, ideals that we have taken in from others, loyalties, feelings . Once brought to the surface and disentangled they can be brought together in a new way. The re-bedding of flowers in the garden. Through analysing romantic love, the intention is not to dilute it or remove its excitement and passion, yet to understand what it is and where it belongs in our lives can support the synthesis of romantic and human love; to create a more harmonious and real experience within external relationships and most significantly; the relationship within.
How romantic are you towards yourself?… Not very often..then maybe it’s time 🙂 X