Robert C. Solomon's Defense of Romantic Love.

Robert C. Solomon, About Love: Reinventing Romance for Our Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988).




This essay is one of the most reproduced and plagiarized pieces on the net. I can ususally tell from what source someone took this article by whether the most recent changes in the text are included. I take it as a compliment that people wish to claim credit for my words, especially someone named "J.G. Miller." Anyway, the point of writing these pieces is to provoke discussions, so it is all good. In fact, I'm flattered.



"You have the chance to meet someone with whom you can have the most satisfying love imaginable -- the stuff of dreams. Sadly, you know that within six months the person will die. Knowing the pain that would follow, would you still want to meet the person and fall in love? What if you knew that your lover would not die, but instead would betray you?"

Gregory Stock, The Book of Questions (New York: 1985), p. 25.

The one thing most of us hope for, from very early in life (and maybe we are conditioned to do so), is that we will find that great earth-shattering romance with one other person and that it will last a lifetime. After we contemporary educated Westerners have abandoned -- at least publicly and officially -- all political and religious illusions, we refuse to give up on the hope for romantic love. I am no exception to this.

No matter how street-smart or academically successful I have felt myself to be, on occasion, there has always been that no doubt naive hope for my perfect love in my mind and heart. This hope has sustained me also, I must admit, at my worst times of failure and despair. It does offer something to dream about, a Holy Grail to pursue. I refuse to give up on it.

This is yet another excellent reason for regarding me as foolish, impractical, unsophisticated. Worse, it is yet another reason why I have no great interest in any of those much admired things that most other men seem to want, like great wealth, power, or sex with many women -- that is, if those things require me to give up on this hope for passionate romantic love with a woman who loves me. Aside from what this bizarre attitude says about me, perhaps this very Western cultural ideal of "Romantic" love is due for some philosophical examination and discussion. One sure sign that I am right about the importance of romantic love is the hostility to romance on the part of trendy psychobabblers.

In Western civilization this dream or ideal of love (cynics are welcome to adopt the pejorative term) has cultural roots which can be traced to the Troubadours of twelfth century France, and even earlier to Plato's Symposium, not to mention to the celluloid step-children of this unique literary heritage in Hollywood romances. Most movies are about romantic love in one way or another.

If this dream of love remains our one true religion, even as we deny that we believe in it and yet head out to the singles' scene or (like me) buy flowers for our wives -- and this is not gender-specific -- then is it time to abandon this final faith as well? To the extent that maturity is defined as the "abandonment of illusions" (Freud), then does maturity now require us to give up this final illusion? If so, why is it that we are unable to relinquish this possibly pathetic hope?

Most painful of all, perhaps, is to choose to love someone intensely knowing that one may be separated from that person forever, against one's will and in a manner that cannot be overcome, so that one's love is also one's tragedy, both "the sickness and its cure" at the same time.

Real love is so precious and rare in any human life, that some few of us would choose even that terrible fate to a life of only tepid emotions. Wolfram's "Tristan" chooses pain and death, even the risk of eternal damnation for "Isolde," and this risk was a real possibility in people's minds at the time of the production of that text. True, this was only after Tristan had drunk the love-potion, but all of us who have ever been in love have had a large gulp of that stuff -- the "five dollar milkshake" of love.

There are several questions to be disentangled here: 1) Do we believe that the traditional notion of romantic love lasting over a lifetime is still (or ever was) a plausible possibility or hope for persons? 2) Is it possible that even if we do not believe this, even if we expect relationships to fail, that we nevertheless strive to achieve that "most perfect union" for which we have been taught to yearn? 3) If so, should this striving be overcome?

Romantic love is now in deep trouble on several fronts, at least according to some of the most influential philosophers of the modern era: For Nietzsche and Adler, all relationships amount only to a struggle for power; for Marxists and many radical feminists, romance is a form of prostitution, a disguise for economic or sexist exploitation; for Freud, love is an illusion meant to obscure the force and pervasiveness of sexual appetite, as well as its connection with such things as early recollections of parents as lovers. Both Sartre and Lacan were deeply skeptical about the true motives for romance, to say nothing of Schopenhauer who makes Andrea Dworkin look like Doris Day.

There is very little stardust in all of this. Yet the cynicism engendered by these thinkers, while pervasive, does not diminish the hope for romance that many of the same persons who state these views take with them to clubs on Saturday night. Mick Jagger has said that romance is "bullshit," and yet he has been married several times, on one occasion describing himself as "besotted." Dismissals suggesting that the quest for romantic love is a disguise for the hope to score on Saturday night are unpersuasive. I fervently hope to "score" on many nights with one specific woman, even as I yearn for romance. To combine the two aspirations is perfection and I won't tell you her name -- both of them.

Maybe the cynicism is justified to the extent that people hope for a Hallmark Cards notion of romantic love. Incidentally, some of my favorite cards are made by Hallmark. I do not want to be charged with unfairly singling out that fine company. Any concept of romantic love that fails to recognize the pain inherent in all real loving, the suffering that goes with the joy, is inadequate.

Love is never a walk on the beach holding hands and nothing more. Every human being has some pain to carry by the time he or she reaches adulthood. Some persons have a whole world of pain to live with, so that to love such a person is to let yourself in for an equal share of some major agony.

I think that each partner's pain is "community property" to be divided equally between lovers in a genuine romantic relationship. Loving another human being is willingly making ourselves vulnerable, accepting the other's pain and sharing our own. It is also, as the British novelist Evelyn Waugh suggests in Brideshead Revisited, "the beginning of all wisdom." To reject love because of the pain of loving, is to reject life.

What is essential to romantic love, I think, is "not the pathetic longing of frustrated poets, nor the pretentions of divinity with which these feelings were sometimes rationalized" (Robert C. Solomon is the source for my understanding of this issue), "not the intrinsic degradation of women that has been charged by some feminists, nor the prudish gloss over nasty sexual lust" ("lust" is something which I think is quite nice actually) that has been diagnosed by the Freudians. Crucial to the lingering hope for romantic love is the formation of "bonds of personal attachment in the absence of established interpersonal identities."

As we become less defined by publicly shared aspects of the self (nationality, party affiliation, religious membership), we grow more devoted to the communities that we create in -- and through -- loving, communities, sometimes made up of only two members and created merely by loving, thereby achieving a kind of "transcendence" of our contested particularities.

I live on a planet with very few other residents. The same is true for many persons, including quite a few people who refuse to admit as much. Frederic Raphael's protagonist in The Glittering Prizes, speaks of living on a planet with only one resident. If we are lucky, then we may manage to discover that one other person -- or maybe more than one -- in that inner place where each of us really lives, all alone and still together. (This last sentence has just been altered by hackers objecting to romance, perhaps, and corrected by me.)

Romantic bonds need not be openly sexual; they need not involve what we usually call "intimacy" (another strange modern invention and term), but they must be formed freely among persons who, at first, are almost strangers, yielding anew the powerful connection that our excessively mobile, restless society continually insists on disrupting. People who are really "in love" recognize in each other a shared loneliness, suffering, mortality that simply is the human condition.

I think that we love others not because of their "perfections," but for their "imperfections," because of those unique foibles and embodied characteristics that make us ourselves. I recall Peter Ustinov saying something similar in a Dick Cavett interview. Only one woman in the world can devastate me just by placing her hands on her hips and smiling. I have no idea why this should be so or why I am so utterly captivated in this way by this one woman, but I accept that it is so and always will be. I am not willing to make many claims of certainty, but one of those claims is that there are a few people I cherish (and especially one woman) that I will love romantically until the day I die.

Ask me at the pearly gates "who" I am, in a metaphysical sense, and I will answer that I am a man who loved at least one woman -- and probably more than one -- more than his own life. I know, I know ... Jane Austen would laugh at this, but only because it takes one to know one. I have no regrets about the love that I have felt, whatever happens.

There are many kinds of love in our lives. And all love is welcome and good, and yet this mysterious and all-powerful, "sweet bewitchment" that we call romantic love is reserved, usually, for only one person in a lifetime.

My beloved is someone I recognize from my dreams -- dreams of "homecoming," completion and rest. Lovers confirm one another's identities only within the loving relation, allowing both to "choose themselves" (Kierkegaard), their best selves and each other forever. Gore Vidal writes: "two can face the darkness better than one." Two can face the hard truths of the world and of themselves better than one. So the chance for real love must always be worth the risk -- no, even the certainty -- of pain. In the words of E.M. Forster, "Only connect." Love is always worth it.

Flower in the Crannied Wall

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies; --
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower -- but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

-- ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON.

The most dismal aspect of severe depression is a terrible sense of disconnection.

Think of an electrical appliance that is unplugged, deprived of energy. It is useless, almost dead. I say this of a machine, something non-organic which shares in a field of energy, electricity, that can suddenly "connect" it to our technological world and to us, making it, as it were, "come alive."

Persons are also within fields of energy. We live in rivers of flowing energy -- energy that is shared, bringing us into relationships (as individuals and in groups) with other persons, with friends, family and lovers, persons who feed and replenish us, and are then nourished by us in turn.

Language is one such river of energy, connecting us to many generations that have come before us (memory) and to our fellow language-users at any time. There are many other such rivers. Art is one such river. Religion is another. Science also is a great river of learning and shared effort. All of them come together in a single word, culture. I have learned much about the importance of culture from Roger Scruton and Terry Eagleton.

We are like plants in a garden (in culture) sharing in sunlight and each producing its flowers, adding to the beauty of the total spectacle. Beauty is a useful notion for the point that I wish to make.

Art is an attempt at unity in terms of purpose, integration or wholeness, among other things, so that the recipient of a work of art is unified with it, plugged-in to it, in a way. This is true however abstract or modern the art work happens to be. The experience of a masterpiece is always an entry into a kind of community. (See "Colin McGinn On Movies and Minds.")

Community is so essential to what we are, paradoxically, even to the preservation of our uniqueness and individuality, as persons, that loss of community, isolation, alienation, the loss of love and exposure to hatred and suspicion from those who surround us, can produce effects on a person similar to the loss of light for a plant, or disconnection for an appliance: shut-down, closure, darkness.

Persons surrounded by hatred and evil, especially in childhood, suffer a kind of spiritual death. This is especially likely where the effect is cummulative, so that hatred in childhood only leads to more hatred in adulthood. This is part of the evil in racial and ethnic prejudice, the way it leaves lingering wounds in the psyches of its victims.

Love, on the other hand, is like the sunshine and rain that brings a flower back to health. This is no "touchy, feely" platitude. It is, as the saying goes, as "a dose of reality."

The absence of love and loss of connection has become a general characteristic of the lives of many people in our world. Communities are disintegrating before our eyes, as persons concentrate on what separates them: ethnicity, race, gender, political differences, rivalries, hatreds, festering ancient resentments in some of the most unfortunate places in the world. Competition and struggle characterize our lives; we are at one another's throats; we hunger; we envy; we covet; we struggle against one another.

We forget that we share a common fate. We are all going to die, sooner rather than later, if we fail to cooperate or care about one another.

Beauty in art is a reminder of the soothing and healing that flows from goodness, from re-connection to community, from unity or integration, which is a reminder of the possibility of transcendence through love. I never tire of saying this, especially to young people in blighted areas, you must walk towards the light of love and not towards the hatred and darkness. This light that I speak of is colorless, like love. Love has no ethnicity or religion. It is so tempting and easy to succumb to rage, especially rage arising from justifiable anger. We must not do so.

There are aspects of our contemporary American society that reinforce these tendencies toward fragmentation in all of us, tendencies that can only lead to spiritual death. The hyper-commercialism that reduces everything to a product, including intimate relationships, semi-aesthetic sensations (King Kong in 3-D!), illusions of political solidarity (balloons at conventions where the candidates are "pre-selected," like the lunch menu) to replace genuine politics, which is debate leading to real choices, more interactions with machines than with people, people that are machine-like.

Worst of all, is the religion of dehumanization that features in our social sciences, especially in mainstream American psychology, that hopes to reduce the ontological status of persons to that of objects, to make us into things that are to be manipulated and fixed, so as to be made to comport with notions of "normality" external to them, to us, reducing persons to mechanical functions that are defined and measured by others.

Fixing a refrigerator will not help as long as it remains unplugged. Medicating persons into a state of chemical lobotomy will not make them happy or good, not even functional, only mentally and spiritually dead, zombies, which is exactly the condition of the loveless person -- even if that loveless person happens to be a so-called "therapist" or lawyer, Supreme Court Justice or banker, media executive, or a writer thinking about these issues and inviting others to do the same. None of us is immune to what I describe.

Art and beauty remind us of belonging to communities, which helps us to achieve an acceptance of restful death. ("Death is an embrace at the edge of the sea," says the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario.) George Santayana pondering the ruins of the world that he had known before the First World War, said ...

You must remember that we were not very much later than Ruskin, Pater, Swinburne, and Mathew Arnold: our atmosphere was that of poets and persons touched with religious enthusiasm or religious sadness. Beauty (which musn't be mentioned now) was then a living presence, or an aching absence, day and night: history was always singing in our ears: and not even psychology or the analysis of works of art could take away from art its human implications. It was the great memorial to us, the great revelation, of what the soul had lived on, and had lived with in her better days. But now analysis and psychology seem to stand alone: there is no spiritual interest, no spiritual need. The mind in this direction has been desiccated: art has become an abstract object in itself, to be studied scientifically as a caput mortumm: and the living side of the subject -- the tabulation of people's feelings and comments -- is no less dead. ...

The more American pychologists and so-called therapists, social-scientists and social engineers poke and prod the social body, the more pathologies emerge: alcoholism, drug use, violence, destruction of families, military conflict, greed, mindless consumption of material goods ... and yet, what strange healing power seems to arrive -- almost magically -- with the fragile beauty of a single flower or love. Beauty is still enough to make us joyful ... like children. That's what I call "therapy."