Existentialism and Romantic Love

S. Cleary

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137455802
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

This book is an existential study of romantic loving. It draws on five existential philosophers to offer insights into what is wrong with our everyday ideas about romantic loving, why reality often falls short of the ideal, sources of frustrations and disappointments, and possibilities for creating authentically meaningful relationships.

1

Introduction

The attempt to understand romantic loving has become big business. The popularity of matchmaking industries, internet dating, romance novels, relationship self-help books, and celebrity relationship counselors are just a few examples of how the dynamics of loving relationships remain of perennial interest. Expectations about romantic loving are grand, but there seems to be an issue with the way we understand it because reality often falls short of the ideal. Romantic loving suggests images of perfect happiness, harmony, understanding, and intimacy that make the lovers feel as if they are made for each other. The ideal is alluring but flawed, because romantic loving often involves conflicts and disappointments.

This book is an existential study of romantic loving. Its central argument is that existential philosophies reveal to us the notion that once lovers free themselves from preconceived ideals about how romantic lovers ought to behave, and free themselves from being slaves to their passions, they will be free to create relationships that complement and enhance their personal, authentic endeavors. Love is a passion to be chosen and mastered, not sacrificed to. One argument is that although romantic lovers lose certain freedoms, the love they acquire compensates.¹ However, I argue that one of the key contributions of the existential approach to romantic loving is its criticism of such an assumption. After all, it is by no means given that the benefits of romantic love necessarily outweigh the costs.

Existential philosophies provide a meaningful framework through which the dominant ideas about romantic loving can be critically examined because they explore the space between the ideals of romantic loving and the compromises lovers make in order to try to achieve those ideals. Five existential philosophers have been selected for study because their narratives provide the means by which the roots of dissatisfactions and frustrations within our everyday ideas about romantic loving can be examined.

While every existential philosopher interprets being in the world differently, there is a common emphasis on concrete personal experience, freedom, authenticity, responsibility, individuality, awareness of death, and personal determination of values. It is unsurprising, therefore, that such philosophers would consider the question of romantic loving. This includes Max Stirner (1806–1856), Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980), and Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986), who contribute significantly to the idea of romantic loving. The five existential philosophers do not provide a single solution, but rather a five-pronged critique that helps us to understand both how romantic loving can go awry and how it can be reinvigorated. An analysis of such existential notions as freedom, power, choice, authenticity, and anxiety challenges our assumptions regarding the nature and meaning of romantic loving.

The existential perspective lends itself well to such an analysis, since relationships are an important part of existential discourse. Existential philosophers acknowledge that we are born into webs of relationships, and they explore how relations with others infuse our world with meaning and modify our possibilities. Existential thinking brings to light complexities, knowledge, and expressions of romantic loving because it provides a language to understand and reflect on our being in the world and being with others, and it expands our knowledge about possibilities and dynamics of relationships. Existential philosophies remain relevant because they deal with everyday human problems.²

What is romantic loving?

In 1300 BC the ancient Egyptians wrote love poems. Around 350 BC Plato classified love into different forms. The Roman poet Ovid wrote erotic poetry in 19 BC. Heloise and Abelard famously exchanged letters about their love for each other in the twelfth century. In the late 1500s Shakespeare wrote plays about love. While the literature of romantic loving dates as far back as the ancient Egyptians, only more recently has it been referred to as “romantic” and become a mass phenomenon, particularly in the Western world. This section addresses a few key historical developments that have influenced our understanding of romantic loving in the twenty-first century Western world and some of the dominant current definitions of romantic loving.

Historically, associations between men and women were marriages based on economic alliances that aimed at either maintaining power and wealth or providing extra labor for domestic production. Coupling was arranged as a matter of economic convenience, and so passionate love usually occurred outside marriage and was based on the natural functions of sex and lust. The love story generally ended in sexual union – until the Middle Ages when the phenomenon of courtly love became popular.

Sometimes courtly love manifested as a knight’s secretive admiration for a socially superior and unattainable female. Because the relationship was unconsummated, the love was idealized. This is why the pinnacle of love in great romance stories ends with lovers seeking unity in death: Liebestod (a metaphorical orgasm).³ William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde are two pertinent examples. However, Robert Solomon and Kathleen Higgins argue that although courtly love was often consummated within the higher classes of society, it was a slow process, and the focus was on courting because it was based on the lovers’ worth, charms, whims, and desires instead of economics.⁴

The use of the term “romantic” proliferated in the Middle Ages when things were likened to the Roman Empire, in which everything seemed magnificent, heroic, adventurous, and passionate. In the late eighteenth century, art, music, literature, and philosophy that emphasized emotions, imagination, creativity, nature, freedom, individualism, and the concrete over abstract reasoning, logic, rationality, and convention became known as “Romantic”.⁵

Narratives of love as romantic bloomed during the nineteenth century, at the same time that romance literature proliferated and when romance came to be equated with courting. With the growth of capitalism and industrialization, the requirement for economic-based marriages became obsolete because domestic production declined and corporations, not families, controlled wealth. Capitalism and the growth of individual liberties in Western society meant that courtship and coupling became a matter of personal choice rather than parental arrangement.

In the second half of the twentieth century, such developments as legal and technological advances in contraception, abortion, divorce, equal opportunity legislation, changes in traditional roles and growth of women’s participation in the workforce, created greater possibilities and variations in forms of relationships. Feminism awakened women’s psychosocial freedom to pursue economic independence and shifted the power dynamics in relationships. Elisabeth Badinter highlights that birth control has endowed Western women with a new kind of power, springing from two sources in particular. First, economic independence means that women are able to survive financially and socially without men, giving them the “atomic bomb that is separation or divorce”.⁶ Second, a father need not be consulted in procreation-related decisions. Women are no longer required to marry, stay married, and have children in order to gain social approval and be perceived as successful in life.

The effect has been that in the Western world, the traditional nuclear family has broken down and more people are living alone. Robert Solomon proposes that with the weakening of familial and community bonds, romantic love has grown in importance since it contributes to an individual’s sense of belonging, if only temporarily. Moreover, it has been possible only since women have been able to choose their partners and have been treated as objects of love rather than as property.⁷

Romantic loving, while incorporating elements of both passionate and courtly love, raised the sexual to the sublime and encompassed the life trajectories and futures of individuals as they wrote their own narratives. This shift in ideas about love meant not only that was it socially acceptable to marry a lover, but also that the ideal of romantic love culminated in marriage, as we see in Shakespeare’s plays. Thus, romantic love united passionate loving and marriage, sexual matters became more important, and the social and economic barriers around romantic liaisons shattered.

Definitions and understandings of romantic loving are wide, varied, and changeable. Some of our modern ideas about love retain key themes of Romanticism, and yet other theories are also popular. There are six major ways of conceptualizing romantic loving in the Western world today, outlined below. Since romantic loving is not a purely philosophical discussion, psychological, anthropological, and biological perspectives are also incorporated.⁸

Merging

First, the conception of romantic loving that most clearly echoes ideas that evolved during the Romantic period is that of merging, which is an idea derived from the ancient Greeks. For example, Plato described love in terms of merging in Symposium. Plato’s character Aristophanes explains that people used to be round creatures with four arms, four legs, and two faces. They attacked the gods and as punishment, Zeus cut them all in two. Since then, people have been searching for their other half so that they can reunite into their original whole. This myth encouraged the idea of romantic loving as a union of two people, who in compensating for each other’s deficiencies together make a single entity. That there is only one other person capable of doing this fostered the idea that finding one’s other half would result in perfect happiness, making it a monogamous and eternal bond, as well as one that allows for complete disclosure to, and understanding of, one another.

Many modern definitions of romantic love incorporate aspects of Aristophanes’ myth. For example, Martin Dillon proposes that romantic love is “to consummate a union with the beautiful object that betokens sheer pleasure”, but the inherent contradiction is that while lovers crave perfection, reality cannot live up to the ideal.⁹ Robert Nozick describes romantic love as longing for a “we”, resulting in a new entity or unit that “pools” well-being, autonomy, and decisions.¹⁰ Aaron Ben-Ze’ev and Ruhama Goussinsky describe romantic loving as uncompromising, unconditional, comprehensive, and encompassing the beliefs that “The beloved is everything to the lover and hence love is all you need; true love lasts forever and can conquer all; true lovers are united – they are one and the same person; love is irreplaceable and exclusive; and love is pure and can do no evil”.¹¹ Just as Christians embrace the ideal of merging with God to become a total unity, Irving Singer argues that the Romantics’ ideal of “organic unity” explains the ideal of merging in love: culminating in marriage, the bond of romantic love promises eternal oneness, and provides value and meaning in life.¹² However, Singer proposes that the problem with the merging ideal is that it assumes submission and dependence. Instead, he proposes a “bestowal” model of love based on interdependence, which balances the benefits lovers derive from each other with concern for each others’ welfare.¹³

However, romantic love is also conceived as opposition, tension, or a dialectic between lovers’ desire to merge their souls and their need to assert their individuality, freedom, and autonomy, which all together is the foundation for romantic love. Robert Solomon is a key exponent of this view. He suggests that there are at least four key components of romantic love. One, it must involve sexual desire (although sexual consummation is not necessary). Two, it must include a desire for reciprocity (but actual reciprocity is irrelevant). Three, it must be personal, that is, love of a particular individual. And four, it aims to create a shared identity. This shared identity is based on something much deeper than companionship, pleasure, and usefulness: it is a process of developing a new shared self together – in and through each other. A central feature of romantic love is that it involves the desire or hope that it will endure. This is why, Solomon proposes, the legendary libertine Don Juan does not love: he is involved with too many women, does not allow time for a dialectic to develop, and knows that the relationship will not last more than a few days at most.¹⁴

Similar stories

A second approach views loving in terms of a personally constructed narrative. According to Robert Sternberg, people fall in love because they have similar stories and complementary roles, and greater differences in lovers’ stories mean that there is greater risk of discontentment with their relationship.¹⁵ Examples include when lovers refer to having things in common, mutual interests,...