Is Romantic Love True Love?

From Fiddler On The Roof

Social media changes the way people interact with their friends and family including their love interests. Young people nowadays commonly express their intimate feelings creatively in cyberspace. You can easily tell when they are "in love" by what they post on their timelines, including pictures.

People have always fallen in love, and throughout the ages many couples have loved each other deeply. But romantic love as the sole or primary basis for marriage is a modern, western invention, beginning to get popular only in the 19th century.

Many people assume that it has been this way for ages and find it odd when some people from places like India still prefer arranged marriage over "love marriage", as the Indians would call it.

In the Broadway musical "Fiddler on the Roof", Tevye was struggling to understand "romantic love" as three of his daughters broke with their Jewish tradition when, one by one, each of them "fall in love" and wanted to marry on that basis. He asked his wife whether they, too, had that experience after 25 years of marriage.

For years, Filipinos, being heavily influenced by western culture early on, had a different experience on this issue compared to some of their Asian neighbors such as the Indians. But, over the years, our Asian neighbors also fell to that fairy-tale "happily ever after" narrative, as they too succumbed to the influence of western literary and other media like movies and songs that bombarded us daily. "Love" marriages are starting to get a foothold in the urban areas of India.

According to Robert Johnson, a Jungian psychoanalyst, we grow up to believe in the irrational assumptions of the fairy tale script of romantic love. He differentiates romantic love from true love – “Romantic love is not love but a complex of attitudes about love – involuntary feelings, ideals, and reactions."

Johnson added: "When we are “in love” we feel completed, as though a missing part of ourselves had been returned to us; we feel uplifted, as though we were suddenly raised above the level of the ordinary world. Life has an intensity, a glory, an ecstasy and transcendence." 

From Titanic

Elaine Hatfield differentiates romantic love and true love this way: passionate love is "a state of intense longing for union with another" and 'companionate' love is "the affection we feel for those with whom our lives are deeply entwined."

Dorothy Tennov noted that true love is an emotion that is acted on while romantic love (she coined a new word “limerence” to describe it) is more of a transformed state that people go into - the difference in the proverbial “I love you, but I’m not in love with you." Some of the symptoms of being "in love" mostly notable among women:

1. Acute longing for reciprocation
2. An aching of the “heart” (a palpable heavy sensation in the front of the chest).
3. Buoyancy (a feeling of “walking on air”)

According to Johnson, the greatest paradox of romantic love is that it never produces human relationships as long as it stays romantic because we are in love with our own fantastical creations instead of the other person for who they really are. Romantic love is a kind of primal religious experience – both revelation and rapture - that is a fundamental part of our collective unconscious. The tragedy of our understanding of romantic love is that it makes us put unreasonable demands on our romantic partners because we believe that they have the responsibility for making our lives whole.

Nick Yee commented on Johnson's observations: "The romantic couples who have been together for half their lives have something quite different from romantic love. Johnson calls it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love – it represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks … to find the relatedness, the value, the beauty, in the simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama … or an extraordinary intensity in everything.
In a strange way, this is true love because it can be everlasting, but this is not the love script that we are bombarded with from every literary or entertainment form in our lives."

For Tevye and his wife, theirs is not “romantic love” as we know it. They don’t impose the same ideals on their relationships, nor do they impose such impossible demands and expectations on each other.

Yee added: "The tragedy derives from the simple fact that romantic love always fades, and most people do not know how to derive a sincere, human relationship from one that is fantastical and rapturous. And if they learned anything from fairy tales, they learned that a relationship without romantic love is worthless.

All their lives, they have had a vision of what love would be, and they now believe that their 'true love' must then still be out there waiting for them. Many people are stuck forever in this wash-and-rinse cycle of romantic love because they believe that fiery romantic love can be everlasting."

So in "Fiddler On the Roof", the following dialogue is indicative of true love, not just romantic love.

TEVYE "But do you love me?"

GOLDE "Do I love him?"

TEVYE "Well?"

GOLDE "For twenty-five years I've lived with him
Fought with him, starved with him
Twenty-five years my bed is his
If that's not love, what is?"

TEVYE "Then you love me!"

GOLDE "I suppose I do"

TEVYE "And I suppose I love you, too"

It doesn't change a thing. But even so - after twenty-five years, it's nice to know.

Me, too.

Reference:

Yee, Nick. Love in 4 Acts: What is Romantic Love?

Hatfield, E., & Walster, G. W. (1978). A new look at love. Addison-Wesley.

Johnson, Robert A. We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love. Harper San Francisco. 1983.

Lieberman, Marcia K. "'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation through the Fairy Tale." In Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales in North America and England. Ed. Jack Zipes. New York: Methuen, 1986, pp. 185-200.

Tennov, Dorothy. Love and Limerence. Scarborough House. 1979.