Valentine aftershock

The first of two post St. Valentine's-day thoughts. This one inspired by Michael Novak over at First Things who has written a piece called "The Myth of Romantic Love". Novak is one of those people who is always worth reading even if the end result is to leave you thinking that there must be something wrong here.

Anyway, he has this piece up about romantic love and how it is a western invention and how that invention puts love at odds with both biological ends and God's end for us. The reason for this being simply that romantic love is all about an unrealized ideal and it leaves out actual consummation. That is both interesting and counter-intuitive. And he backs it up nicely too.

If romantic love were to lead too quickly to physical consummation, it would cease being romantic. For then it would require dealing with clothing in disarray, a mess to clean up, bad breath, and hair all disheveled. Then there would be a meal to fix, and—bump!—romance has fallen back to the lumpen earth. No, for the sake of romantic love, it is much better for fulfillment to be delayed, for obstacles to be put up, for a sword to be laid down between the longing couple, or a curtain drawn between them. For their romantic passion to persist, lovers must be kept away from one another. 

That's right. The sword laid between the couple is  from Tristan and Iseult and the curtain appears all sorts of places including the 1934 movie It Happened One Night.

But methinks that Novak is drawing too much conclusion on just a few examples. Yes, there certainly are examples of stories where the non-consummation of the romantic love becomes so over-blown that it leads to a  situation where death is more meaningful than sex: as happens in Wagner's version of Tristan and Isolde for example.

But there is also a much homelier explanation here and that is that couples move through courtship stages prior to sex for very good reasons and that courtship is dramatically interesting.

The other thing that it seems to me that Novak has skipped over here is that the creation of this romantic love has a lot to do with the Catholic church's discomfort with eros. Much of the sublimation that occurs with the troubadours, for example, was precisely for this reason. And in Saint Francis we have the ultimate example of a love of denial that is consumed only with death. In fact, the celibate life would seem the ultimate example of this.

In any case, I think I know where this years Lenten-reading project will come from now. Heck, it may take longer than just Lent.