The Incurable Romantic by Frank Tallis

Author:Frank Tallis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-09-17T16:00:00+00:00

The word ‘romantic’ is extraordinarily rich and complex, because it represents many beliefs and ideas about love that have accumulated and blended together over a period of a thousand years. The concept of romance is so much a part of our cultural heritage that we accept its implicit assumptions without question. In plays, operas, films and novels, anything—if it is done for love—is acceptable.

Today, Islam is frequently characterised as an exporter of hate; however, in actuality, the Islamic world’s most successful export is love. Our concept of romance has a Middle Eastern pedigree. The Arab Bedouin composed a form of poetry that contained several motifs now familiar to a global readership: an idealised lover, thwarted passions and melancholic yearning. Building on this tradition, eleventh-century Islamic authors wrote large-scale epic romances. The dissemination of Islamic love stories across Europe followed the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Presumably, these stories were told and retold by travellers who had crossed the Pyrenees and in due course they were cannibalised by the itinerant entertainers of medieval France. Thereafter, the chivalric songs and verses of the troubadours provided the foundation for home-grown courtly adventures featuring radiant queens and ‘beautiful ladies without mercy’ whose remoteness inflamed knightly passions. During the Renaissance, poets such as Petrarch and Dante took the theme of idealisation to new and ecstatic heights. The word ‘romance’ was infused with further meanings in the late eighteenth century, when romanticism—a movement that valued violent passions over cold reason—found its initial impetus in a story of doomed love by Goethe: The Sorrows of Young Werther. This slim volume, which ends with the protagonist committing suicide, was massively influential and forged a strong link in the popular imagination between love and death. Numerous imitators glorified the misery of rejected lovers in poems that depicted young men setting off across winter landscapes with suicidal intent.

The fundamental problem with the notion of romantic love is that it is based on a misunderstanding. Early Islamic romances were allegorical and dramatised the soul’s longing for God. They were never intended to be taken literally. By confusing spiritual and earthly goals, Western authors imported a raft of unrealistic expectations into courtship and marriage. How can a mortal woman ever live up to the romantic ideal of eternal beauty? How can an imperfect human being deliver perfect love? Is it really the case that there is only one person (like a singular deity) with whom true love is possible? Sex, however pleasurable, is not heavenly communion. Fate (or the hand of God) does not bring people together, there are only random occurrences. Obstacles to love have no significance; they do not appear in order to test and intensify love. There is no divine plan.

Romantic love makes impossible demands and quickly falls apart, after which its wretched, disappointed devotees are offered the cruel consolation of a freezing landscape and a pistol. The romantic world view is rooted in literatures that construe love—particularly young love—as nascent tragedy. As such, it is a potentially dangerous body of ideas.

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