Finding Love in a Romantic Age

Never in the history of humanity has romantic love been so celebrated. But what if all the romance on sale this week clouds a basic and vital truth - in a tragic world, love is meant to be something deeper than happiness and the fulfillment of desire.

When I teach poetry, I'm often struck by how unromantic the Romantic poets were. Most of the time their poems are really just about wandering off to nature and forgetting about everybody else. There is very little mentioned about the actual nitty gritty of love, marriage or raising a family.

Yet they still cast a long shadow over the way we view love in the modern age.

The idea that human beings are constantly filled with majestic desire that must be fulfilled - that a perfect world awaits if we just have the courage to begin it again according to the wonders of our imagination - these are all ideas given to us by the age of Romanticism in the early 19th century.

Suffice to say, I can't think of one of the Romantic poets who had a happy marriage. Most of them treated women pretty badly - even while they were adored by women.

Rather, if you trace their ideas all the way to the 20th century you can find their ideas lurking behind the social devastation given to us by the concepts of Free Love and no-contest divorce. If our desires are always noble, then nothing should stand in their way.

This is all obviously fairly ironic when you consider how so many people today thirst for more romance in their lives.

The problem is we think love is designed to make us happy. And then when we are not happy, we blame love.

I think Shakespeare might have predicted all of this in 'Romeo and Juliet' which so many of us misread. Romeo and Juliet were not great lovers, but crazed adolescents, let down by their parents and their own death-seeking desires, thus ensuring an abominable death. They never listened to the Friar (whose naivety doesn't help their cause either) when he tells them, 'These violent delights have violent ends... therefore love moderately.'

Shakespeare must chuckle wherever he is when he notes modern day people still trying to imitate the doomed lovers.

I think Shakespeare may have been hinting at the fact that love is meant to be something deeper than desire and even happiness.

In 2016, the most popular article on the website for the New York Times, was the piece ‘Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person’ by French pop philosopher, Alain de Botton. I think it was popular because it struck a chord with a romance-addled generation of mostly unhappy people.

He wrote that too many people look for a perfect partner to make them happy - but then obviously they are disappointed. The solution does not lie in swapping partners. He says:

"We mustn’t abandon him or her, only the founding Romantic idea upon which the Western understanding of marriage has been based the last 250 years: that a perfect being exists who can meet all our needs and satisfy our every yearning.

"We need to swap the Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us — and we will (without any malice) do the same to them. There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness. But none of this is unusual or grounds for divorce.

"Choosing whom to commit ourselves to is merely a case of identifying which particular variety of suffering we would most like to sacrifice ourselves for."

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In short, read the tragedy or comedy of Shakespeare rather than the poetry of the Romantics in order to understand love.

Shakespeare knew that the heart of tragedy and comedy was the 'giddiness' of human beings - our potential to make mistakes, be drawn into new desires too easily, and, in trying to fix everything, create new and worse calamities.

In such a world, kindness and understanding are the real tools that build lasting love in a tragic and comic universe.

Love is something simpler, and yet deeper, than the Romantics would have it. Of course it involves romantic moments, and gifts, and beaches, et cetera. But deep within love, there is an understanding that we're in this together, that we will never be perfect, that we're flawed, and we can't create this perfect world for ourselves.

I'll give the Bard the final word on the matter. I think he knew what true romance was:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov'd, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd.

Happy Valentine's Day, beautiful Lara.