So as to show that romance is a historical concept that was born at the dawn of recorded history, refer to the documents in the Hebraic tradition. It might seem, in fact, that the earliest stories in “Genesis” were already devoted to this notion of romance. Remember that in the creation story, God creates Adam to be on his own even though he would soon create the other animals with their mates and only then does He decide that Adam is alone and so needs a companion. Why had that not occurred to God in the first place? Perhaps because Adam was supposed to be a figure who got to rule over the animal kingdom without being a member of it in other respects. But God changes his mind because Adam seems lonely, which is a spiritual state. Adam needs someone to cling to, or as the Bible puts it, to “cleave” to, and that is as full a definition of romance as one needs, even if “Genesis” is, as usual, notorious for its brevity. So move on in the Bible.
The story of Samson and Delilah might seem an unpromising one for propounding as a romance. It is simply about lust, not romance. Delilah is an opportunist who uses her wiles to conquer a warrior, much as happens much later on in the Bible when Judith does that so she can kill Holofernes in his tent. Samson is a warrior overcome by his lust and so the whole story is about lust rather than romance. But read it more closely. Samson was more a troublemaker than a revolutionary. He killed Philistines for revenge rather than because they impeded the independence of the Israelites. He had to be taken into custody or killed, like Bonnie and Clyde, for the good of everyone. He is also a womanizer, going to a prostitute where the Philistines think they can catch up with him, but he fools them, as a gangster might, by leaving early. He had earlier insisted on marrying a non-Israelite, but dispensed with her when she wanted to turn him in, and Samson’s family turned her over to the person who had been the best man at his wedding, his family presumably feeling pity for the woman Samson had married and then dispensed with. So Samson is established as an unreliable and notorious figure. Then the story tells us he married a woman, Delilah, and so that sets the reader to wonder whether his fate with her will be the same as his fate with his first wife, who had tried to wheedle his secrets out of him, and whose requests he had successfully resisted.
It is only after the marriage of Samson and Delilah that emissaries of the Philistines reach out to her to try to bring Samson down. That was perhaps because she was a Gazan herself or because she was mercenary. Her motives are left unclear. But she does not hide very well what she is up to. She arranges three times for Philistines to come to subdue Samson because he has told her lies about his vulnerabilities. Each time, Samson, not having lost his superpowers, is able to prevail over those who have come to take him. It is perfectly clear that Delilah has betrayed him these three times because she says that she has been embarrassed and humiliated because her schemes don’t work out. This can be read as a joke wherein the perpetrator of evil accuses the victim of not allowing the scheme to work, But it goes deeper than that. After any of these failed schemes, Samson could have just left Delilah, though he had reason enough to kill her for being a traitor. Instead he puts up with her and tries to appease her on the grounds that, one can speculate, a bond of romance had been created between the two of them so that Samson takes into account her whims and her weaknesses, which in this case is to deliver him up to his enemies. If a woman you love says that what you do is humiliate her, you try to compensate for that in your behavior, her weaknesses things for you to adjust to rather than neglect. So whether because he has been worn down, or because it was a lapse, or because he cannot but want to fulfill her wishes, he tells her the secret of his strength and so she cuts his hair and he is indeed in the hands of the Philistines. Samson loved Delilah more than he had his previous wife, to whom he had not revealed the secret of his strength, although she had importuned him also three times to do so. The parallelism is significant. The question is whether he had loved Delilah to excess.
If this is indeed a love story, which there is every reason to think it is, then what, within that frame of reference, are we to make of his surrender of his secret? The usual and time honored formula for understanding romantic stories is which of the two parties loves the other the most, most people of even peasant wisdom able to figure out that the passion and loyalty two sexual partners have for one another may not be equally reciprocated. Feelings that are both equal and of great depth might be held out to be an ideal, as it is in “Romeo and Juliet”, but love is usually rather asymmetrical, in that love is such an individual thing, slightly different with every couple. It may be asserted as a rule that women should love men more than men love their women, because then a woman will remain true to the man no matter the amount of disappointment the man brings to a relationship, while others may assert the contrary proposition, which is that men should love their women more than the women love them, because otherwise the men will not be as considerate and providing as they otherwise might be, the men thinking that the sexual favors of their women is worth whatever tokens of affection they can offer.
So Samson is to be faulted not for loving Delilah but for loving her too much, so much, in fact, that he is willing to sacrifice himself and his mission (should he be said to have one) so as to appease her, while Delilah has limitations on her love for Samson, willing to put love aside for her ethnic allegiance, mothers before and since urging their sons and daughters to marry within their ethnic group because you never know what hidden grudges a spouse of a different group will carry with them into the relationship. So this is a tragic story in that it is the sort of thing that happens in romance, part of the possibilities of romance, and so one reason outsiders might think that one has lost one’s mind at least a little bit by falling into love. Moreover, this particular dynamic, the uneven nature of love, does not seem to have changed very much. Ophelia loved Hamlet too much; Anthony loved Cleopatra too much; Edward VIII loved Wallace Simpson too much, although in that last case, there wasn’t much character there beforehand for him to lose, and Charles never did love Diana all that much. Love stories, or what we know of them, are the subjects of gossip because we want to fill in the details of what are the levels of feeling behind the scenes, a curtain drawn over them for the sake of propriety and so as to keep them secret because those are the real secrets of how people can stay together, the secret of Samson’s hair only a symbol of what people have on one another and which they are therefore to guard, even if Delilah, to her shame, does just the opposite.
Now compare Samson and Delilah to “Gilgamesh”, written, let us say, some thousand years before. As befits the world’s oldest epic, “Gilgamesh” deals with the basic existential dilemmas of humanity and takes what must have seemed at the time a progressive point of view about them. Gilgamesh is moved to find out why people die because he is very upset that his friend Enkidu has died, a maggot coming out of his nose on the seventh day after he died and so confirming to Gilgamesh that it really had happened. Gilgamesh goes through the vault through which the sun passes at night so that he can find out the secret of life and is given a number of tasks to do which are impossible, such as staying awake for seven days, so as to prove to him that some things are impossible, and that avoiding death is one of them, and that one should enjoy life as best one can, wearing clean and bright clothes. Gilgamesh also learns on that journey that getting angry and killing people or creatures does not solve all problems even as, earlier in life, he and his friend had admired themselves for killing monsters.
There are two emotions upon which the author of “Gilgamesh” dwells. One is lust. It was intercourse with a goddess that gave Enkidu the awareness that he was no longer a wild man who had been raised by gazelles. Lust, one presumes, gives one the self awareness to see life through more civilized eyes, even if nowadays we think of it as temporarily immobilizing that capacity. The other emotion dwelled upon is friendship, as that is exemplified by the relation between Gilgamesh and Enkidu. Whether they also have sexual contact is beside the point. The real issue is the nature of friendship, and in this epic it seems very recognizable as the way people support one another in their adventures, the one taking or providing courage from the other or making up for the faltering of the other. So friendship is recognized not as thinking as well of a person as a person thinks of themselves, which would be a modern way of approaching the problem. Rather, friendship is marked by the similarities between the two who are friends: they have the same strengths and weaknesses as one another, are equals, and that was the view of friendship, that it could only be between equals (and so one could not be friends with a woman) until modern times, when friendship across social cleavages became acceptable. Vivid in “Gilgamesh” is the sense of how friendship is a relationship that can endure despite setbacks and that it may be the most profound of the emotions that people can feel for one another, however much that is put aside today, except by psychologists and moralists, in the name of the much more combustible relation of love, where one is supposed to see in one’s partner even more than they see in themselves.
An emotion that is not available in “Gilgamesh” is love, as that is to be distinguished from both lust and friendship, although it can be proposed that love is the union of these two feelings as that is realized sometime after the writing of “Gilgamesh”. Love, as I have said, is the distinctive engagement with the character of the beloved as that is prompted and encouraged by lust. It is a voluntary activity in that sometimes it sparks and sometimes it does not, even with people with whom it would be in one's self interest to fall in love. But love is always a falling, a kind of cataclysm that takes one as if unawares no matter how much one is practiced in the signs of reading love, as was supposedly an attribute of Emma Woodhouse, who was blind for so long to her love for Mr. Knightley. Whereas friendship is solid and comes about because two people of common interests and dispositions find one another, that having been the case for Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who are simply announced as having become close friends after they have met, there being no problematic in their becoming friends, which is very different from what is the case in love, where there is always a love story, a tale of how two people have overcome difficulties so as to have found one another or during the course of their story after they have found one another. We don’t know how Samson and Delilah met, but we know that their relationship was soon very rocky, especially in the light of his prior relationships. So every loving couple has a tale to tell about the circumstances that brought them together and how they overcame obstacles either at the beginning or somewhat into their relationship and so romance makes epic heroes of all of us through the telling and retelling of love stories, whether of “Tristan and Iseult” or of “Romeo and Juliet”, or of how you first saw your own true love across a room and knew that she was the one.