Romance, I think, is bursting out all over, but people disagree.
Here is a three net tennis match about a well discussed topic in literary history which I think unfolds an even deeper three part argument or presumption about social structure. The topic is the status of romantic love as it has altered or not altered across the ages. The contributors are my daughter in law Maria, who is a trained classicist and seems to have read everything; my close friend Roland, who has esoteric views about sociology, in which he was also well trained, but has standard view on literature, one of his major interests; and myself, also a trained sociologist with a literary flair, who is politically adventurous only in thinking that Joe Biden was the second coming of FDR, while having views on romantic love which seem rather radical even though I thought my own view was the usual one.
After batting about the topic between myself and Roland, I asked Maria what she thought about romantic love. Her view, as I expected, was coherent and not in keeping with what either of the other two had discussed. She thinks that in the ancient world there were many examples of companionate marriage, which means that people later on become quite fond of the people they marry for other reasons. She thinks that true in the contemporary world when it is that the pair in an arranged marriage are expected and will soon enough get to like one another. Maria thinks that the people in the Iliad and the Odyssey are quite recognizable as people nowadays. Their emotions and relationships haven't changed.
Maria disagrees with Roland’s orthodox view that romance started in the Middle Ages. She thinks C. S. Lewis was knowledgeable about courtly love but that he never dealt with a woman until his middle age and so hardly expert on romance even though her husband Harold, who is my son and also very well read, is very taken with Lewis's Christian apologetics. She also dismisses the idea that romantic love had to be transgressive was a bizarre notion and clearly not applicable to most people who think themselves in love. She thinks Romeo and Juliet were crazy and stupid, moody and silly early adolescents, and Shakespeare knew that-- a point with which I agree. Maria places romantic love much more recently, in the Romantic Era, when writers rhapsodize about anything, like mountains and flowers and nations and love. It's been downhill since.
In retrospect, I had to say that I misspoke when I said to Roland that Samson and Delilah are in romantic love. I meant that the two were engaged in a feature of sexual relationships that still take hold. Men become vulnerable to women, whatever the men's positive attributes and accomplishments, and rely on or trust women to not exploit them, and Delilah did just that. A modern observer would also say that a woman can also have her heart broken. In the old days, Bathsheba did not seem distressed that David had Uriah killed because Uriah was Bathsheba’s husband. People in love will do desperate or awful things.
Maria was judgmental in describing the madness of love, but Roland was simply saying that romantic love only applied to a small number of people even if a lot of people claim that they are in love, but faking it, while I think that most people feel deeply enough in a mixture of sexual and personality attractiveness that the condition qualifies as romantic love. Roland thinks these few couples, who often face tragic fates or betray something vital about themselves, as when Antony allows Cleopatra to dominate her, is the result of potions or spells found in classical literature or else by fate or in Lerner and Lowe’s “Camelot”, where circumstances conspire to put Guinevere and Lancelot together whoever might be the king.That is why love is so endearing and spontaneous: because it is precious because love is rare though sometimes dreadful.
Roland may indeed be right in that he and Maria were both distinguishing conventional and romantic love, the first of which has been around for a very long time, and romantic love, which requires a potion or some such to start off the madness, and may have started with courtly love in the middle ages but which Maria thinks began in the Romantic Era, while I was speaking only about romantic love, which is always transgressive and applies more or less to most people in love, who have to deal with overcoming some friction or dissimilarity, such as being two human beings that have a disjunction that has to be overcome even if in a minor way. I am thinking of modern sitcoms where people meet cute as in "Sleepless in Seattle" or "Mad About You" or "The Big Bang Theory" and "The West Wing", where people start off by sparring with one another,like Beatrice and Benedict, as my wife and I did when we courted. Every love, I was saying, has a bit of that while Maria and Roland think only a few people engage in transgressive love, my own view being that of Lionel Trilling when writing about his own life with Diana Trilling,where they had sex before marriage when that was considered transgressive, as well as him about Humbert Humbert.
So it was reasonable for Roland to ask me if there were lovers in the world that did not engage in romantic love. What lovers are those to whom romantic love doesn’t apply? Here are some of my answers. There are dynastic marriages, such as the one in "Henry V", where Shakespeare parodies a romantic courtship knowing the marriage had to be made; there are also traditional cultures where matchmakers arrange mates who are more or less suitable but before modern arranged marriages where the matchmaker hopes the people will become fond of one another and think fate rather than the matchmaker put the two together; and there are very conventional people terrified of doing anything dangerous. These last are few and far between. The girls, at least, in the couples who were at the college where I taught undergraduates, were constantly talking about their relationships to see if sexual intimacy might lead to marriage. They were pretty conventional in their worldviews and their ambitions but thought courtship a test and a risk and a decision which you could get out of until the two of them realized they were hooked on one another. So romance is everywhere, just about anyone's great adventure.
People, with the exceptions noted, expect to have romantic relationships. The young women who came to America from Europe in the twentieth century from peasant and traditional societies thought that liberation in America did not just mean economic opportunity and freedom from persecution. They thought they were free to indulge in romantic love. The Japanese girls interned in detention centers during WWII were listening to Frank Sinatra on the radio just as Italian girls acclimating to America were also swooning over Frank Sinatra. Romance was freeing even if a less reliable procedure for marriage than matchmaking. It doesn’t make sense to think that all of those love songs had no impact or represent real feelings
Physical intimacy except of the most commercial sort, and that includes arranged marriages, risks personal intimacy and so either men or women can break your heart6. That is why couples negotiate their relationships so that they for a while take less risk before becoming clearly involved. Churches and dating services monitor contacts so as to lessen risk even though that is misunderstood as prudishness. To the contrary, chaperone services are aware of the power of lust. Men and women are not like trolley cars where another one will come by in ten minutes. Rather, love affairs leave scars that can last a lifetime or a long rehabilitation process. That is why courtship is an adventure. A quantitative sociologist might consider which are the more or less likely outcomes of romance while a qualitative sociologist might consider the types and processes of romantic adventure. Maybe only literary critics will consider the dynamic of a particular courtship, transgressive or not, as in “Jane Eyre” or “Of Human Bondage”.
The points of view of the three participants in this conversation were also revealing very deep thoughts about how society and even politics operate. If Maria thinks the Romantic Age is the time of the bad vibes, that applies to other kinds of endeavor in that period. The downfall occurred in the last few decades of the Eighteenth Century, Jane Austen the last person who was sane about romance. Maria thinks there is nothing useful to be found in the French Revolution, full as it was of grandiose ideology and political killing. We are still under the sway of gigantic political and governmental programs. As Tim Walz says, though without adopting him, Maria likes the idea of the government keeping out of your own damn business. New fangled ideas like electric cars and even some more acceptable things like wire transfer of funds, don’t sit well. Let's get back to things the way they were before they were all messed up.
Roland is more an amused bystander, noting the cultural baubles that come up for attention as just what happens in social life, like hula hoops or phrases of thought, to disappear for reasons unknown just as they arrived for mysterious reasons, however much the fundamentals of social life don’t change, including the division between conventional and romantic love.
I, for one, plunge into the idea that government can make us more free by providing Pell grants so people can at leisure engage in romantic love, everyone trying some new kind of cultural venture that include, as I suggest elsewhere, documenting your life and engaging a field of study for its own sake, as well as gaining pride from work, which is what Biden is always talking about. So a political commitment is not just a calculation of interests and ideology but at the very core of a strand of cultural thought whether or not having reduced a sense of things into a political principle.
So how are we to assess these deep currents of thought and feeling? Literary studies are one mechanism for recovering them. and it is difficult for me to believe they will become passe even if English departments are on decline. They assess fundamental things rather than frivolous ones.