Last week in this column, bell hooks made a distinction between romantic love and true love. The former, she told us, quoting from Toni Morrison, is “one of the most destructive ideas in the history of modern thought”. She may be right, but then hooks goes on to define “true love” in terms that don’t really differ all that much from the current perception of what romantic love is meant to be. It cannot be an accident that the term “true love” has been appropriated by slushy women’s magazines devoted to recycling the myths of romance.
The idea of an overwhelming romantic attachment sweeping one away almost against one’s will has roots in the Middle Ages of troubadours and chivalry – and thus in a particular perception of women as the passive beloved and men as the active lover. What may surprise the modern observer is the fact that such romantic love is presented as chaste, more often than not: sex is kept out of the equation as much as possible.
The repressions of the church must have had a role here, and assuredly there are slippages (Abelard and Heloise, perhaps; the story of Lancelot and Guinevere’s illicit passion) that indicate that sex could not be entirely erased, but the image we are left with is one of brave shining knights more concerned with the lady’s honour and winning a pennant on her behalf than getting her between the sheets of the old four-poster.
The image of romantic passion gets turbulently reformulated in the Romantic era, the age of poets like Byron and Keats. Sometimes it is requited, sometimes it becomes physical passion, but not always. Look at poor tubercular Keats pining for his unresponsive beloved Fanny Brawne – and sublimating his urges into urgent poetry in which beauty is not the spur of lust but instead a rather coldly abstract Truth.
The past two centuries saw the collapsing of the romantic ideal of love into the hallowed embrace of marriage. Perhaps the cause was the Victorian need to bury sex beneath propriety, to contain it within acceptable limits – and when we talk about romance, let’s be frank, we’re talking about sex, though admittedly in a form that gives it a gloss of high soulful importance beyond the mere scratching of a primal itch.
Previous ages were quite happy to see matrimony as primarily social, political and dynastic in purpose, with room for sexual play outside its bounds, though that of course usually favoured the male partner. The threat of wifely infidelity was based in fears about inheritances and bloodlines (today, fidelity is an end in itself – lapses are a sign of crisis). Women were so oppressed that there was no notion of a true companionship of equals within marriage. At least nowadays we can conceive of and create such equitable relationships, between members of the same sex as well as between men and women, even if the dominant ideology insists on sealing romantic-sexual love and lifelong companionship into a single hermetic container with little room for variation.
Formulations like those of hooks seem to divide all love into “true love” and “false love”. We should remind ourselves that the ancients had a far more flexible and wide- ranging sense of what love can be, of the many forms it can take. Philosopher AC Grayling enumerates the Greeks’ many words for love: “They spoke of agape, altruistic love … They spoke of ludus, the playful affection of children and of casual lovers, and pragma, the understanding that exists between a long-established married couple. They spoke of storge, the love that grows between siblings or comrades in arms who have been through much together, and of mania, which is obsession. And they allied the latter with eros or sexual passion.”
It would appear that nowadays we have been left with very few paradigms of love: not much more than eros, which is either disruptive or can be channelled, eventually, into what the Greeks called pragma. That’s the ideal we’re presented with – passion becomes marriage, and all directed specifically at one other person. That’s not life; that’s a Hollywood movie.
No wonder many people now feel an almost unbearable anxiety in the face of finding and keeping love, of continuing to love. It’s almost impossible to live up to the hype. Yes, we want to love and be loved, and yes, it’s exhilarating when we have the opportunity to focus all those feelings on one other individual. But can we really expect what hooks says takes place in true love, that “when it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other’s core identity”?
What core identity? We are each subtly different people when we’re interacting with different others; we change registers, we go in divergent directions. Even in the context of a single relationship, we change faces at various times. That’s what other people do for us – allow us to be all the different people we are. If we are searching desperately for the one other person who will discover our true selves, or demanding that of our lovers, we run the risk of limiting the range of what we can be as human beings.
True love is not one thing, it is many things – the pragma of domestic arrangements can segue into the games of ludus, or the storge of companionship acquire a frisson of mania. The challenge should be to integrate or juggle all its permutations, rather than narrowing our definitions. After all, as the Afrikaans poet ID du Plessis had it, “liefde neem ‘n duisend vorme aan” – love takes a thousand forms.