Romantic Love is a Hoax!

People would never fall in love
if they had not heard love talked about. —La Rochefoucauld

II. THE EXPERIENCE OF 'FALLING IN LOVE' ....................................4

A. Love at First Sight ......................................................................6

B. The Blindness of Romantic Love ..........................................7

C. Falling in Love with Love .........................................................8

IV. MODIFICATIONS OF THE ROMANTIC TRADITION ...................12

V. ROMANTIC LOVE AND MARRIAGE ...............................................12

VI. HOW DID WE LEARN THE ROMANTIC RESPONSE ................14

VII. EMOTIONAL PROGRAMMING: ROMANTIC & RELIGIOUS ....17

VIII. BEGINNING TO DOUBT OUR ROMANTIC FEELINGS ...........19

IX. CONCLUSION: ROMANTIC LOVE IS AN ILLUSION .................22

X. GOOD-BYE TO FANTASY, HELLO TO REALITY .........................23
 

    It is almost incredible that so many different peoples
should be attracted to a pattern of love that is essentially Western,
strongly Anglo-Saxon, and relatively new on earth.
Western love, in a manner scarcely to be found in earlier history,
attempts to combine sexual outlet, affectionate friendship
and the procreative familial functions, all in a single relationship.
Romantic attraction is considered to be the adequate,
and indeed the only basis for choosing one's lifelong partner;
the sexual desires deliberately aroused in courtship
are supposed to be held in check until after marriage;
the sexual drives of both partners are
supposed to be completely and permanently satisfied within marriage
even though there was no testing period beforehand;
and tenderness, mystery, and excitement
are expected to coexist with household cares, child-rearing problems
and the routine of fifteen thousand nights together.
All in all, anthropologists consider it
one of the most difficult human relationships ever attempted;
just as certainly, it is also one of the most appealing.

                            —Morton Hunt The Natural History of Love p. 342

    Hum your favorite love-song as you read this chapter.
Most of those delightful, melting, transporting feelings of 'love'
belong to a complex romantic game, a cultural tradition of feeling and behavior
that was invented about 800 years ago by the French troubadours:
 

Chapter 1   ROMANTIC LOVE IS A HOAX!
EMOTIONAL PROGRAMMING TO ‘FALL IN LOVE'   by JAMES PARK   1

            Toward the end of the eleventh century A. D.,
       a handful of poets and noblemen in southern France
       concocted a set of love sentiments
       most of which had no precedent in Western civilization,
       and out of them constructed a new and quite original relationship
       between man and woman known as...courtly love.
       ...[It] began as a game and a literary conceit,
       but unexpectedly grew into a social philosophy
       that shaped the manners and morals of the West.
       It started as a playful exercise in flattery,
       but became a spiritual force guiding the flatterers;
       it was first a private sport of the feudal aristocracy,
       but became finally the ideal of the middle classes;
       and with wonderfully consistent inconsistency,
       it exalted at one and the same time
       adultery and chastity, duplicity and faithfulness,
       self-indulgence and austerity, suffering and delight.
       Although satirists have slain and buried it
       in the tinsel costume of all its follies a thousand times over,
       it has not stayed interred for one night,
       and men and women throughout the Western world
       still live by and take for granted a number of its principal concepts.
 
       [Morton Hunt The Natural History of Love (New York: Knopf, 1959) p. 131]

     For 800 years our culture has been developing an elaborate romantic myth,
one of the outstanding features of which is the denial of its cultural origin.
If we have drunk deeply from the pool of romantic fantasy,
we find that romantic feelings 'just happen' to us without effort,
as if 'love' were the easiest, most natural of all human feelings.

     We are told that romance needs no justification or analysis;
we should just let ourselves fall into the warm, enchanting pool of love.
We should allow those happy feelings to flow over us, drowning our cares.
If we feel a vague longing or a nebulous dissatisfaction with life,
we should just 'fall in love' and let romance solve everything.

     'Falling in love' is a deep and enjoyable emotional adventure,
based on a story or script implanted in our 'hearts' by romantic folklore.
It is a fantasy for our feelings, a drama written hundreds of years ago,
a fairy tale we want to replicate in our own lives.

     We human beings are narrative animals—story-telling creatures.
And the dream of romantic love is one of our favorite stories.
This wonderful delusion has now touched almost all of the human race.
Its promises are unbelievably great—even tho sometimes distant.
And we cling to this hope, despite our personal experiences with 'love'.
We might even admit that the romantic myth is an immature fable,
but if we learned the basic script at an early age,
this emotional programming might remain alive within us as we mature.
 

2      NEW WAYS OF LOVING:
HOW AUTHENTICITY TRANSFORMS RELATIONSHIPS  by JAMES PARK

     The oldest roots of this cultural tradition of feeling and behavior
reach back to the Greek god Eros and the Roman god Cupid.
But romantic love only became a wide-spread fashion in the Middle Ages.
'Falling in love' has always been an emotional possibility.
And before the Middle Ages, some people probably experienced
exaggerated, fantasy feelings close to what we now call "romantic love".
But such accidental eruptions of personal, deluded feelings
did not become the passion of the masses
until the French troubadours refined and spread the emotional game of love.

     We might compare this fashion in feelings to styles in music.
Even tho each style of music has always been a human possibility,
any given style (eg classical, rock-and-roll) had a beginning in history.
Later composers adapted the stylistic conventions they heard.
And just as we might want to trace the roots of any given style of music
(discovering the first classical music or the first rock-and-roll),
we might also be curious about the earliest inventors of romantic love,
the people who—as a matter of historical fact—started the feeling
that has now become a taken-for-granted cultural phenomenon.

Additional resources on the Internet exploring romantic love

1. Romantic Love Bibliography—The Best Critical Books .

2. The Romantic Love Test: How Do We Know If We Are in Love?
This test includes what is perhaps the first explicit definition of romantic love
—in the form of 26 defining features of the phenomenon: the A-Z of romance.

3. Outline of a presentation on The Romantic Love Test .

4. Outline of a presentation unpacking the dynamics of romantic love .

5. An electronic magazine article (3 pages) summarizing this chapter:
"Romantic Love is a Hoax! Emotional Programming to 'Fall in Love' "

6. An extensive discussion of the question:
When Was Romantic Love Invented?