by Tim Sommers
(1) Aristophanes. This is my favorite theory about the origin and nature of romantic love. Humans were once spherical, four-armed, four-legged, two-headed beings that rolled around everywhere confidently. They were cut in half by Zeus for trying to scale Olympus and attack the gods. Love is the search for your missing half and the ache to become whole again. Notable: Aristophanes says some of us were originally composed of two women, others of two men, and still others a man and a woman. In other words, your gender is not what determines whether your other half is male or female.
(2) Socrates/Plato. At the same dinner party as Aristophanes (aka The Symposium), Socrates offered this one. Love begins with desiring one beautiful body, then that body’s beautiful soul, then beauty as an idea, and finally the very form of beauty: love becomes the desire for the eternal. He lost me at loving beauty as an idea.
(3) Ovid. Despite being the author of some of the most famous love poetry in Latin literature, Ovid abandoned the philosophy and metaphysics of love for a practical, and not at all poetic, approach in Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love). Love is a craft. To succeed, master the moves. In other words, he wrote the first instruction manual for pick-up artists in recorded history. His advice? Take her to a gladiator match or a chariot race. Ask her who is fighting or riding. Pretend to care about her answer. If her dress drags at all, pick it up “for her” and get a good look at her ankles. Strategically brush a real, or imaginary, speck from her dress. Press against her whenever the crowd surges — whether you really must or not. Master stroke? Press against her at the height of the excitement in the ring and she will confuse her excitement at the gladiators (or chariot race) for excitement towards you. Apparently, there is empirical support for this move in contemporary social psychology. It’s called misattribution.
(4) Fin’amor (Courtly Love). The 12th century is sometimes called the aetas Ovidiana (“Age of Ovid”) because his (non-pick-up-artist) works were so widely read, imitated, and adapted. Marriage being mostly practical and political rather than romantic, the troubadours of southern France made lyric poetry with romantic themes all the rage, whereas romantic narrative fiction was the schizzle in northern Europe. Some argue that this is the origin of romantic love or, at least, the modern European conception thereof. These romances mostly involved the chaste love of a pure and gallant knight for a married, aristocratic, unattainable lady. Think Lancelot (and Guinevere). Scholars say that these romantic poetry and narratives were most popular with educated, aristocratic women.
(5) Dante. As you probably know, Dante went through Heaven and Hell for Beatrice, a woman he barely knew but loved from afar since she was eight. (Don’t worry, he was nine at the time.) His theory: every soul is created with an innate love that draws it toward what it perceives as good. Sin is disordered love — loving the wrong things, loving right things in the wrong proportion, or loving them with the wrong intensity. Hell is populated entirely by people whose loves are disordered — like reality TV.
(6) The Romantics. Lord Byron, Keats, both Shelleys, Coleridge, and Wordsworth reject Enlightenment rationalism in favor of intense, individual, and nearly inexpressible feelings. Love is almost a religious experience and proof that the most important things are beyond the reach of reason. Wordsworth said poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but he might as well have been talking about love. Keats wrote to Fanny Brawne, “I cannot exist without you.” Now, that is romance.
(7) Stendhal. Despite (because of?) his unrequited love for Mathilde Dembowski, Stendhal threw cold water on the overheated Romantics. Stendhal’s most famous contribution is his theory of crystallization. Throw a bare branch into the salt mines of Salzburg: when retrieved months later, it’s covered in glittering crystals, transformed into something dazzling. Love, he argues, works the same way — the lover’s imagination encrusts the beloved with imagined perfections that have little to do with the actual person. So, settle down, Keats.
(8) Schopenhauer. Always a cosmic bummer, he doubles down on Stendhal. Love is a trap. Biology — or, as he would put it, the will-to-life — uses sexual attraction to trick us into mating. If reproduction were left to reason alone, the human race would die out, which would be a good thing, because no clear-eyed rational being weighing the suffering of existence would choose to inflict it on a new person. I hope some day they find the secret love poems he wrote in high school.
(9) Freud. Adult love re-enacts childhood relationships. Romantic attachments represent unresolved dynamics with our earliest caregivers. We fall for people who match templates we formed before we had words for them. Idealization of the beloved is a projection. Love is our own narcissism mixed in with (partially) unconscious needs we cannot acknowledge directly. Red flag.
Two Arguments that Love is the Meaning of Life
(I) The Experience Argument that Love is the Meaning of Life.
Assuming that the aim of life is happiness, and that happiness is more complicated than just the quantity of pleasure minus the quantity of pain, Mill offers us a theory of higher versus lower pleasures. Having experienced both, we can identify which pleasures are higher. Higher pleasures have lexical priority over lower pleasures: no amount of a lower pleasure replaces a higher. Love, on this criterion, is the highest pleasure of all and, so, the real meaning of life. Just ask somebody in love.
(II) The Mattering Argument that Love is the Meaning of Life.
We all want our life to matter, to mean something. If there is no God or cosmic meaning, then my life matters because it matters to others, and they matter because they matter to me. Romantic love is the highest form of mattering. Not “I think therefore I am“; but “I love, therefore we matter.”