THE FALSE GOD OF ROMANTIC LOVE: JUNGIAN AND BUDDHIST CRITIQUES
In 1973, I was in Malaysia. I remember encountering a Muslim man who asked me about love and marriage in the United States. What was the divorce rate? I told him that about 50% of American marriages ended in divorce. His reply was that among Muslim Malaysians arranged marriages were common and the divorce rate was very low. Wasn’t that a better type of social system? I said there was no way that Americans would give up their right to choose a partner; what’s more, they believed in love. But this exchange did get me to thinking whether such a fickle and temporary emotion like romantic love was really an adequate foundation for a family.
Penetrating critiques of romantic love made by Robert Johnson and David Loy gave me perspective on the matter. Johnson integrates spiritual and psychotherapeutic approaches in the manner of Jung. His We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (1983) is especially valuable for its analysis of the myth of Tristan and Iseult in the French version. This myth took hold in Western culture when romantic love was emerging and can be considered a foundational myth. Johnson uses Denis de Rougemont’s well-known critique of romantic love in Love and the Western World (1939) as a point of departure. The Tristan myth provides the material for him to build his own acute dissection of one of the most powerful myths of our time. The myth of romantic love continues to exercise a great hold on people, disseminated in movies, popular songs, and stories and novels.
De Rougemont boldly asserts that Tristan and Iseult do not love each other. What they love is the idea of love, of being in love. And to keep the fire of their love burning brightly they do not need each other as they actually are. In fact, they need the other to be absent, because obstacles stimulate their love and keep it alive. De Rougemont takes another important step when he declares romantic love a religion. “The passionate love which the myth celebrates actually became in the 12th century — the moment when first it began to be cultivated — a religion in the full sense of the word, and in particular a Christian heresy historically determined.”
But why did this alternative religion arise at that time? David Loy, a contemporary Buddhist philosopher in the Japanese Zen tradition, makes the connection between the decline of the Christian myth and the emergence of a more individualistic and personal myth of romantic love. In A Buddhist History of the West (2002), Loy notes that the incompatibility between love and marriage was first perceived at this time, love being a matter of personal choice and marriage a social institution regulated by the ethics of duty. In other words, the development of individualism in the West was occurring simultaneously with a decrease in allegiance to a social system that was feudal and authoritarian. And the emphasis on individual choice led to the creation of new meaning systems in conflict with the social order and with social institutions such as marriage.
The actual disruption of the social order of the time was minimized when romance became central to courtly love, since such love was not based on satisfaction of physical desire. Johnson writes that “courtly love, at its very beginning so many centuries ago, was understood as spiritual love, a way of loving that spiritualized the knight with his lady, and raised them above the ordinary and the gross to an experience of another world, an experience of soul and spirit.” De Rougemont believes that this highly spiritualized form of love derives from the dualistic religion practiced by the Cathars. In their gnostic view, the universe was ruled by two opposing forces, the God of good and the God of evil. The God of good ruled the invisible world of light and the soul, whereas the evil God controlled the physical world which is a fallen world in which souls are imprisoned as they take form in human bodies.
It is quite fascinating that this gnostic form of spiritual love with obscure religious origins developed into a powerful ideology in the modern West. In this regard, Johnson makes an arresting claim. “Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy.” Now if romantic love has become a religion in which its practitioners are in love with the very idea of love, what are the implications for Western culture and for all the individuals who subscribe to it?
Johnson shows that unless the lover finally penetrates the illusion of romantic love, there will be no happiness. Romance must deteriorate into egotism. The problem with romance is that it is not love of a human being. Instead, it is an attempt to realize our projections, expectations, and fantasies. To give up this self-inflation and pursuit of power requires humility. The ego must be willing to do the hard work involved in loving another person for who they actually are rather than loving one’s own projection fastened on that person.
The problem in the modern West is that, as Jung recognized, we do not really believe in the reality of soul and spirit. For the modern person, the search for perfection continues in the external world. Lacking a belief in inner transformation and the experience of the divine within, we continue to pursue various means that we hope will bring happiness. Loy has identified fame, money, technological development, and romantic love as four major ways in which we try unsuccessfully to satisfy our spiritual needs.
In Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life in Psychotherapy, Existentialism, and Buddhism (1996), Loy emphasizes that lack is the motivation behind the projects that have been the driving force of human history. As he points out, the 20th century has been a time filled with war, revolution, genocide, and now ecocide. From this perspective, I would say that romantic love has been one of the less destructive projects in which humans have indulged themselves in modern times. Yet, according to Loy, the energy we give to romantic love is propelled by the same sense of lack that is behind the drives for fame, money, and technological progress that have had such destructive outcomes. But what does this sense of lack involve and what is its relation to another clearly powerful motivation of human behavior, the fear of death?
The starting point of Loy’s exploration into the human sense of lack is the repressed feeling that the self is not real. It is not the knowledge that humans must die which makes people feel less than real; the root of human anxiety is the very groundlessness of existence which is experienced as intolerable and banished from conscious awareness. Loy’s achievement has been to flesh out this rather abstract philosophical claim from a Buddhist perspective in a way that enables us to connect human psychology with the social and cultural systems that we have created to govern our lives.
Loy’s Buddhist approach emphasizes that humans are caught between being and nothingness. They feel the need to be something solid and substantial, grounded in reality, yet they experience themselves as lacking what they most need. This causes anxiety and dread, leading to vain attempts by the ego-self to gain a sense of being whole, full, complete, and real. Yes, there is freedom but we feel like we don’t belong and are without an anchor, so we feel somehow wrong and not good enough. Unable to deal with such anxiety, we repress our feeling of lack. But it returns as our projections in the world and we compulsively try to make ourselves real by pursuing various projects that promise to provide us what we lack. We try to ensure that the future will give us what we need and make us feel sufficient and whole — money or status or power or a sense of rectitude or love — but none of these things ever satisfy us.
Once our selves become individual, we stand out from the group and no longer view our identity in purely collective terms. Social structures made up of vast systems of power and control have emerged to compensate for our repressed feelings of lack. These social institutions then condition and manipulate us so that we behave in destructive ways. For example, the cultural ideal of romantic love is reproduced by formidable media conglomerates, and as our sense of autonomy and self-determination has grown stronger, romantic love has consolidated its hold on our imaginations.
For both Johnson and Loy, the way out is to realize that we are already whole as we are. Only when we feel unified and complete, when we are no longer looking for the missing part of the self, can we truly love another human being. As Erich Fromm made clear in his 1956 classic, The Art of Loving, love is an art, a skill, something we need to practice. Love must be brought down to earth. It is not the solution to our spiritual needs. Self-knowledge and self-love are what we need in order to love another truly; the real object of our search is ourselves. Can we stop looking for the ideal person who will love us and make our problems go away?
