Romantic Passion

• "Presently romantic passion (or romantic love or infatuation) is defined as any intense attraction involving the idealization of the other within an erotic context.  The idealization carries with it the desire for intimacy and the pleasurable expectation of enduring for some unknown time into the future." (4)
• "Romantic passion draws on...several psychological processes that range from erotic stimulation, emotional attachment, and subjective idealization" (4 underline added).
• core properties: "1) the desire for union or merger; 2) idealization of the beloved; 3) exclusivity; 4) intrusive thinking about the love object; 5) emotional dependency; 6) a reordering of motivational hierarchies or life priorities; and 7) a powerful sense of empathy and concern for the beloved" (5).

Romantic Love & Courtly Love

Romantic love compared with courtly love, realist and modernist views (from The Nature of Love 3: The Modern World.  Irving Singer.  Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987)

• Romantic love and courtly love--"Romantic love deviates from courtlly love by interpreting beauty or goodness in terms of the erotic experience itself, with the result that sexuality takes on greater significance.   ...In Romantic love, the elevation of the male occurred through an idealization that often had nothing to do with the beauty of women.  This new ideal was the modern concept of heroism: self-sacrifice in the interest of humanity, the nation, a revolutionary cause, the demands of one or another art.  ...Seeing in everyone and everything [not necessarily a beauty or a lady] the ability to become love''s alter ego, romanticisim develops a segment in the theme of magic that had previously been neglected.  ...love itself is now magical"  (p 14, 16, 18-19; underline added)
   
• problems with Romantic love, compared with realist view.  "If love is the search for an unknown, if it does not presuppose much knowledge about another person, it two people merge through an experience that reveals divinity but has no objective basis in what they are as a particular man and woman, it seems strange to say that they mutually or reciprocally love each other.
• Romantic love as a haven from social reality
  vs. Modernist''s view; e.g. Freud''s view of libido (sexual impulse); Proust "What I here call love is a reciprocal torture."

Victorian Love & Modern Love

"Victorian love was more patient, more polite, more self-sacrificing, and more Christian than modern love.  It conformed more to parental influence and was structured more in deference to public rituals.  It may ave been more explosive, but it was not as authentic as modern love, and that is my argument." (9).

the influence of social structure: "[Some] cultural traditions center the individual emotionally and psychologically in an intricate web of social dependency with others, thereby rechanneling or defusing the possibility and thus intensity of an individual''s private emotional experience.  This web of dependency, with its many attendant demands and expectations, in turn undermines the individual''s proclivity to fantasize about a lover or fully explore the subjective realm of the erotic.  From these and countless related studies it has often been inferred that the non-Western cultures are, by their very nature, incapable of romantic passion or are too closed off to feelings and desires independent of the social context or customary expectation." (2)
the influence of childhood development:  "[some] theorize that love is not based on the physiology of erotic attraction, the rigors of sexual repression, the power of instutional transformation, or anything innately given.  It is, rather, a learned response from early childhood tha provides the necessary emotional foundation to experience romantic love.  A "love crush" is nothing more than the desire to recapture the warmth and comfort of the early attachment of the child to his or her parents." (2-3)

What Is It For?

"Evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists believe that romantic passion evolved to improve human reproductive strategies and solidify parenting efforts" (3).
[For some existential-oriented psychologists and anthropologies,] "romantic love is not derived from reproductively driven sexual desire but rather springs from the existential yearning for self-transcendence...romantic love is one possible response to the need to experience emotional union with another."

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