Romance is when a person regards a sexual partner or a prospective sexual partner with a fascination that renders any number of aspects of the person—the way a woman poses her head, the way a man strides across a room—as so engaging that the lover wants to remain in the company of the beloved for a very long time— or as it is put in the exaggerated rhetoric of romance, “forever”. This engagement with another person licenses the lover to attribute to the beloved any number of positive qualities such as loyalty, attraction, compassion, intelligence and so on, though it also licenses the lover to recognize the failings of a lover— his or her meanness or anger or duplicity-- without necessarily breaking the bond that ties them together emotionally and may simply mean that a lover understands that his or her beloved is a termagant or a bully or a nag or distracted. Love does not mean the forgiveness of all, only the acceptance of all, love being a way to think that the intensity of sexual passion is a window into the soul of the beloved.
Romance or love, both being the same thing, is a voluntary relationship because it is an event that a person takes on or in some sense decides to love someone particular person, though what “voluntary” means is a deep question about romance because romance can seem to come upon a person unbidden or to develop gradually, let us say, over the course of a marriage. In that it is a voluntary commitment, there are dynamics to love at every stage of it from its inception to its continuation to its termination. So we think of young love as going through a sequence that begins with flirtation and then into courtship and then into consummation and then into a consideration of how long to extend the relationship. Stendhal gives a good account of what he calls the crystallization of love from a disparate feeling into a thing. Lovers of long standing, for their part, can settle into a relationship whereby they can sit at dinner, enjoying one another's company, and barely exchange a word. Long term lovers take confidence and comfort from listening to one another breath. Death of a spouse, which is one form of termination, can lead to sentimentalizing the strengths of the departed while neglecting weaker parts of his or her character and love stories that end in divorce can occasion turning traits once found attractive into traits that now prompt anger.
One of many questions to be addressed about romance is when it first arose, that presuming that this concatenation of feelings and interpersonal dynamics has not always been with us but is a social construction, however much that belies the current sense that love has always been with us, is part of the human condition. My answer to that question is that romance arose three to four thousand years ago in both of the independent traditions that eventually came to make up the Western consciousness: the Greek and the Hebrew. We can show that to be the case in the Greek tradition because the Greek myths display a kind of precursor to love in that some of them are about passions that overwhelm people, while later written documents, such as the Homeric hymns and the Odyssey, show full blown examples of love. We also have before and after documents in the Hebrew tradition that show romance or love originated in that time frame. Love or romance is not there at all in “Gilgamesh” and yet is perfectly recognizable in the story of Samson and Delilah as that is found in the Book of Judges, the stories in Genesis having been clearly influenced by “Gilgamesh”, which also contains the story of a flood, and an allusion to years of feasting followed by years of famine provided for through storage granaries, all that making the absence of love or romance all the more apparent. I cannot say whether love ever arose in Asian cultures, however advanced they were in other respects.
The earliest Greek literature, already steeped in sexual passion, can provide us with a clear idea of the literary characteristics that obtain when the emotion of romance is not yet fully presented, and that is perhaps all we can know about an emotion, whether it is what it was like three thousand years ago, or what it was like in the past few years, when the trope of love was supplanted for so many by the trope of sexual aggression, as that is represented by the Harvey Weinstein case.
Greek mythology is full of stories about gods and mortals that are treated as love stories but are not that because they are simply stories of obsession from which the lesson might be taken that people should avoid disastrous sexual relationships that testify to the warped characters of the people involved. Narcissus was so obsessed with himself that he could not protect himself from his own image. The object of his affection was wrong and so was his compulsion about it. The same is true of famous couples from mythology. Pygmalion carves Galatea because he will settle for nothing less than the perfect woman and Aphrodite gives her life, but the moral of the story, nonetheless, is that there are no perfect women and so men should get over that particular obsession. Zether blows a disc thrown by Apollo off course and so it kills Hyacinth, his beloved, which just goes to show that life is fragile and also not to trifle with the life of one’s beloved by placing her in danger. Pyramus thought that his Thisbe was dead and so killed himself, which just shows that lovers can be rash and impetuous or, to say the least, lacking in judgment, and so this is an emotion not to be trusted. Love, like as not, will lead to bad ends.
The story of Penelope and Ulysses in the Odyssey, on the other hand, is a fully realized love story, where the lovers are fully aware of the nature of the world around them, and have more enduring bonds between them than just infatuation. Their love story frames the entire epic as it provides the motivation for Ulysses wanting to return to Ithaca despite all the setbacks and temptations that stand in his way, and also explains why Penelope persists in delaying finding a new husband even though doing so would make sense in that it would stabilize life in their little kingdom and allow her to take up life again, and yet both of the lovers persist in their attempts to get back to one another even though they do not communicate with one another during that long ten year period, simply because they cannot get one another out of their heads or not see one another as part of one another’s futures. So love survives time and distance because the two lovers use their love to keep them tied together, to even coordinate their actions without knowing that they are doing so so as to increase the chance that their love will be once again consumated. They will be true to their commitments without reassurances. Moreover, they will do so despite setbacks and sacrifices, Penelope robbed of the happiness of a new husband and Ulysses having to pass up many a safe harbor. There is another thing. Love explains things that are otherwise inexplicable. So we always resort to it to explain what seems to be irrational behavior or, better, to give a pleasing explanation for what would otherwise be considered irrational behavior. That love made you do it is better than saying that greed or power or lust made you do it because it is an appeal to your best instincts. Penelope was not just playing politics and Ulysses was not just trying to survive.
This idea that romance overcomes boundaries of time and geography holds throughout the romantic literature. It is many a year, in Shakespeare’s “A Winter’s Tale”, before the king is restored to the woman he had set aside because of his rash and unjustified suspicions about her. It is many years before the amnesia racked hero of James Hilton’s “Random Harvest” is able to consummate his love for the woman who has become his secretary, he not knowing, but she knowing, that these two had been lovers. The lovers in Erich Segel’s “Love Story” can only be reunited beyond the grave, as was true with Romeo and Juliet, and any set of lovers can be awed by the fact that were it not for happenstance they might not have been on the same coast or in the same circles so that they could meet one another. Infinitely sad is it that Tristan and Isolde could not have met under better circumstances or that, in Edith Wharton’s “The House of Mirth”, Lily Bart and Laurence Seldon could not have overcome relatively low social barriers so as to find romance before even more social barriers were put up between them so that she had no chance of being redeemed. Lost loves are very upsetting just as requited love and reunited lovers are uplifting.
A full blown love story occurs in Greek literature a little before Greece’s greatest age in Sappho’s “Hymn to Aphrodite”, from the Sixth Century B. C. Aphrodite violates good moral conduct by finding love with a mere mortal, Anchises, who is “comely” and plays the lyre “thrillingly”, according to the translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Aphrodite had made herself sweet smelling and well clothed because she was overcome by desire that was both “sweet” and “terrible”. Anchises asks for a strong offspring and to live long and prosper, which suggests that he suspected she was an immortal, which he later admits, even though she lied and said she was a mortal. He strips her and lays with her “not clearly knowing what he did'', that referring to treating an immortal as a mortal and also refers to the act of love itself, a man given over to his passion.
Anchises worries what will befall him after such an act. He worries that he will be unhealthy, as happened to Tithonus after having made love to the goddess Eos. Tithonus became a babbling wretch who had to be locked away. Aphrodite grieves about what she has done and promises that what happened to Tithonus will not happen to Anchises who will lead a normal life and will be introduced to his young son, Aeneas, who will become a famous Trojan. So both have risked much for their love affair. She will certainly have to endure the shame of having loved a mortal and he risked the fate of someone who had loved an immortal. Was it worth it? From inside the relationship, the lovers might think so, but they are likely, later on, to have their regrets, even if they do not give voice to them.
So we have the elements that are there in love stories thereafter: the taking of one another into one’s heart because of their attributes; the scene of love making; the regrets and consequences that come afterwards. Indeed, one can say that the invention of romance is the invention of the love story as a voluntary though emotionally empowered comingling of fortunes, at least for a while, however permanent are the social and psychological consequences. Everyone has love stories that stick with them and are recounted in one’s mind, there not having to be any other consequences for the love stories to be real. In that love is now a story, however, it is a drama of what might not have been and decisions taken, despite forebodings, that make the event of love itself to be immortal for the persons involved-- which is perhaps a kind of immortality in that love stories play upon death not only in that sexual intercourse is in the Elizabethan phrase, “a little death”, but in the more profound sense that it shows the fragility of life even while so totally enrapt in life, or as John Updike put it, love making life worth living while you do so while religion allows one to think about what it all means.