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Short-Lived, Emotional Attachment at First Sight

Romance: A Novel Idea

This semester, I am teaching a course called Marriage in Literature. Each week, seven intrepid students and I read a novel or a few short stories that somehow touch on marriage. Last week's novel was Female Quixotism by Tabitha Gilman Tenney.

Don't feel bad if you've never heard of it. It was published in 1801 (and in 1992, was reprinted as part of Oxford University Press's Early American Women Writers series). I doubt it's read very often outside of classes like mine.

The main character of Female Quixotism is a woman named Dorcas Sheldon. Dorcas leads a charmed life. The only daughter of a wealthy widower, she is able to devote herself to charitable deeds and her favorite pastime, reading novels. Actually, Dorcas doesn't so much read novels as enter into them: In order to more closely approximate the heroines of the dreamy tales she's reading, she even changes her name to Dorcasina.

Her uncritical novel reading, it turns out, unfits our Dorcasina for real life. She has read so many romantic novels — novels that depict starry-eyed lovers, secret assignations and swooning — that she comes to believe that "violent emotion, at first sight … always accompanies genuine love" and that "passion" and ardor are the real guarantors of marital happiness.¹

So when Lysander, a wonderful guy who would make Dorcasina a great husband, proposes marriage, Dorcasina turns him down — because his proposal is not passionate and romantic enough. Because the novels she's read have given her an unrealistic picture of love, she does not recognize the real thing when it's staring her in the face.

Female Quixotism is, to be sure, a satire. And yet when I read it last month, I was startled by its insight: for, just as Dorcasina bought into the unrealistic ideal of romantic love put forth in her novels, haven't we been fed lies about love by today's pop culture? Don't many romantic comedies still promise love at first sight? And don't they subtly suggest that the dramas of dating are infinitely more interesting than the doldrums of married life? Don't they recommend that if you "fall out of love" with someone, you should drop him and move on, even if the person you've stopped loving happens to be your husband? Don't movies and TV shows depict love as something that overwhelms us, something we have no control over?

Short and Sweet

I suppose Dorcasina's novels struck a chord with me because, now in the middle of my third year of marriage, I'm increasingly aware that the love-lessons I learned from soaps, chick lit, and the silver screen have nothing to do with what goes on, week in and week out, in my ordinary, wonderful, blessed, hard, blissful, terrifying marriage.

Perhaps the most pernicious lie about love perpetuated by our pop culture is simply the idea that romantic love is the most important kind of love there is — the most desirable, the end all be all. So close to Valentine's Day, it is worth revisiting that assumption.

Romance. We all long for it. But is it really so desirable? Try looking up "romance" in the dictionary. On dictionary.com, you'll find this primary definition:

ro•mance n.

1. A love affair.
2. Ardent emotional attachment or involvement between
   people; love …
3. A strong, sometimes short-lived attachment, fascination, or enthusiasm for something …

Hmmmm. "Ardent." "Short-lived." An "emotional attachment."

I like ardent emotion as much as the next gal. I like the heady feeling that we describe as "Falling In Love." But it doesn't have a whole lot to do with real life. By its very definition — "short-lived" — romance cannot sustain a marriage. Husbands and wives will cycle in and out of romantic love over the years, sometimes feeling more ardor, sometimes feeling less. If you think that's a bummer, think again. It's actually very good news. The kind of love marriage cultivates — the kind of love marriage demands — is something much more transforming and profound than mere ardor.

Neighborly Love

Romance, eros, falling in love, infatuation … all of it feels great, and romantic love has a place in the Christian life. But the most important kind of love between a Christian man and woman is not love shaped like a heart (or a heart-shaped candy box). The most important kind of love a Christian man and woman can cultivate is love that is shaped like the cross.

Christian love is modeled on God's love for us — a love expressed in creation and a love expressed on the cross. And it is a love that is directed toward an other — or, more precisely, to two others: to our beloved and to the One who made us.

Romantic love, even infatuation can play a part in the Christian emotional landscape in part because it gives us a glimpse of loving our neighbor. Theologian Diogenes Allen expresses it well:

When falling in love, we seem to float on air. The whole world seems wonderful, and we take in stride people who normally irritate us and things that normally frustrate us. … A particular person's idiosyncrasies, which normally rub us the wrong way, no longer affect us adversely. For a while, we simply seem to be able to love anyone — to love our neighbor — without any effort at all. These momentary occasions can … give us a glimpse of what it would be like to love our neighbor all the time.²

C.S. Lewis makes a similar point in The Four Loves. When one falls in love "spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all is Love Himself is to rule in us." But, "can we be in this selfless liberation for a lifetime? Hardly for a week."³

There's the rub. Romance gives us a peek at selfless love, but, as anyone who's ever been in a dating relationship for more than a few months knows, we can't sustain it.

"I Love Me — I Mean, You."

Even the very romantic feelings that hint at selfless love often direct us back toward ourselves. When we are "in love" with someone, we often seem to attend to our beloved when in fact we are doing the very opposite. Instead of being attentive, we are acquisitive. We use the other for our own glorification; in other words, we bask in the presence of our beloved because we enjoy the image of ourselves that is reflected back. We run the risk of loving the image we have concocted of our beloved rather than loving him for who he really is.

In the words of Søren Kierkegaard, a nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian, "It is important that we do not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The one who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something similar."⁴

This is the opposite of Christian love. This opposite is all about me.

Even idolizing my beloved — certainly a danger for the newly infatuated — is all about me, though it pretends to be all about the other; it is all about me because it does not take my beloved seriously as a person created and redeemed by God but rather imagines him to be perfect, heroic, sublime, and customized to meet my needs.⁵

These distortions of love, from idolizing our beloved to basking in the reflection of ourselves that we see in him, are both deformations of Christian love. They fail, ultimately, to be directed toward the other. Actually, they barely take account of the other at all.

Kierkegaard wrote that in order to love, we must first have a "heart bound to God."⁶ In her study of Kierkegaard, ethicist Amy Laura Hall develops several characteristics of what she terms "faithful love." Faithful lovers recognize that the beloved is truly another person and not to be used for the lover's purposes.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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Do you think we have bought into the idea that romance is the true signifier of love?

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Put more positively, a lover is called to recognize that her beloved is her equal before God. We love our beloved first as a person who is in a relationship with God. Hall says it this way: "By understanding the ones to whom we related as being first related to God, we come to acknowledge their actual selfhood apart from any image, dream, or plan we have for them."⁷

Our intimacy with our beloved, in other words, is based first on their relationship with the Lord, and on our own — long before it is based on our relationship with one another.