Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

“If we do not serve the depth energy that a god represents, then we violate something profound.” - Alexandra Fidyk, A Rehabilitation of Eros

Recently I read an incredible book about the history and origins of the concept of romantic love. It’s called ‘We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love’ by Robert A Johnson and it is fascinating. I’ll be quoting Johnson extensively in this essay and I recommend you buy the book because it is pretty spectacular. 

The ideal of romantic love, it turns out, did not fall suddenly out of the sky. It entered into Western society during the middle ages and first appeared in our literature in the myth of Tristan and Iseult, then later in the songs of troubadours known as courtly love and through love poems which, in the French, were called romans , a term later anglicized into our term, romance.

This model of courtly love was embodied by the brave knight who worshiped a fair lady as his inspiration, the symbol of all beauty and perfection. But in the beginning of this tradition, the knight did not pursue his lady for sexual purposes or for marriage. He saw her as a symbol of the divine, and as such she existed primarily on a heavenly plane even though she was embodied in physical form. 

To understand how this came to be, we’ll need to dive into the story of Tristan and Iseult. As I recount this story to you, I want you to remember this is a myth. Think of a myth as something that is false on the outside but true on the inside. It is a symbolic story that reveals something deep and abiding about the human condition. In this case this myth teaches us to look honestly at romantic love in the West, and according to Johnson forces us to look not only at the beauty and potential in the concept of romantic love but also at the contradictions and illusions we carry around inside us at the unconscious level. This journey will bring us through difficult confrontations but also, if we persevere, to a new possibility of consciousness. 

Now this myth is an old Celtic legend that comes from the 12th century about a man named Tristan who falls in love with an Irish princess named Iseult the Fair. At first Tristan is simply a knight who wants to fulfill the king’s missions. At first he has no interest in Iseult at all.

He is raised to fight with sword and lance and bow. He is raised to ride a war-horse and leap over wide towers. He is taught to hunt, to wield power, to train for battle, to defend territory. All of these are necessary skills. But they are the yang of life, and Tristan lacks the Yin. He possesses the masculine but does not have the feminine. He does not have the capacity to love, to feel relationship, to nurture a sense of the sacred, to introspect, to experience the lyrical and intuitive side of life. The Yin and Yang, the Masculine and Feminine require each other and we humans must learn to harmonize both in order to be whole. As Johnson points out, power without love becomes brutality, and feeling without masculine strength becomes sentimentality. We must have both to become whole. 

But in the beginning of our story Tristan only contains the masculine, so when his king desires Iseult for himself and sends Tristan out across the sea to capture her and bring her back, he does so willingly. Upon reaching her shores, Tristan comes face to face with a dragon. And although he successfully kills it, he is wounded and poisoned in the process. Iseult the princess finds him and nurses him with a bath of healing herbs. When he comes to, Iseult recognizes him as the man who killed her uncle on a previous mission. She vows to take revenge, but Tristan stops her by speaking kind words to her, words of love and commitment. So she lowers her sword, and kisses him. 

There’s just one problem. Tristan is lying, ya’ll. Trash. He says all of this to get her to go with him so he can deliver her to the king. His words were words of deceit. Iseult’s mother who is a sorceress queen learns about this and gathers flowers and herbs and steeps them in wine and casts a magic spell. According to the spell, “they who drink of it together shall love each other with their every single sense and every thought, but its power will wane after a span of three years.” The queen gives this potion secretly to Iseult’s maid and makes her promise to offer it to the king and Iseult on the night of their wedding.

… you can see where this is going right?

As fate would have it, on their way back to the king, Tristan has to rest for a bit on a small island. Its hot outside and both Tristan and Iseult want something to drink so Tristan sends his own servant to fetch something and they both accidentally end up drinking the potion. 

So Tristan and Iseult fall in love with each other. They stare at each other for hours. They fawn over each other. And they fall in love. This is where the term “falling in love” actually comes from. It is a fall and it is distinct from loving another human being. Think about this: When we fall in love, we often use words like adore, we say our significant others are “the only one” and we say we worship our beloved. These are religious terms and that’s no accident. 

Falling in love is about a vision of romantic ecstasy not about committing yourself to a human, flesh-and-blood relationship. With romance there is drama; there is tugging. Theres despair when romance grows cold and ecstasy when it burns hot and this message is repeated over and over again in our culture. How many movies have you seen that talk about ‘true love’s kiss.’ How many Bachelorette and Love Island episodes have you watched that are swimming in the currents of a notion that has come to us from centuries ago, a notion whose history we are mostly completely oblivious to?

But what is often lacking in these depictions is real love, relatedness, stability, and commitment. And so as this book points out, romantic love is not love at all but a complex of attitudes about love: involuntary feelings, ideals, and reactions. 

All of this comes from a history of courtly love that idealized a spiritual relationship between men and women, that idealized the feminine in response to an overly patriarchal attitude, and in this dynamic between Tristan and Iseult, they see each other not as human beings, flesh and blood, full of imperfection and flaws but as divinity itself.

Now this courtly love did not have sex or marriage as its goal. According to Johnson, it sought to spiritualize relationship into a perpetual and superhuman intensity which as it turns out is actually a poor basis for marriage and a very risky approach to human relationship. These very ideals are what underlie our patterns of courtship and marriage today and if enacted on the wrong level, these inherited ideals cause us to seek passion and intensity for their own sake, and they plant a perpetual discontent that can never find the perfection it seeks. This is why romance can feel like possession. It’s a love potion. The key, as Johnson states is for us to become alchemists: To find the truth in romantic love and the level on which this truth can live.  Distill what’s in the wine, separate the herbs from the spell, and see what awesome forces are mixed in us and are revealed in our capacity for both human and divine love. 

So what is it that we seek in romantic love when we seek to be possessed by our love, to soar to the heights, to find ultimate meaning and fulfillment in our beloved? We seek the feeling of wholeness. Here, according to Johnson is a great paradox of our modern Western lives: What we seek often in romantic love is not human love or human relationship but a religious experience. When Tristan and Iseult are staring at each other, they are seeing the very concept of infinity in each other’s eyes. Think of John Mayer’s beautiful song, ‘Edge of Desire’ 

“Young and full of running

Tell me where is that taking me?

Just a great figure eight

Or a tiny infinity?”

“A Tiny infinity.” This is the vision, and that vision is fundamentally religious. Romantic love has always been tied to spiritual aspiration.

To understand where this comes from in our culture, you’ll have to know a little bit about the Cathars. The Cathars were a Manichean sect which by the 12th century consumed entire towns and provinces in the South of France. The Cathars believed that “true love” was not an ordinary love between husband and wife but the worship of a feminine savior and the depiction of her as mediator between God and man. Again the subject of romance was deemed the ultimate one. 

You can hear this conceptually today in songs like ‘Die for You’ by The Weekend or ‘Be The One’  by Dua Lipa. 

The Cathars perceived ordinary human sexuality and marriage as bestial and unspiritual. The Catholic Church declared this group a heresy and drove the Cathars underground where it remained until it reappeared in the idea of courtly love which swept through the feudal courts of medieval Europe and began a revolution that became what we know now as romanticism. In a way, then, the West became split. Western man saw woman as a divine symbol but refused to honor her as a human being. This, according to Johnson is the unhealed split within man that he projects onto outer woman, the war he fights at her expense.

We claim in our culture in so many ways to only believe in production, in power, and in control, not in matters of the heart or the spirit. We claim to believe only in what is physical and sexual. And yet, romance continues to be a phenomenon that underpins the foundation of our civilization. Romantic love attempts to experience the ‘other world’ in a searing, all-enveloping ecstasy that completes one, makes one feel psychologically whole, utterly fulfilled, and in touch with the meaning of life. 

The cult classic film ‘Dangerous Beauty’ unpacks how this religious need for ecstasy and surrender and abandon migrated into the realm of love in Venetian culture. Highly highly recommended, Dangerous Beauty is one of my favorite movies. It is the true and abiding story of Veronica Franco, courtesan and poetess who is forced to choose between divine love and romantic love and who shows that the two are one and the same. 

So what happens in the end of the myth of Tristan and Iseult? What happens is precisely what has happened to so many star-crossed lovers we depict in our films. From Romeo and Juliet to Tony and Maria in West Side Story, our story ends in disaster. And in this case, it ends in disaster because Tristan is given the opportunity to commit to a real relationship with another woman, a different Iseult know as Iseult of the white hands. This different Iseult represents human love, a love that is down to earth, that is of this physical, earthly realm. Now remember, the Cathars rejected the earthly realm.

After the three year curse passes, Iseult the fair leaves and marries the king, the king she was fated to marry; and Tristan is given another opportunity to love a different woman and to commit to an actual relationship. But in the end he refuses and he ends up choosing to die with Iseult the fair rather than commit to an earthly relationship. 

All of this is a symbolic representation of what happens when we are moved by a principle, let’s call it the principle of romance, which is simply a euphemism for the divine, but we live it on the wrong level. We project the image of the divine onto other human beings instead of realizing that it is within us and must be lived on an inner level. 

How do we do this. Each person must find their own path, what works for them. Some will take up a religious practice. Some will pursue meditation and others,  rituals. Others will create their own traditions. But as Johnson says, we seek the spiritual realm in romantic love, we seek it in sex, we seek it in physical possessions and drugs and physical people; You may have done this. I certainly have done this. But it is not there. It is only revealed through the soul. 

The feminine principle, or Yin, as it is referred to in the East, is all about relatedness and whether in a man or woman, it teaches us to learn to practice relationship — to both our outer and inner lives. If we do not do this, if we do not develop a relationship with the sacred, we will become upset by obsessions, possessions, and neuroses, and we will unconsciously project it onto others. 

“The quality of sacredness consists not only in what is there in the inner world, but also in the attitude we take toward it.” As some of you know, I have quoted Micaela Coel many times before and will now do so again. After she won an Emmy for best writing for a limited or anthology series last year in 2021, she said the following:

“In a world that entices us to browse through the lives of others to help us better determine how we feel about ourselves, and to, in turn, feel the need to be constantly visible, for visibility these days seems to somehow equate to success. Do not be afraid to disappear, from it, from us, for a while, and see what comes to you in the silence.” 

The Daoists put it this way: If you want to awaken all of humanity then awaken all of yourself…truly the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.

This is what the romantic principle, once put in its proper place, and related to on the proper level, is calling us toward: A capacity to commune deeply with our own souls in reverence and awe, so that we will achieve wholeness. Only when our egos have a capacity for reverence, only when respect and awe flows from us, can anything be sacred for us. It is this sacred kind of participation that is being asked of us. But as Micaela points out, our culture does not push us to do this, it does not incentivize us to do this. It turns us into spectators, constantly needing to watch — and by extension project — onto others. This hollows us out and makes real the possibility that we will never achieve one of the hardest and noblest things we can ever achieve: self-knowledge.  

Johnson asks us to devote time and energy to experiencing our psyches, exploring our own unconscious, to discover who and what we are beyond just our egos. To discover the sacred, one must spend time and energy learning to experience those energies. 

You have heard that love is a verb. But love is not just an action, it is also a state of being, a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with a person that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or my efforts. Its existence and nature does not depend on my illusions or opinions or counterfeits; it is different from what my culture has led me to expect, from what my ego wants from the sentimental froth and inflated ecstasies we’ve been taught to hope for. It is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is. To be able to live from that place requires much self work indeed.