From a survey of popular novels and media, it would be reasonable to conclude romantic love is an ultimate goal of life. Man meets woman, man and woman defeat obstacles—misunderstanding or illness, perhaps forced separation—to recognize their love. They swoon. Exquisite desire transcends everyday humdrum, making them feel realer than real. Murmured exchanges of love’s liturgy—'You are so beautiful,’ ‘I’ve never felt like this before,’ ‘I can’t live without you’—confirm their experience of The Grand Romance.
Romantic love saturates the stories we watch, read and ponder. Denis De Rougemont, in his compelling Love in the Western World, says, “love and death, a fatal love—in these phrases is summed up, if not the whole of poetry, at least whatever is popular, whatever is universally moving in European literature.” In The Allegory of Love, C. S. Lewis similarly observes that romantic love has “left no corner of our ethics, our imagination, or our daily life, untouched.”
Why? And, aside from its ubiquity, what is it about the presentation of romantic love in modern storytelling that makes me queasy?
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