While in Western countries religious control over personal life has declined, our ideas about close relationships are still dominated by the idea of romance leading to a life-long and exclusive couple bond.
Although in liberal states divorce and informal relationships are widespread the goal of the exclusive and excluding relationship is the ideal for many. An ideal they chase through heartbreak and sometimes worse. This ideal, largely the creation of churches trying to control us ‘from the inside’ by conditioning our feelings, prevents us modernising and liberating our emotional lives.
While ‘love’ describes the flow of connecting energy that links being to being and is expressed in many ways and moments of life ‘romance’ is an ideology of possession and control disguised or perceived as love in an often loveless world.
Lasting and profound relationships do not depend on long-term sexual activity but connections through personality, compatibility, shared interests, values and affection. However it’s clear that good couple relationships are often hostage to unmet sexual desires. Couples split up because of jealousy (in a world of sexual shortage and taboos) and ‘adultery’. But adultery is what adults do! Only cruel rules, prejudices and power plays condemn physical pleasure between consenting beings…
The origin of love is in our biological striving to connect (as Wilhelm Reich described) but Romance originates in the early Middle Ages as a literary movement describing the platonic (i.e. unfulfilled) desire of court poets for married women. After condemning desire in principle in former centuries the Church learnt then to channel sexuality into the licensed love called marriage, formerly seen only as a property contract.
