Romantic Love

Romantic Love began as a spiritual aspiration. Instinctively, we seek a world that is beyond the reach of our day-to-day mentalityr
The word aspire means “breath” aspiration means to “breath life into”
Spiritual aspiration means to seek after, to reach for, and to rise above the smallness of our personal lives to something limitless and extraordinary.

This aspiration is really a seeking after the totality of one’s self, of one’s life. We seek that which we inwardly know lives beyond our normal perception in the vast unseen, world of feelings, thoughts, energy, emotion and symbols.

In Romantic Love we seem to be possessed, to be suddenly lifted above the mundane world into a splendid life of passion, ecstasy and transcendence. Ultimately we seek the feeling of Wholeness.
This is a sacred aspiration; a spiritual experience.

To the normal everyday self, everything that appears to be outside of natural human experience in the realm of the unconscious; it appears magical or supe
atural. It appears to have come involuntarily from outside of us and posses the lovers against their will. We say they “fell” in love.

Here are faced with on of the greatest paradoxes and deepest mysteries of our lives.
There are three elements that characterize Romantic Love.

1. First, it is an idealized, spiritualized relationship that is unconsciously designed to lift the lovers above the grossness of everyday life. Thus it can never be consummated. That means no sex.
2. Second, she must be attended to as a personification of his inner ideal of the Ete
al Feminine Essence and pursued as a divine symbol of his own feminine soul. While he is honored as the manifestation of masculine perfection. That means no marriage.
3. Third, the lovers must maintain this intense passionate desire for each other while striving to see the other only as a symbol of the divine world beyond. They must never reduce the other to the everyday world by seeing them as ordinary. That means never being with them as an ordinary human being. That means, not related.

The culturally transmitted ideals that underlie Romantic Love have us seeking passion and intensity for their own sake. We got these ideals from movies, books, poems and love songs.

True love has been entangled with Romantic love as a basis for relationship. This has bred a perpetual discontent that blinds us to the magnificence and beauty of the everyday world.

We fear that reality will drive the love out of our lives.
But in fact it is by distinguishing the two types of love that we free ourselves of this confusion.
We are then empowered to enjoy both of these systems in a workable way that is the basis of a life long relationship.