ROMANCING

    The psychological makeups of men and women are distinct. In romantic love a woman’s feeling side develops differently than a man’s, and her experience of relationship has subtle nuances that men do not experience in the same way.

   When a couple are genuinely related to each other, they are willing to enter into the whole spectrum of human life togeather. They transform even the unexciting, difficult, and mundane things into a joyful and fulfilling component of life. By contrast, romantic love can only last so long as a couple are “high” on one another, so long as the money lasts and the entertainments are exciting. “Stirring the oatmeal” means that two people take their love off the airy level of exciting fantasy and convert it into earthy, practical immediacy. Love is willing to do these “oatmeal” things of life because it is related to a person, not a projection. Romantic love is never happy with the other person just as she or he is.

   In romantic love there is no friendship. Romance and friendship are utterly opposed energies, natural enimies with completely opposing motives. If a man and a woman are friends to each other, then they are “neighbors” as well as lovers; their relationship is suddenly subject to Christ’s dictum: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Why then do couples impose unmeaningful demands on each other? Because the cult of romance teaches us that we have the right to expect that all our projections will be borne — all our desires satisfied, and all our fantasies made to come true — in the person we are “in love” with.

   Perhaps in the rites of courtship and marriage, couples can eventually learn to exit the system and make a solemn statement to each other: “You will be my best friend.” Perhaps they can learn what it is not to use the other to make them happy but to serve and affirm the ones they love. And perhaps they will discover, to their surprise, that what was needed more than anyhing was not so much to be loved, as to love.