I have often written about the fallacy that romantic love is superior to other forms of love:
I honestly feel sorry for those who truly believe that the best way to “connect” with other people is by boinking them, and the notion that people must boink to feel “connected” is a tragedy. Sexual relationships are held up as the pinnacle of human interaction, but they’re not even close; they’re in fact nearer the bottom because they’re extremely conditional.
I have always felt very strongly about this, ever since I first started really thinking about the matter before I was out of my teens. Part of the fallacy holds that romantic love is somehow intrinsically different from other kinds of love, but I don’t think that’s true either. Take “love at first sight”, for example; we only ever hear the term applied to romantic love, even though the idea that it represents something other than plain animal lust in that context is highly dubious. And yet there are certainly cases in which another kind of love manifests itself at first meeting. The very first time I really thought of that was in a fictional context: in the movie The Emerald Forest, a tribal chief in the Amazon abducts the son of an engineer surveying for a dam project, and years later he explains to the father that he had fallen in paternal love with the boy at first sight, and could not bear to see him go back to “The Dead World” of concrete and steel which the natives feared and hated.
Over the next several decades I saw other examples in both fiction and real life, culminating in one I experienced myself. In November of 1997 I met Grace at a party and she gave me a ride home; we hit it off immediately, and within weeks I’d received an actual paper letter from her in the mail. After a few more letters were exchanged, she told me she wanted to move down to New Orleans from her father’s place in Monroe, Louisiana, where she currently lived; I invited her to move in with me, and she never moved out. From that very first meeting she was as devoted to me as any sister; there was never any sexual chemistry, and in any case Grace was only sexually interested in men. But looking back to those times, I have no better term for the rapid bonding she experienced and demonstrated than “love at first sight”. And it would be wrong to pretend otherwise merely because it was not romantic love.
I know what you mean. My late best friend and I hit it off from the moment we met, and for 25 or so years we were best pals. But there was nothing remotely sexual between us—we were both devoutly straight.
What bugs me is the trope of someone (usually a woman but not always) who “falls in love” with a real wrong person—and throws everything they ever believed in over to be with that person. Case in point—Harley Quinn in the DC Comics universe. She was a psychiatrist assigned to try to analyze the Joker but fell in love with him and became “Bonnie” to his “Clyde” for quite a while.
Very well said, Maggie, I could not have put it any better.
Not only is what is called “romantic love” not superior to other kinds of interpersonal feelings, it is also a dangerous myth that it “conquers all”. If the ties between two people are not reinforced by a high degree of commonality and a willingness to compromise, they are likely to be broken when the pangs of “romantic love” dimimish, as they surely will. This is one of the main reasons for the high prevalence of divorce in today’s western world.
As for expectations of 100% sexual fidelity, that is not love at all, but a sense of possessiveness and control.
My parents were married for 41 years, and I for longer than that, so I have a pretty good idea what I am talking about.