On romantic love

Funny. In the process of writing my very first blog, I already came up with an idea for the second one. I don’t think I will have time to write very often, but this one seems worth capturing.

 I have to partially credit ChatGPT for this. I asked it to write a short essay on why people still find Romeo and Juliet’s story interesting. A part of what the bot produced echoed my own understanding. Namely, the sentence was “The story speaks to the universal human desire for love and connection”. Indeed, romantic love is more than just a biologically programmed mechanism for the continuation of the species. It is also a natural opportunity for deep human connection, and for forming an elementary cell of the community. It is an opportunity to step out of your own shell, to learn and appreciate the other human being, and to care. There is an evolutionary reason for forming bonds with other people and communities, better chances for survival that way, and also a reason for forming families, which is providing nourishment and security to the offspring. But the point here is that what starts with primarily a sexual attraction can grow into a much bigger and more beautiful and meaningful unity of two people when two is really more than just one plus one.

This then led to another thought, this one not suggested or prompted by ChatGPT. Romantic love also is, or at least can be, an opportunity for personal growth and development. By learning about another person, appreciating them, and caring for them, we can change ourselves. And this leads to an even more interesting thought. Lovers tend to fight. Perhaps it is only natural. Ever since nature decided to divide species into two different genders, to better mix the genetic material that way, the two genders were necessarily different. Not just in appearance or physiology. Whenever you get close enough to another person of the same or different gender, you will discover that while we are all human and share a lot of qualities, the other person sees the world and reacts to it in a way different from yours. And in the case of different genders, well, everyone knows that men are from Mars and women are from Venus. Different views of the world and different reactions to it can lead to misunderstanding. But there is more to that. As we know from physics, movement and change are produced by force, and force is produced by tension. The heat flows from hot to cold, and the current flows from the positive to the negative pole. So if a strong and meaningful relationship is an opportunity for change and growth, then in this way it represents a force. And that force originates in tension. The tension in the best case is a desire to make the other person happy or more fulfilled. But it could also result from an inability to correctly understand the other person or to appreciate and accept their view of the world and their reaction to it. Hence, the fight.

The secret, it seems, is to appreciate the opportunity.  A gift of romantic love is an opportunity, and a very precious one, as already stated above. Then the fights, viewed as something natural and a signature of an opportunity, might not be such a bad thing. Perhaps they should add a subject to the school program “How to see the fights with your loved one as an opportunity”. 😀