Romance: Best Enjoyed in the Middle Ages

Last night I was listening to an audio book that mentioned the relationship between Dante and Beatrice, celebrated as an example of romantic love at its finest. Dante, of course, wrote The Inferno. Beatrice was his cousin. He fell in love with her the first time he saw her, when he was nine. They didn't speak to each other until a few years later, and they never had what we would today call any kind of relationship at all. Instead, his love for her was in the mode of "courtly love" possibly "invented" during the Middle Ages.

I've written several times about the problem of mistaking romantic love, which may be evolution's way of making sure a couple stayed focused enough on their relationship to have sex and get pregnant, then keep the baby alive for the first couple of years, with committed love. Romance is fired by dopamine and lowered levels of serotonin, while committed love is fueled by oxytocin. (The theory goes.) Oxytocin produces a more "social" love; the oxytocin bond activates the same brain systems as trust and generosity.

This story from The Independent in the UK, Aspects of Love, illustrates the conflicting definitions we have of love. (Some of the interviewees also state as fact some of the neurochemical bases of emotion that haven't been completely proven yet, as I'm often guilty of doing, such as in the previous paragraph.)

I like what Alain de Bottom says:

One of the things that happened in the modern age was that suddenly people decided that romantic love could be put together with marriage, so the sort of feeling people always had around a lover, an intense romantic passion they thought might last a few months, you could stick that together with what people had always followed which was to get married.

And marriage used to be about "handing on the farm" to the next generation and suddenly it was thought you could have the farm and this great intense romantic relationship. You no longer needed what the aristocracy had suggested you always needed, which was a wife and a mistress, or the other way around if you were a woman. This idea that you can have romantic passion and the practical benefits of keeping a household together – modern society has fallen for this idea and it's making us miserable.

De Bottom is author of Essays in Love, which sounds pretty interesting.

In the Middle Ages and into Dante's time, marriages were arranged, and based on social and economic benefits. People might have had lovers and/or asexual romantic relationships like that of Dante and Beatrice. I don't think we can -- or should -- go back to that, but I wish our culture would learn to celebrate committed love the way we do romance.

The adorable embroidered heart is by Minha lojinha, a wonderful artist.

See also, Sex, Orgasm, Bonding and the Marital Blahs; and Get Over Romance; please, please please?

Comments

[Waqqas]

Those are some very interesting and novel perspectives.

However, isn't having both a wife and mistress (which is what deBottom suggests) counter-productive to oxytocin? It would be distressing for a wife to know that her husband really loves someone else and she is only there to bear his children.

Have you looked at how oxytocin works in polyamorous relationships? I think that a fear of your lover/partner giving out your secrets to his/her other lovers/partners would reduce the feeling of trust and therefore oxytocin levels.

[Random Indie Game Dev]

I do believe that the Japanese actually have two separate words for the two forms of love. Koi and Ai... koi for the passion and ai for the lasting love.

[Susan Kuchinskas]

I, ah, love the concepts of koi and ai!

Waqqas, I think the idea of having a lover and a husband or wife is to separate the trusting, oxytocin-based relationship from the exciting, dopamine-based relationship. So, the husband and wife would trust each other to do what was best for the family. And maybe they would think that they "really loved" each other, and the mistress or lover was a lesser or different kind of love.

If your partner is a sports fanatic, or a huge fan of a pop star, you don't (usually) feel that he or she "really loves" them or loves them more than you. You know it's a different kind of love.

I am just conjecturing here. I think it's very difficult for modern people who aren't raised in a polyamourous culture to understand how this would feel. But I think knowing that people used to behave this way -- even though it was the privliged upper classes -- provides a good reminder that our beliefs about love and romance are not necessarily hard-wired.

[Julie D]

I think it's a rather huge leap to say that historic aristocracy's use of spouse & lover proves loose wiring. A lot of those people were miserable because they were chained to people they didn't love, and never bonded to. Also, women were typically second class citizens, so if they objected to their husband's messing around there was little they could do about it, and in fact, if they complained their heads could roll, literally.

It's also key to point out womens' much higher levels of oxytocin. What works for the goose seldom works for the gander - that much does in fact seem to be hard-wired. I am sure you are aware of many studies in this regard, as well as extensive anecdotal evidence suggesting that women generally fare worse in the area of casual sex, apparently owing to their higher levels of oxytocin. And as plastic as brains are, and as little oxytocin as men have to start with, there are those who surmise that men are more-or-less training their brains away from bonding by indulging in casual sex.

I'm not offereing this from any moral perspective - just bringing up a few points.

[Susan Kuchinskas]

Thanks for the thoughtful comments, Julie. My original post was an attempt to point out that historically, society did not believe that romantic love and committed love necessarily went together.

Helen Fisher defines romantic love as a motivational state, and she posits that it handled by very different brain systems from maternal love or that for the mate with whom one lives. I further define the second type, which I call "true love," or committed love, as the one based on oxytocin.

I've written several times that I think our culture's conflation of these two states causes us much distress, because romance inevitably dies.

So, I'm not saying that people in the era of courtly love had loose wiring, but rather, that they did not believe that romantic love was the only love. I agree, this might have been harder on the women.

And I do agree that our culture's insistence on fortitude and emotional stoicism for men, combined with its obsession on sex, may be training their brains away from bonding.