The American Love Affair with Romance
A comment left by Rebecca on the post below got me thinking about the whole perfect-soulmate-romance thing--and how much we in America especially, seem to really need believe in that ideal...
I keep thinking about French films, and how so many of them deal with adults having relationships that are, well, what we would consider Adult by American's prudish standrds (and I don't mean pornographic. I think of movies like Jules et Jim and Cousin, cousine and La Moustache and so many other movies, the titles I can't remember...where sex is part of life, and relationships between men and women are, to use a term, complicated...
Americans often like to keep the dynamics between men and women simple. There are Perfect Couples that get together, have some sort of trauma, then have the tearful reunion and live happily ever after, with great communication and great sex forever and ever.
And then there are the Bad People, for whom relationships don't work out too well. There's alway Retribution--either in death or insanity or just plain life misery consisting of bitter glances and heavy sighs. They're usually Fornicators, or horrible for some other reasons...
I keep thinking about where our American ideas of relationships came from--and why they'er so black-and-white in how adult relationships are supposed to play out...
Believe it or not, most of it comes from our Protestant roots, and John Milton....
The guy who wrote Paradise Lost also wrote a document titled Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce where it was stated that incompatibility of mind and spirit was a better ground for divorce than adultery (or childlessness for that matter--a Catholic reason for divorce.)
It was Milton's ideas and emphasis on compatability of both body, mind, and spirit that has shaped our ideas of how romantic love should influence our choice in a mate--as much as Paradise Lost and not the Bible, has shaped our visual and emotional ideas of Satan and Hell (moreso than Dante's Inferno which still, in many ways, shapes the Catholic vision of Hell--regardless of the recent changes to the official theological thinking on Hell.) Milton, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the King's English, so influenced the minds of Protestant Reformers that some, even now, do not know that their ideas about Hell and Marriage come from Miltonic sources and not the Bible itself...
Yet perhaps we've taken Milton's ideal way too far--to where we are righteous about our romances, and look for any sort of proof that those passionate feelings are rational reality. I don't believe Milton, who was a reasoned and practical man despite a rather amazing visual imagination, would have approved of the ways in which Americans search to find the perfect mate. From consulting with diviners to pragmatic psychological profiles, Milton may have thought all of that just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. After all, he did still believe in God, and did think that we would be lead to the right choice.
Milton's work, however, was anti-Catholic and didn't particularly grant the right of divorce to women (although it has been argued that he did believe women could divorce, too...) Milton had political reasons for writing his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, as much as he had a personal desire to improve the lot of humanity. So, the notion of what marriage should be--our American notion of romance and marriage, influenced by Milton--is rooted not in some ideal of mystical union of two souls but in a political movement in a particular time...
Yet many of us now choose to marry on mumbo jumbo and divorce for Miltonic reasons...
And Dr. Phil castigates us for our moral lapses...
It would be wonderful if the romantic ideal of one man to one woman in perfect harmonious union could be carried out across a lifetime. It would be wonderful if we did not need Milton's guidance on divorce. But that's not reality. And we have, oddly, conflated the ideal of the former in our culture of romance, and liberalised the Miltonic idea of divorce for when that culture fails us.
In other words: we have high ideals for marriage, and when those ideals aren't met, we have a pretty good escape route.
We also have Dr. Phil to castigate us and tell us to shape up, stop all that cheatin' and be faithful (dammit!)
But I don't think the answer (if that's what I'm looking for here) is in fixing marriage or divorce. Marriage is an imperfect institution in many ways--fraught with lots of trials and tribulations and doctrines and politics and history, no matter how pragmatic the couple is when they enter into the marriage. Sometimes we change. Sometimes, for whatever reason that is shaped by the complexity of the human condition, we can't get it together to find that perfect mate of body, mind and spirit in one single individual.
The individuals who are able to find that mate of body mind and spirit just might be the ones who are truly blessed by God. Perhaps we should admire them, but not beat ourselves up if we somehow fail that ideal...
And maybe if we haven't been so blessed, we can conduct our lives and relationships with a degree of caring, concern, and friendship for those we are involved with. We can be honest with ourselves, even if we can't be openly honest with others, and admit that there exists a kind of love--not the romantic ideal of love, but a different kind of love--between the people we have relationships with. We can decide for ourselves who we love and why we love them, and be judicious with our choices (not tomcat around just because we have a "forgiving" mate.)
And perhaps if we started making movies that expressed more of the realities of adult relationships and not the fantasies of youthful romance, as a culture, we may have less anxiety and less negativity, when those ideals begin to change.
Yeah, who am I kidding....
I keep thinking about French films, and how so many of them deal with adults having relationships that are, well, what we would consider Adult by American's prudish standrds (and I don't mean pornographic. I think of movies like Jules et Jim and Cousin, cousine and La Moustache and so many other movies, the titles I can't remember...where sex is part of life, and relationships between men and women are, to use a term, complicated...
Americans often like to keep the dynamics between men and women simple. There are Perfect Couples that get together, have some sort of trauma, then have the tearful reunion and live happily ever after, with great communication and great sex forever and ever.
And then there are the Bad People, for whom relationships don't work out too well. There's alway Retribution--either in death or insanity or just plain life misery consisting of bitter glances and heavy sighs. They're usually Fornicators, or horrible for some other reasons...
I keep thinking about where our American ideas of relationships came from--and why they'er so black-and-white in how adult relationships are supposed to play out...
Believe it or not, most of it comes from our Protestant roots, and John Milton....
The guy who wrote Paradise Lost also wrote a document titled Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce where it was stated that incompatibility of mind and spirit was a better ground for divorce than adultery (or childlessness for that matter--a Catholic reason for divorce.)
It was Milton's ideas and emphasis on compatability of both body, mind, and spirit that has shaped our ideas of how romantic love should influence our choice in a mate--as much as Paradise Lost and not the Bible, has shaped our visual and emotional ideas of Satan and Hell (moreso than Dante's Inferno which still, in many ways, shapes the Catholic vision of Hell--regardless of the recent changes to the official theological thinking on Hell.) Milton, perhaps the greatest philosopher in the King's English, so influenced the minds of Protestant Reformers that some, even now, do not know that their ideas about Hell and Marriage come from Miltonic sources and not the Bible itself...
Yet perhaps we've taken Milton's ideal way too far--to where we are righteous about our romances, and look for any sort of proof that those passionate feelings are rational reality. I don't believe Milton, who was a reasoned and practical man despite a rather amazing visual imagination, would have approved of the ways in which Americans search to find the perfect mate. From consulting with diviners to pragmatic psychological profiles, Milton may have thought all of that just a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. After all, he did still believe in God, and did think that we would be lead to the right choice.
Milton's work, however, was anti-Catholic and didn't particularly grant the right of divorce to women (although it has been argued that he did believe women could divorce, too...) Milton had political reasons for writing his Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, as much as he had a personal desire to improve the lot of humanity. So, the notion of what marriage should be--our American notion of romance and marriage, influenced by Milton--is rooted not in some ideal of mystical union of two souls but in a political movement in a particular time...
Yet many of us now choose to marry on mumbo jumbo and divorce for Miltonic reasons...
And Dr. Phil castigates us for our moral lapses...
It would be wonderful if the romantic ideal of one man to one woman in perfect harmonious union could be carried out across a lifetime. It would be wonderful if we did not need Milton's guidance on divorce. But that's not reality. And we have, oddly, conflated the ideal of the former in our culture of romance, and liberalised the Miltonic idea of divorce for when that culture fails us.
In other words: we have high ideals for marriage, and when those ideals aren't met, we have a pretty good escape route.
We also have Dr. Phil to castigate us and tell us to shape up, stop all that cheatin' and be faithful (dammit!)
But I don't think the answer (if that's what I'm looking for here) is in fixing marriage or divorce. Marriage is an imperfect institution in many ways--fraught with lots of trials and tribulations and doctrines and politics and history, no matter how pragmatic the couple is when they enter into the marriage. Sometimes we change. Sometimes, for whatever reason that is shaped by the complexity of the human condition, we can't get it together to find that perfect mate of body, mind and spirit in one single individual.
The individuals who are able to find that mate of body mind and spirit just might be the ones who are truly blessed by God. Perhaps we should admire them, but not beat ourselves up if we somehow fail that ideal...
And maybe if we haven't been so blessed, we can conduct our lives and relationships with a degree of caring, concern, and friendship for those we are involved with. We can be honest with ourselves, even if we can't be openly honest with others, and admit that there exists a kind of love--not the romantic ideal of love, but a different kind of love--between the people we have relationships with. We can decide for ourselves who we love and why we love them, and be judicious with our choices (not tomcat around just because we have a "forgiving" mate.)
And perhaps if we started making movies that expressed more of the realities of adult relationships and not the fantasies of youthful romance, as a culture, we may have less anxiety and less negativity, when those ideals begin to change.
Yeah, who am I kidding....
posted by Tish Grier at 11:17 PM
4 Comments:
Shalom Tish,
We're born, we die, we do our best to have life that doesnt' suck in between.
B'shalom,
Jeff
I think people ought to focus on being more whole within themselves instead of looking for a 'soulmate' to complete them somehow, but that's an ideal too I suppose.
Hi Heather...
ah, the "wholeness" thing! My sense is that it's different at different times in our lives. A person in her 20's can be very much a "whole" person--relative to that age and stage of life. It's foolish though to expect or believe that a young person can be "whole" in the same way someone in his/her 40's is "whole"...
But what you've said reminds me of another irony--that we're supposed to be whole in order to be ready to find that missing soulmate. If we're whole, why do we need another person to complete us?
It's just another myth meant to drive us bonkers and make us feel that we are incomplete at every phase of our lives.
Hey Jeff...
I always think it's that we should do our best to not make our lives nor the lives of others full of intractable misery.
Then again, what do I know about life ;-)
T.
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