Romanticism: A Concept Of Love

The sudden rush of dopamine, the sweet escapism from ourselves, their melodious rhythm to our chorus, and the happy-ever-after are things we grew up with. Romanticism was a European ideology that emerged in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It started as a movement of art, literature, and expression toward the subject of fascination. Throughout these years, the concept of love has conquered the world by symbolising itself through different cultures, traditions, and rituals. But during these thousands of interpretations, the basic concept of love has been misinterpreted. What is love? Love is an emotion characterised by a series of behaviours that portray intense closeness, consideration, and intimacy. The level of intimacy may vary from person to person. Being the human beings that we are, our minds are always seeking patterns of survival. Our ancestors used to form social bonds to secure their existence in the wild. Over the years, forming social circles and groups has been a means of having more emotional security than physical security. A newborn infant learns to walk, talk, communicate, etc. through social influence. The influence may not be as apparent as we would like it to be. Everything that we feel, think, and draw is based on how a particular event has affected us or how we are influenced by it. 

The same concept applies to love too. We grew up reading fairy tales, which conditioned us to believe that our lives could only be fulfilled by the presence of "the one". This sort of thinking puts the lover in the idealistic belief of perfection. Certain fairy tales influence us to think we are insufficient on our own. It glorifies the ideology of ‘damsel in distress. We are shaped by the love narratives we read. We are taking lots of cues from the outside world. We act on certain emotions because other people are telling us to, and we disregard certain feelings because we are told to. We are living in an era of validation. And in such an era, romanticism seems like the greatest expression of love. Love is supposed to be intuitive, but romanticism obliges us to follow a distinct set of patterns to attain it. We are put under the delusion that everyone has ‘the one’. We are supposed to know when a particular person is ‘the one’ based on the limited amount of time we spend with them. We are conditioned to believe that 'the one’ will act as our sweet escapism from our surrounding world. Romanticism defines love as the ultimate solution to existence. It portrays love as saving ourselves from our internal battles, and it puts the responsibility on our partner to be the saviour of our existence. While this ideology sounds perfect and sweet in some sense, it's a basic illustration of dependency. If we expect our partners to solve our crisis for us, we are not only driving them away by our lack of self and lack of mutual understanding, but we are also developing a concept inside of us that makes us believe that we "need to be saved" by somebody other than ourselves. Our partners will change gradually, but our patterns won't. Because romanticism puts that certain pattern of clinginess, of needing a certain "knight in shining armour," as "romantic".

Making small efforts for our significant other and treating them decently are the fundamentals on which every relationship stands. Romanticism disbands the idea of emotional security in a partner but rather glorifies the passion for separation and the need for one another's existence. We tend to search for familiarity in every place we go. If we grew up in an abusive household, we expect our partner to treat us the same. And if they don’t, then we feel like we can’t "connect" with our partners. We feel like something is missing in such a relationship. If we grew up in a loving household, we search for environments where we find more compassion and love. The feeling of familiarity is what gives us the ultimate "connection" with our partners. How do we initiate healthy relationships? As cliché as it sounds, communication is the major key to understanding one another. We shouldn’t seek a relationship that is emotionally or physically stimulating. We should instead look for signs of what is right for us. And we may not be able to find it right the first few times. In such cases, compromising over small details is somewhat necessary too. But we should always keep in mind that the other person is a complex being with emotions, and s/he is deserving of everything we are. We don’t have to be okay with all of their quirks, but we have to learn to live with them. We should understand that as long as a certain behaviour isn’t harming us, our physical or mental health, or the relationship, we can learn to accept it for what it is. Romanticism gave us the basic gist of the story before the ‘happy ever after’. But what we should do to gain and maintain the ‘happy ever after’ solely depends upon us.

Xavier Academy, Lazimpat