‘The stage is more beholding to Love than the life of man,’ wrote Shakespeare’s contemporary Bacon (1625), confirming the prevalence of heterosexual romantic love in literature. Bacon distinguishes three sorts of love: marital love, which ‘maketh mankind’ through sexual reproduction; ‘wanton love’, presumably including romance; and ‘friendly love’, the highest human form, to be found only between equals, which for most centuries and most cultures meant love between men.
In monotheistic religions, God’s love for humanity and the believer’s love for God are often held up as examples for the most selfless human love, which aspires only to the beloved’s good, while polytheisms may feature deities of earthly love like the Roman Venus, Hindu Parvati or Voodoo Erzulie. In Plato’s Symposium (early fourth century BCE), Aristophanes defmes love as a longing for completion by one’s ‘other half, preferably both being men, whereas Socrates defmes love as the quest for the good and the beautiful, beginning with desire for a beautiful young man though ultimately transcending the body for eternal philosophic ideals.
Although it has been allegorically interpreted as signifying divine love, the JudeoChristian Bible includes a great poem of heterosexual love, the Song of Solomon, which claims that ‘love is strong as death’ (Solomon 8:6). The New Testament uses the language of homosocial love to describe Jesus’s mission and sacrifice: ‘This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (John 15:12–13).
Thus simultaneously love is seen as a rare, peak and enobling experience and as a virtually universal feeling. Rare and pitied is the person who claims he is not loved or cannot love. The love of parents for children and of children for parents is assumed to be natural, if not instinctive, though mothers’ love is often considered stronger than fathers’ love. In the literature of romantic love, men are usually the ideal lovers, devoted and constant. In Persian and Arabic medieval poetry, the beloved may be a woman or young man. In European medieval literature, she may be a married or marriageable woman whose love inspires the man’s heroic deeds. In classical Japanese and Chinese poetry, the lover may be a spouse of either sex longing for an absent partner.
The belief in idealising love as primarily male continues into the present, although women in love become the staple of novels and popular culture from the eighteenth century onward. Goethe’s sorrowful hero Werther (1774) committed suicide from unrequited love for a married woman, supposedly inspiring real suicides. Men’s treatises on love from Stendahl’s in 1822 to Freud’s writings in the early twentieth century describe romantic love as an exciting fantasy in which a man idealises and pursues a woman, often to be disillusioned after sexual consummation. According to Freud, erotic attachments are all based on the child’s early love of the caregiving mother. The Oedipus complex describes normal male heterosexual development: the boy loves and wants sole possession of his mother, but because he is frightened of his powerful rival, his father, he represses this incestuous early love and instead after puberty turns his affection towards another adult woman. However, since idealising love is connected with the mother, Freud theorises that many men split their affections between devotion to a maternal wife and sexual passion for women unlike the wife/mother, like prostitutes or mistresses.
Although romantic love is supposed to ennoble the lover, its derangement or perversion includes harmful passions, such as sadism and masochism, both predominantly male, in which the desire to hurt and dominate or be hurt and dominated by the beloved fuses with sexual satisfaction. Jealousy and behaviours now characterised as harassment were previously accepted as normal for men in love—like following the beloved everywhere and not taking ‘no’ for an answer. Men’s feelings of possession and entitlement reach a negative extreme against wives and girlfriends who leave or reject them. Even honour killings, in which men murder wives, daughters or sisters for alleged unchastity, can be seen as partly springing from feelings that the beloved is the property of the lover, her behaviour reflecting on his, so that he would rather destroy her than allow another man to possess her.
In contemporary popular culture, unmarried men are frequently portrayed as fearing love, commitment and monogamy, while women are assumed to be more interested in, and more susceptible to, romantic love. Some twentieth-century feminists have therefore attacked romantic love as a masculine strategy for persuading free women to become subordinated wives (Greer 1971). Although popular culture is based on fantasies, it shapes people’s expectations and actions, and Hollywood images of romantic love are now circulated globally. Fed by popular culture and merchandising, occasions like anniversaries, a woman’s birthday and Valentine’s day are supposed to bring forth gifts and expressions of love from male partners. This influence can also be seen in some US men’s formal marriage proposals, even to women with whom they have had sustained sexual relationships—for example, with surprise diamond rings presented on cakes at fancy restaurants or during hikes to mountain peaks. Homosexual as well as heterosexual relationships are now also sometimes represented by romantic language and symbolism.
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