TRUE LOVE: Sara Butler

...From what little psychology and even less evolutionary psychology I've studied, it's always seemed to me that psychologists are better able to describe what love looks like than tell us what it really is. While the five characteristics Buss mentions are a pretty decent description, they don't really tell us what romantic love is. For an evolutionary psychologist like Buss, the answer to that question is likely something unromantic like, "love is an adaptation that evolved to maximize our reproductive possibilities" (by the way, if you want to read some of Buss’s work in this field, which is pretty interesting, start with this paper or this one).

For psychologists working in this field, I would imaging that sudying love can be kind of a downer; the whole point is to demystify love, to take the magic out of it. So my guess is that David Buss's "true love" is love that is still magical somehow, that defies the scientific approach, that refuses to follow the path that psychologists have found "regular love" usually takes. "True love" is love "for its own sake." It is how one feels about one's "soulmate," and the intense passion that one feels at the start really does last forever. My best stab at a definition of "true love," as opposed to "regular" love is that "true love" is what happens when you just follow your feelings, but everything ends "happily ever after" anyway (i.e. your love outlasts your lives). Also "true love" never becomes fully domesticated; it never entirely fades into the calmer, steadier attachment that "regular" love might. There are plenty of examples of this in art (of course, one of the perhaps unfair advantages that many of these couples have is that they seem to die fairly young), but how many couples do you actually know who would fit the description? I'm inclined to agree with what Prince Humperdinck told Wesley, "You truly love each other, and so you might have been truly happy. Not one couple in a century has that chance, no matter what the story books say."

In fact, "true love" has long been more of a literary convention than a social reality, although that doesn't make it any less important socially. Commonly held understandings of "true love" can say quite a bit about a given society. One standard interpretation of the courtly love tradition, for example, argues that the ideal of courtly love was just a way of keeping young, landless, unmarried knights from making a big mess by providing some kind of direction for and limits on their actions. One of the insteresting things about this tradition is how explicitly it denied any link between love and marriage. In The Art of Courtly Love, Andreas Cappellanus explains that this is because marriage is a duty and love must be completely free. With the dawning of modernity, one first sees love being associated with marriage, even used as a reason for choosing a specific marriage partner. It's taken some time and the movement of women into the workplace for that new conception to become reality--probably more so than the courly love tradition ever did--with arguably less than spectacular results.

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posted by Eve at 5:36 PM | link

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