Journal of Love

Another bleeding edge find (from yesterday) in the Wall Street Journal. Affairs to Forget: How Hollywood lost its romantic groove:

Among many similar spam emails, I recently got one from a hook-up site headed "No commitments." It began: "Its [sic] your birth right to 'Date-Beautiful Women and Men' " [sic, sic, sic].

Okay, so it doesn't start out very promisingly. But it does make an excellent point about love, believe it or not. In short, how much can love matter when the stakes are so low?

In an era when anyone can be, as Catullus put it in the Amores, a "horse-jumper of love," the stakes for any given romantic relationship are slashed. Where's the tension, the terror, the drama in a relationship when you don't believe in your one true love? But hey, I'm not doing justice to the topic. Let's let James Bowman explain this one:

The origins of romantic love, like its name, lie in the verse romances of the Middle Ages, which took from the troubadours of the 12th century the novel idea that the lover's whole life could depend on his lady's willingness to grant him her favors.

This idea later became a commonplace of medieval love poetry. The anonymous 13th-century English lyric that begins, "With longygne y am lad," for instance, includes the lines: "Lady, have mercy on me! / You have brought me to piteous sufferings / Be you the remedy that I beg / My life depends on you."

People were well aware that the last line was, at least partly, a figure of speech. But it also stood for a daily reality at a time when the cultural expectation was that love, like marriage, was for life. In Shakespeare's "As You Like It," Rosalind, in male disguise as Orlando's love-tutor, rehearses for him the stories of those who are supposed to have died for love and then dismisses them: "These are all lies," she says. "Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love."

It's a wonderful and concise argument against the idiotic approach to relationships that characterizes most of my peers. Fie on them. But up with James Bowman.