Romance names a drive, an ideal, and an affair at once
Romantic love covers several linked ideas: the state of being in love with one person, the ideal of choosing partners for passion over practical concerns, and affairs conducted on that basis. The word traces back to Latin Romanus by way of medieval French tales of knights and love.
After Rome fell, the Latin adverb Romanice came to mean in the vernacular, marking languages descended from Latin. In Old French, romans or romanz named both the language and works written in it, and in the Middle Ages it narrowed to narrative verse about chivalry, the chivalric romance. Troubadours sang of unrequited devotion to a cold, cruel mistress; Chrétien de Troyes worked under royal patronage in Poitiers and Troyes, and Andreas Capellanus wrote The Art of Courtly Love.
Courtly love raised the woman’s status and dwelt on suffering and separation, feeding stories such as Layla and Majnun, Tristan and Iseult, Romeo and Juliet, and The Sorrows of Young Werther, while Aucassin and Nicolette ended happily. Critic Denis de Rougemont observed that happy love has no history in European literature, and philosopher Arthur Lovejoy complained that romantic had come to mean so many things that it meant nothing.
Psychologists treat romantic love as a motivation, related to attachment but distinct from it. In 2021 anthropologists Bode and Kushnick defined it as a motivational state tied to desire for long-term mating with one particular person, found in both sexes across the lifespan. Focused attention on the beloved is driven by dopamine in the brain’s reward system, oxytocin may add to it, and endogenous opioids are linked to the liking side of the experience.
An fMRI study of people still madly in love after years together found reward-area activity without the anxiety seen in new lovers; typically the in-love phase within a relationship lasts about a year to 18 months. Stanton Peele, who pioneered the idea of love addiction, criticized the romantic ideal, and sociologist John Alan Lee proposed love styles to capture the many ways people love. Those who feel little romantic attraction are called aromantic.
Source: Romance
