Love Bhakti #5: A Romantic Life

When I first began exploring sacred romance as a spiritual path– before I even really had a vocabulary with which to name it– there was a seeming paradox that I struggled to understand.

On the one hand, whenever I spoke to anyone about my thoughts and ideas around sacred romance, about bringing beautiful love energy into the world, they would almost invariably react like a desert traveler spotting an oasis, as though the world were parched and romance was water.

On the other hand, romance *seemed* to be everywhere. As a culture, we can’t get enough of it. Love in some form is probably the single biggest subject for modern music. The majority of TV shows and movies, if they aren’t specifically about love stories, feel the need to include romantic subplots whether they make sense or not. Magazines are choked with articles about finding, keeping, maintaining, and recovering from romance; and romance novels are a huge and thriving industry. We use romance to sell everything from diamonds to dish soap, rate restaurants in part based on whether we’d take a date there, and despite that it’s now perhaps more acceptable to despise Valentine’s Day in a sort of weary and jaded fashion, at the same time millions of people still throw themselves with almost a frantic need into an orgy of roses, champagne, and french-milled cliche.

In addition to that, people everywhere are obsessed with being in love. They flock to personal ads and matchmaking sites and services, spend hours on their appearances, read books and articles about winning love, look for social gatherings where potential partners are likely to be plentiful, cast appraising eyes at their friends’ friends. Monogamous people are either on great quests to keep romance alive, or they cheat, or they become so-called serial monogamists, moving from partner to partner like junkies in need of a fix. Polyamorous folks aren’t immune, either– you can’t throw a rock in the poly community without hitting someone so addicted to NRE (new relationship energy, aka the romantic high of a new romance) that they collect new lovers at a rate far exceeding their capability to maintain existing relationships (or, you know, keep up with the laundry and grocery shopping).

How, I wondered, is it possible for the world to be so starved for something that, it seems, you couldn’t escape if you tried?

Sure, part of it is that romance is not always easy to find or to maintain. But that just didn’t seem to account for all of it, for the sheer yearning wistfulness in the faces of people I talked to about sacred romance who seemed so oddly…hopeful.

I started evolving a theory about it when I realized that some of my most, shall we say, irrationally romantic friends– the ones who had somewhat unrealistic ideas about the way life “should” be or the way people in their lives “should” act and react– tended to evaluate life as though it were a movie. Forgetting that movies are a series of compelling, archetypal moments with all the boring and tedious parts cut out, they expect life to behave as though any moment the people on the street around them might burst into song and dance, and the moon come to life and serenade their first kiss with their new lover.

It’s something I’m sympathetic to– I often feel that the world would be tremendously improved by the occasional Act 1 showstopper in the heart of a city day– and it made me think that perhaps I was approaching this paradoxical question from just the slightly wrong angle.

Then, as I spent some time refreshing my understanding of Romanticism as a movement and philosophy in the interests of developing an actual philosophy of sacred romance, it struck me that one of the keys to Romanticism is that it encompasses everything. Most of us get our exposure to the Romantics in a unit or two of high school English, and might vaguely remember that it had something to do with appreciating nature and drinking too much absinthe, or we might recall enough to impress a date by whispering a few lines of “She walks in beauty like the night” or “I arise from dreams of thee/ in the first sweet sleep of night”, and think of it in the same terms as small-r “romantic”.

But Romanticism infused not only art and music, but politics, sociology, spirituality. Its emphasis on the beauty, power, and sublimity of the natural world, its disdain for authority and hierarchy, and its (admittedly often patronizing and anglocentric) fascination with “exotic” cultures and “primitive” peoples are a key part of the philosophical underpinnings of modern Paganism and other modern spiritualities and New Age movements. It influenced military undertakings, social reform, the suffrage movement, it explored science with an eye towards the artful, the soulful, the beautiful.

That was when I began to understand what I and others were responding to in the concept of sacred romance. It wasn’t simply the idea of approaching Deity in a lover/Beloved context, or making beautiful altars laden with red velvet and roses, or the idea of attracting more romance into one’s life in a traditional way. We are, as a society, sublimating our much greater hungers and placing them all on the shoulders of one lover after another, because romantic love is the one culturally acceptable outlet left to us for an entire range of desires.

This is the thirst of the world: Not for a romantic partner, per se, but for a romantic *life*.

I already knew that the trappings of romance with which we’re inundated in daily life– the magazine articles, the commercials– were not the substance, that they were exploiting our hunger without ever really satisfying it; but I could not until then define what it was we might all be seeking, the reality beside which these things were just the shadows flickering on the cavern walls.

A friend writes this week that she feels immature because her roleplaying game adventures are so much more interesting and fulfilling to her than the workaday world. It’s not the first time I’ve heard someone say something like that; anyone whose avocation is somehow built on great imagination and fantastical worlds is likely to at least once in a while feel regret at having to back to the “boring” world, to the mundane and often tedious. I think about my friends who so deeply long for a more cinematic reality that they hurt their uncinematic but far more tangible relationships in the reality they’re given.

And I think that the problem does not lie in what they wish for. In fact, if we’re going to define “normal” as the most common state or experience (and I say that very tongue-in-cheek, because it works for my point at the moment), then I would go so far as to say that it is absolutely normal to long for a more romantic reality, and to despise the hopeless and the tedious.

The problem, as I see it, is that culturally we are at war with ourselves. I’m not going to sit here and rail about the commodification of people or the soullessness of industry or anything like that– at the least, it’s another rant for another day, and at the most it’s perhaps as pointless as complaining about the oppressiveness of diapers on a small baby. “Everything is perfect”, said one of my wisest teachers, and perhaps this modern age is something we needed, even with its endless rage-filled conflicts and rampaging money lust and horrors; perhaps on a soul level we’re in our “terrible twos” and only beginning to learn how to eat at the grownup’s table without throwing our dinner plate on the floor.

But that said, it may be time to realize how this status quo wounds us all, and to question “the way things are” and decide whether or not to accept that as the final word on our shared reality.

So, if we’re seeking a romantic life, what does that mean? What does it look like? What, exactly, are the qualities we’re seeking for?

A romantic life would be characterized, first of all, by the quality of the sublime. My Loverboy, who writes very scholarly papers about sublimity in Romanticism, will probably cringe in pain at my Cliff’s Notes definition here, but the concept is so vast and deep that I’m going to shorthand it for all our sakes. An experience of the sublime is an experience of awe, awakening such vast emotion that it is beyond all words; it is a transcendent feeling, an awareness of the universe and its symbols as something mighty, profound, limitless, transforming. From my point of view I would say that it is the experience of being in the presence of something “normal”, be it a ruined building, an ocean, or a loved one, and having the realization that you are looking into the face of the Divine.

What I need to point out, however, is that the sublime is internal, not external. That is to say, it’s about your inner landscape and the way you interact with the world, not the things in the world themselves. Part of our hunger is that we are never taught to experience the sublimity of the world around us; we learn to pass through the day barely seeing what’s around us, and no one teaches us to look at “ordinary” things in any more than a cursory way.

As an example: Look at a pencil. An ordinary, #2, same-yellow-it’s-always-been, eraser nub at one end, pencil. I don’t particularly consider myself a Libertarian anymore, but I’ve remained rather fond of the essay “I, Pencil” that I learned from the libertarians. Looking past its propagandistic bent, the meat of the essay, to me, is a fantastic description of the miraculous attributes of the very mundane, and the fact that very few things, if anything, are devoid of a wonderful and even mysterious origin story.

You can, of course, still go to look at mighty mountains or Roman ruins or powerful works of art or great holy sites in order to seek this experience of sublimity, and it’s probably good for your soul if you do. But just as it’s necessary to love the very ordinary mundane things about your partner if you would have the experience of the rarer, more transcendent moments of romantic passion, you will probably get a lot more out of those pilgrimages if you are already capable of walking through your daily life allowing yourself to contemplate, and be awed by, the simpler things around you. Walk down a city street and learn to pay attention to the wonderful, quirky, overlooked traces of architectural history in the jumble of buildings. Look at the friend you have lunch with and try to contemplate the countless incidents and thoughts and molecules of food and images that somehow came together to shape this human being in this particular, specific way. Watch a movie and consider this marriage of technology and soul, the arrangement of silver nitrate particles or the strings of ones and zeroes that form millions of individual images all infused with a vocabulary of symbols and archetypes, myths and ideas stretching back in an unbroken lineage to the beginning of humanity. Is it even possible to look at such seemingly mundane things and *not* be awed and deeply moved?

Another characteristic of a romantic life would be courage. Hear the word in your head the way it would be pronounced in France: cor-AZHE. Couer-age. Courage, quite literally, makes a noun out of a verb concept of “heart”– as though there is a verb “to heart” that’s other than the modern trend of saying “I heart french fries!” ;-) I would say it’s a verb related to the action of the heart, the steady beat; a verb indicating the act of remaining true to that primal rhythm and the song it plays.

Most dictionaries include some version of “fearlessness” in their definition of courage, but I think that’s somewhat misleading. Courageous acts are, I suspect, very rarely performed out of a lack of fear and rather are performed in spite of fear. We tend to be much more fascinated by, and to relate much more closely to, stories of courage in which the hero(ine) defies or overcomes fear than ones in which there is no fear to begin with.

I think this quality matters so much because the chief quality of a dull, gray, mundane life is fear. Dominance of fear leads towards only the “safest” choices, towards avoiding risk, towards a more and more fixed routine, towards order without chaos. It replaces meaning, imposes illusory limits that seem more and more real over time. And the quiet despair that results is so painful that the only way to endure it is not to pay too much attention to anything in it, so that days pass in a soft blur of undefined dissatisfaction.

Yet, so much about our culture and its institutions encourage and reinforce fear, often as a means of control. There is very little external incentive to move past fear– sometimes we even reinforce it in one another, without realizing it, because one person overcoming fear could raise the question “why am I not doing that too?” which can be even more frightening to consider.

And it’s understandable. The shadowy unknown, the pain of potential failure or loss, the changes that seem hopelessly vast, the uncertainty of our own true capabilities, these things are all real and great. Yet they are the guardians at the gate whose challenges we must face if we would do anything but merely exist. We should, to some extent, be patient with ourselves, until the day comes as Rilke puts it, when “the risk to remain tight in bud became more painful than the risk to bloom”. But if that bud-pain already feels great and consuming, if you are reading this and feeling that “ordinary” life is unbearable in some way, then it is likely you have reached that day, and you are seeking the heart-energy of courage to break out of it.

There is a brilliant article by Steve Pavlina that I think all my gamer friends will especially appreciate, which uses video games as a way to understand how we can engage in risk and growth and acts that require great courage without being overwhelmed by the fear of “bad” emotions: The Joy of Sadness. It is an approach to courage that I think could make a great difference to many people.

From that article, I would add that a quality related to courage but deserving of its own mention would be emotional courage. If you desire a life of color, meaning, power, and romance, it is crucial to overcome our cultural dysfunction about emotion– to neither reject it as the enemy of reason, nor to indulge in it as an exploitative spectator sport. A romantic life requires that you allow yourself to feel, deeply and powerfully, that you seek to understand and name and own the emotions you experience, that you honor them as great gifts of direction, warning, teaching, celebration, connection, and humanity. And it requires that you be willing to face them in other people, not to enable unhealthy states, but to stand witness to their place in time and their path and to honor what is in their hearts, even if it is painful to see, without turning away. Remembering, always, that the human capacity to feel is also sublime.

A romantic life is characterized by heroism. I would define this as “a great striving that tests one’s abilities, willingly performed in service to a higher purpose or ideal.” If I ask you to describe a heroic act, you’ll probably think of something along the lines of a firefighter rescuing someone from a burning building. And, of course, this fits– obviously running into a fire requires a test of strength, courage, and skill, which is willingly performed by someone who has chosen that line of work, and who does it in service to the ideal that human or animal life is precious enough to be rescued from danger.

But a sense of heroism is not limited to certain jobs or to physical feats, and as a quality of a romantic life, it is exceptional action in service to meaning. I have written before about my disdain for the myth of the “self-made man” who, the story would have you believe, rose up solely by his own power with no help along the way, and the damaging beliefs that have arisen from it, that accomplishing anything for any reason other than one’s own satisfaction is somehow needy and unhealthy.

And yet I see every day in the world around me a desperate hunger for meaning, for ideals and causes. In the medieval troubadour romances, the chevalier devoted himself to his Domina and went out on heroic quests, accomplishing tremendous things, all for the purpose of laying those laurels at her feet as proof of his love. We tend to see things like that, nowadays, as at least misguided and more usually creepy or weird. But the lady was always a stand-in for the divine and for the code of honor to which the knight had sworn himself; the personification of the meaning that guided his life.

We would all be so much better off if, when we were schoolchildren, people asked us not “what do you want to be when you grow up?” but “to what will you give your life?” It is entirely possible to live an “ordinary” life in terms of job and house and family, in terms of the purely external, yet to be tremendously richly fulfilled and challenged because every action in that life is dedicated to striving in service to a purpose or ideal, whether it’s “family” or “healing people” or “making art” or “love”.

A romantic life is characterized by curiosity and adventurousness, each of them inseparable from the other. The world is a fascinating place, and the way to have a fascinating life is to say “yes” to that world, to dive into it and explore it and immerse yourself in it, to interact with it and to savor each new mystery uncovered by each new question. When you meet someone who has led an extremely interesting and colorful life, it is always the case that they were also adventurous, restlessly traveling through their existence in search of experiences, and curious about their surroundings no matter where they were.

A romantic life is steeped in the natural world. At a work event earlier in the week, one of our teaching artists mentioned that children today often suffer from “nature deficit disorder”, a term coined by author Richard Louv to describe the physical retardation of growth caused by a lack of exposure to the natural world and to outdoors play. I think it’s an inevitable consequence of a culture that has for multiple generations now been losing touch with nature. The physical effects of remaining cooped up inside climate-controlled buildings all day can be measured, but it is harder to quantify the spiritual damage we are doing to ourselves by losing contact with the natural world. Yet it is no less real; spending time out of doors puts us in direct physical contact with the living energy of trees and grass and sunshine, with the currents of the air and the rhythm of the rain, and it nourishes our spirits. It exposes us to the sublimity of nature, allows us to ground our anxious excess of energy in the rich earth, revitalizes our spirits, aligns our rhythms and cycles with the world around us.

A romantic life draws inspiration and wisdom from many cultures and traditions– not seeking to appropriate or usurp, but to be worldly, to be exposed to different tastes and aesthetics and points of view, to build our brains through the connections we draw between more and more different types of ideas and sensory input, and to have the choice to build that life out of the people and things best suited for it, drawn from the widest possible range of options.

And of course, a romantic life is characterized by love. Not just the experience of sexual passion with a specific partner, but a lusty, laughing, compassionate, vibrant hunger for the world and all it has to offer. Love that says Yes to life, love that cherishes each thing for what it is at its heart, love that seeks to know deeply and to embrace passionately and above all to connect utterly with the universe as we know it.

Living a romantic life, then, means that there is no need to burden one’s partners with the entire responsibility for one’s transcendence and joy. There is no need to seek in one person what is available in every corner of the world, and therefore, when a romantic love affair does take place, it is free of unrealistic demands and becomes an opportunity to share the unbounded bliss of existence, to make each other gifts of the many wonders of each other’s lives.

My poetry teacher used to say, “You can’t lead bunny lives and write tiger poetry.” In the same way, it is impossible to sustain Romance in love affairs if the life in which they take place is timid, colorless, fearful, and bland. It’s like trying to cure the disease by seeking treatments for the symptom. And no, it’s not particularly easy, given the state of society and the things it values and rewards and teaches, to embrace the things required for a romantic life; but is it possible? Absolutely, yes. Is it sustainable? Yes.

Is it worth it?

Yes.