ROMANTIC LOVE

Bhikkhu Nyanasobhano, Landscapes of Wonder: Discovering Buddhist Dhamma in the World Around Us (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1998) ("If it is possible to live with a purpose, what should that purpose be?..." Id. at 31. "Perhaps most of us do not come to a definite conclusion in the matter, but this does not mean we have no purpose, only that we do not recognize it or admit it or even choose it for ourselves.... If life means nothing then only pleasure, it seems, is worthwhile; or if life has meaning and we cannot get at it then still only enjoyment is worth chasing--such is the view of the hopeless. It slips into the mind by default when we hold no other, but we are reluctant to entertain it and will rather, if we think about it, take as our purpose support of family, creation of beauty, social charity, fame, self-expression, development of talent, and so on. But it might be fair to say that apart from these or beneath these, deep and urgent, a fundamental purpose of many of us is the search for love, especially romantic love." Id. at 31. "Indeed, many take it on faith that romantic love is the highest thing to live for. Popular literature, movies, television, and music tirelessly celebrate it as enduring, accessible truth. Such love, giddily set free, obliterates reason, and this is part of its charm and power, because we obscurely want to be swept up and spirited out of our pedestrian selves. In the spiritual void of modern times the wanting of love becomes nearly indistinguishable from love itself. So powerful, so insistent is it that we seldom notice that contentment is rare and craving relentless. Love seems to consist mostly in unripened hope; it is an ache for a completion amid the incompleteness of the present. That we never seem to possess it in its imagined fullness does not deter us. We worry at our pain as if to convert it somehow into joy." Id. at 32. "Love is never the poorer for being accompanied by wisdom. It is not harmed by being denied a crown. The agonies we endure and inflict in the name of love come from making love bear too heavy a weight, from recklessly heaping our ambitions, fears, desires, and loneliness on top of another person--another who is as changeable as we. It is natural to form attachments to other people, but the pain produced from these attachments will vary according to our wisdom and maturity. If we see nothing higher at all and plunge thoughtlessly into the conflict of gaining and losing, we will surely suffer, but if we keep the ideals of the Dhamma before us, peacefully contemplating the transience of things, we will ride more securely over the waves of fortune." Id. at 38. "We love best when we do not love out of desperation." Id. at 41. Or, as Graham Swift writes: "Paris first bred in me the notion that the highest aim of civilization is the loving perfection of the useless: ballerinas, cafe chatter, Puccini operas, Elizabethan sonnets, silk underwear, parfumerie, patisserie, chandeliers, the magic hush when the lights go down in an auditorium ... and Romantic Love." Graham Swift, Ever After (New York: Knopf, 1992), at 22-23.).