Finding True Romantic Love

A socio-philosophical approach

By Gabriel Matias Castilho

Valentine's day passed by and, once again, I was alone. 

That should not be a shocker. It is not as if I was actively seeking love in the first place.

In fact, I believe this variety people call “romantic love” does not even exist. I may have given up on believing in it quite long ago.

Decades have passed by, and humans have already discovered that not everybody gets their “happy end”. It is unfortunate, but people are still born and they still die in wars, children are still implanted with the ‘money’ bug (and made to believe life matters more if you have more of it) and governments still strive to deepen social and economic ravines. All of this to end up at a time when preserving the integrity of world-ending bombs is a necessary evil.

But still, people claim they have “found their true love”. How are they getting to this point—even when, with social media bombarding us with information about our society collapsing, we know every bit of what is wrong in the world and get stressed about it?

Where do we find love in all of this? Where do we find answers?

Some have tried to explain why we have become like this. The Genevan Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on the origins of the existing inequality in society, once wrote “from the moment one man needed another's help, from the moment he realized that it was useful for one man to have provisions for two, equality disappeared, property was introduced, work became necessary.” He argued society was equal when people did not need any help from each other to do anything. 

But love, according to this thought, would be truly impossible. If people were happy by themselves and only found new problems when interacting with other people, imagine what would happen if you interacted with the same person for a long period of time? 

Let’s go somewhere else then. Maybe the answer is within theories of social interactions. 

In sociology, for example, love is a real debate.  

Nineteenth century French sociologist Émile Durkheim argued social integration resulted from the “collective consciousness” (values, norms, and beliefs), and that, without it, society could not function. Those values, norms, and beliefs were supported by what he deemed as “deviance,” as it elicited the population to discipline such deviant actors, increase internal social support, and discover its own social flaws. Those deviant norms, values, and beliefs thus generated the boundary for the collective consciousness—anything different is marked as deviant. Thus, the collective consciousness is markedly egotistical in nature for Durkheim. 

Even though devoting only a few pages to love, Durkheim describes romantic (or passionate) love as the eternal antithesis between passion and duty. He also describes it as the outcome of “spontaneous private sensibilities.” 

As a result, romantic love for Durkheim is nothing ethereal, it is purely egotistical, resulting from the needs of a single individual projected toward someone else. Love for him is also a reflection of society as a whole.

But we tell ourselves that romantic love is much more than that. Shouldn’t romantic love be mutual, full, and equal?

Recently, Nicola Montagna, an Italian sociologist, asked for a new definition of romantic love. He wrote that its empirical indeterminacy made romantic love difficult to observe in sociological methods, relegating it to the margins of sociological investigations. 

Cataldi and Iorio describe it as “an action, relationship or social interaction in which subjects exceed (in giving, in receiving, in not giving or not doing, in neglecting) all their antecedents, and therefore offer more than the situation required in order to make benefits.” Love is irrational according to this description, and it changes behavior in an unexplainable and unexpected way. 

So, romantic love truly does exist for those Italian sociologists, and impacts society. But love is still one-sided, bound by the barriers of the human body. It is not a two-player game where both parties agree they are in love. It can be, but, according to this definition, it still originates from private interests. 

My argument for how it differs from “platonic love”, the secondary assumption for when a person proclaims they love someone, is it is always used in a context where two people are involved. In fact, it is not unlikely for someone to claim their couple relationship was “platonic” and get surprised when it is not reciprocated: they expected it to be mutual already.

So what is romantic love after all if not a result of our private needs? 

So here is the only time when “selfish” is not used pejoratively:

“Enjoy holding hands, you bunch of lovely, selfish couples!”