The Labyrinth of Romantic Love

by Sam Lowry

Better to have loved and lost than not to have loved at all, they say. But they also say that a taste of honey is worse than none at all, so what do they know? When I was a child, Valentine's Day was generally a source of sadness and embarrassment to me. I never got any Valentine's cards, having failed to inspire the devotion of any secret admirers. I expect that many of you will be able to relate to that.

It's ironic that, of all the saints, Valentine (despite being unrecognized by the Catholic Church) is perhaps the best known (after St Nick, of course). The cult of romantic love is the supreme religion of the West. In the past half century, with the arrival of movies, pop music, and Hallmark (all of which rely on sentimentality to seduce us), romance has become our chosen form of worship, and what was once a quest for oneness with God (spiritual perfection) is now the quest for two-ness: emotional satisfaction through the comforts and pleasures of “love.” Ironic again, then, that romance really did begin as a spiritual ideal, way back when, with the Christian knights, the Crusades, Arthur and the Round Table, Robin Hood and Maid Marion, and those troubadours that traveled the land, telling beautiful lies about it all.

As children, our first taste of romance comes from those tales of knights, slaying dragons and saving beautiful damsels in distress. Archetypally (as any Jungian psychotherapist will tell you), the dragon signified the sexual passions, the maiden or virgin the spiritual virtue that is “rescued” by overcoming them. If one looks deeper into these myths and fairy tales, however, one finds a much older tradition of Goddess worship, a tradition that was adapted and altered by the Catholic religion (the idea of a Goddess being anathema to Christians, as it was to Jews).

The knights (Parsifal, Lancelot, et al.) questing for the Holy Grail signified the soul seeking its feminine half (inner self), in order to attain wisdom (the goddess Sophia) and wholeness. Hence, the knights (historically represented by the Knights Templar and other monk-like orders) were indeed celibate. They worshipped the feminine principle from a safe (and respectful) distance, fighting to protect it and preserve it from the beastly male lusts of our base natures. They never, ever, settled down and married it, and they certainly didn't bed down with it.

The knights were wanderers, likewise the troubadours who came after them. The troupadours sung songs, recited poems and told tales of the knights´ heroic and selfless exploits. Such songs and tales inspired the common people with the notion of the romantic quest, and answered the longing in their hearts.

Gradually, these poetic, abstract ideas (potent with Christian mystery and magic) were hijacked by the more profane interests of the folk, those of marriage and mating. This was such a powerful, instinctive drive that it had little trouble imposing itself on the more refined spiritual concepts of romance. Hence, “romantic love” as we think of it today was born: the desire for a soul mate who will satisfy our physical/emotional needs, and save us from loneliness.

Nowadays, instead of looking for fulfillment through a relationship with God, we look for salvation through the sexual-emotional gratification of “relationships.” As anyone who has attempted a lasting relationship knows, it doesn't work that way. “Romantic love” that seeks completion in another person is just another word for blind obsession.
There's an obscure folk tale about love and lust that I think encapsulates this conundrum nicely. It's not an especially cheerful tale, but then, romantic stories rarely are.

Once upon a time, a young troubadour (with a special fondness for mushrooms of the hallucinogenic variety) fell in love with a local woman and proposed to marry her. He resolved to lay down his guitar (the same guitar he had used to woo and seduce his beloved), settle down into the quiet life as a husband and father, and leave his wandering days behind him. At the last moment, however, his lady love (as fallible humans sometimes do) had a change of heart, and ran off with another man. Devastated and embittered by this betrayal, our troubadour picked up his guitar and resumed his wanderings. Only now-his heart filled with despair where once hope had been-the songs he sang were bitter and melancholy, songs of hate in place of love. His anger extended to women everywhere, whom he now believed were duplicitous and malevolent creatures. He preached a cruel gospel, that all women should be destroyed, if men were ever to find peace. In short (and due in part perhaps to those hongos), he lost his marbles.

Time passed, however, and our bitter bard mellowed, and one day he fell in love again. At which time (humans being whimsical creatures), he changed his tune, and began again to sing of love and happiness. This time, his lady love remained long enough for them to marry, and they conceived a child together. Then one day, when the child was still small, the troubadour's happiness came tumbling down, through the intervention of a cruel and capricious Fate.

There was an accident (some tales blame soldiers on horseback, others a runaway truck): the poet's beloved was struck down in the road and killed. The poet was distraught. He believed that all his bitter exhortations against womankind had come back to punish him, that his old rage, wanting revenge, had taken his new bride from him. He took the child and returned to his beloved's homeland, to tell her family the dire news (she was from a faraway place-let's say the USA-where customs were very different, and the poet was a stranger). There, misfortune struck again. The father of the departed wife, a powerful merchant and public figure of much renown, angry and bitter over the loss of his daughter, had the young troubadour thrown in jail, and his child taken from him.

The poet languished in prison for a long period, all hope gone, and none would hear his pleas. Eventually he was released. He returned to his homeland without his child (too afraid to seek it out lest the angry father have him seized anew). This time the troubadour returned from his travels a profoundly changed man. He had loved and lost, and hated, then loved again and lost again. And now he was now no longer capable of hatred. But nor could he love in quite the same way as he once had, for love and hate co-exist as twin poles of a single obsession. Take the one away, and the nature of the other is forever altered.
Now he loves the way a poet must, the abstract way. Not the substance but the principle of love is his food, and his children are his songs. The hard way he learned to appreciate the essence and spirit of love, in place of personal desire, knowing that the latter would always fail him in the end (death made sure of that), but the former, never. For even death has no dominion over love.

In Western romances, the only permissible ending is “they lived happily ever after.” The tale of the troubadour shows that happiness comes from wisdom and experience alone, not from any circumstances. In fact, the troubadour eventually did meet another woman (third time lucky?) and they did live happily ever after (until they died). But that was only because the poet had stopped looking for his happiness in women.
Some will relate to this tale and nod their heads and agree. Others will tut and say that it is gloomy and cynical, and that no man is an island. But what else would we expect in a culture that considers solitude to be synonymous with loneliness? If the human heart is a Labyrinth, romantic love must be the Minotaur.

The moral of the story? Like those knights of old, we can't expect to win the maiden, until we have slain our dragons.