Here's an extensive excerpt Liz provided about that whole crazy, intense versus sane and stable dichotomy. It's long, but interesting.
in the chapter called "Spiritual Love" I talk about the difference between that wild, addictive, surreal love versus saner, more sensible....more comfortable love. I want to believe you can have both but I've never experienced that...it always seems to be one or the other.
Divine Madness
This is my favorite phase of love, the “smitten” phase, when the person you love is the thing your mind always returns to, when dressing up for them is still a two-hour affair, when, like a religious devotee, life is easy for you because there’s only one person to please, and it isn’t you— and you want to do it. Slavish devotion can be very freeing and sex can be intensely spiritual; combine them and they take you to a plane that impossible to capture in words. That’s why all the parental flapping about “waiting till you find the right person” falls on deaf ears. There is no explaining that feeling of “right” until you experience it. It’s so elusive it can seem nonexistent, but when it happens it’s the only thing that’s real.
This intimacy can be terrifying. It can be overwhelming to connect so fully to someone else. And then it’s really awkward to have to tell someone with whom you’ve shared sublime ecstasy to pick up some toilet paper on the way home, even weirder to start talking about things like life insurance and lawn care. What the hell happened? How does something so grand it defies language degenerate into squabbles that end with lines like “She’s your mother, you take her to Aquarobics.”
Cristina Nehring is an American author who lives in France and who made me feel indescribably better about my own discomfort with the transference of romance to mundane life. Her book A Vindication of Love is about how 21st-century timidity has broken and domesticated romantic love and made it something tepid, rather than the wild, passionate, erotic, spiritual experience we crave….
Nehring writes: “We inhabit a world in which every aspect of romance from meeting to mating has been streamlined, safety-checked and emptied of spiritual conse- quence. The result is that we imagine we live in an erotic culture of unprecedented opportunity when, in fact, we live in an erotic culture that is almost unendurably bland. ... Romance in our day is a poor and shrunken thing…..”
The vilification of intellectual women who fall for imperfect matches seems to rankle Nehring the most: “If she felt deeply she cannot, we seem to assume, have thought deeply,” she writes of the female intellectual.6 Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote the first feminist text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in 1792 (from which Nehring got her title), was a brilliant author and adventuress and was so smitten with a married American businessman that she tried to kill herself for him….
Nehring also holds up some exemplars of ’70s feminism who treated romantic love as the enemy. “It was in the ’70s that the antiromantic chorus really swelled: from Germaine Greer and Kate Millett to Shulamith Firestone and Andrea Dworkin, articulate, energetic and often best-selling writers declared sex a glorified form of rape and romance a patriarchal ploy to enslave women. Such voices created a climate in which women who loved were often regarded as dupes.”
The sex-positive feminism that followed in the forward- thinking 1990s changed that (or so I think—I might be living proof of it). Yet for all the advantages women have now that we didn’t have then, the assumption that we’ll want a conventional, safe, domestic love—happy, hetero, and hitched—hasn’t changed that much.
Not All Bliss Is Domestic
“My inspiration for Vindication was at once the intensity and ferocity of love I witnessed and experienced around me, and the lukewarm timidity with which I saw it discussed every day in the media,” Cristina wrote from her home in France in the summer of 2010. “It was the fact that I’d review books about women (like Mary Wollstonecraft, like Margaret Fuller) who had been lovers as well as thinkers and I’d see these women saluted for their ideas and dragged through the mud for their amorous practices. As though the boldness of ideas and the boldness of amorous enterprise weren’t closely linked—even inseparable.”7
Is this domestication and diminution of love a uniquely American phenomenon, or something she sees happening in Europe as well?
“I’m afraid the Europeans will tag along behind the Americans eventually—they too often do—but, for now, the sanitization of love and the fetishism of erotic safety does seem to be an especially American phenomenon. In France people still honor a messy romance, complete with secret trysts, inappropriate partners, and intergenerational love triangles. (Just look at the respective amorous lives of Carla Bruni and Nicolas Sarkozy.) In Germany, there’s still a vein of deep romanticism where the notion of “safe sex”—of girding yourself against the very partner with whom you’re aiming to fuse—is highly suspect. Only in America are we so proud of being so self-protective and dull in our personal relations.”
To champion the madness of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility over the reserve of the practical, long- suffering Eleanor might seem a little nutsy-cuckoo to some, but this is just what makes it attractive to the romantic spirit:
a) It’s more fun.
b) Pain is better than boredom.
c) It’s a quest.
In that struggle between permanence and transience someone who gets claustrophobic with permanence (like myself) and is always on the lookout for a well-timed dopamine rush is going to be drawn to this epic, uncertain, literary type of love—or at least to staying for more of a reason than that it’s what one is supposed to do. Not all bliss is domestic.
And not all bliss is even blissful. Look back at the Shaky Bridge Theory: “Adrenaline makes the heart grow fonder,” Dr. Ian Kerner said.
