{"id":12214,"date":"2026-01-08T20:18:51","date_gmt":"2026-01-09T00:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-trouble-with-love-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2026-01-08T20:18:51","modified_gmt":"2026-01-09T00:18:51","slug":"the-trouble-with-love-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/the-trouble-with-love-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"The Trouble with Love \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"The<\/a><\/p>\n

Two centuries ago, a small group of brilliant and troubled young people trembling with the unprocessed traumas of their childhoods laid in their poems and letters and journals the foundational modern mythos of love. Although none but one<\/a> of them lived past their thirties, they touched the lives of generations to come with their art and their ideas about life. <\/p>\n

We call them the Romantics, keep quoting their poems in our vows and keep paging through their textbook for suffering.<\/p>\n

Pulsating through our culture as unexamined dogma is their idea that there is a hierarchy of the affections and that romantic love sits at the top as the organizing principle of our emotional lives, the aim and the end of our existential longing. It is a religion that even people with extraordinary capacity for critical thinking in other domains of life tend not to question. And yet when we let our hearts be large enough and real enough, we discover that there is but a porous and permeable membrane between friendship and passion<\/a>, that collaboration is a form of intimacy, that family can mean many different things and look many different ways; we discover that romantic love is overwhelmingly a relation not between complete human beings but between idealized selves and mutual projections \u2014 the most powerful prompt for fantasy the creative imagination has invented. <\/p>\n

<\/a>
Illustration from An ABZ of Love<\/em><\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa<\/strong> (June 13, 1888\u2013November 30, 1935) offers a sobering antidote to the cult of romantic love in a passage from The Book of Disquiet<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) \u2014 the posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a good explorer in the lifelong expedition to yourself<\/a> and how to unself into who you really are<\/a>. He writes:<\/p>\n

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Romantic love is a rarefied product of century after century of Christian influence, and everything about its substance and development can be explained to the unenlightened by comparing it to a suit fashioned by the soul or the imagination and used to clothe those whom the mind thinks it fits, when they happen to come along. <\/p>\n

But every suit, since it isn\u2019t eternal, lasts as long as it lasts; and soon, under the fraying clothes of the ideal we\u2019ve formed, the real body of the person we dressed it in shows through. <\/p>\n

Romantic love is thus a path to disillusion, unless this disillusion, accepted from the start, decides to vary the ideal constantly, constantly sewing new suits in the soul\u2019s workshops so as to constantly renew the appearance of the person they clothe.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The standard romantic model is in this sense a warping of the deepest, truest kind of love \u2014 the kind Iris Murdoch so perfectly defined as \u201cthe extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real\u2026 the discovery of reality.\u201d<\/a> Romantic love, Pessoa observes, is the flight from reality into fantasy, the projection of oneself onto the other:<\/p>\n

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We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It\u2019s our own concept \u2014 our own selves \u2014 that we love.<\/p>\n

[\u2026]<\/p>\n

The relations between one soul and another, expressed through such uncertain and variable things as shared words and proffered gestures, are deceptively complex. The very act of meeting each other is a non-meeting. Two people say \u201cI love you\u201d or mutually think it and feel it, and each has in mind a different idea, a different life, perhaps even a different colour or fragrance, in the abstract sum of impressions that constitute the soul\u2019s activity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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Card from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days<\/em><\/a>, also available as a stand-alone print<\/a> and as stationery cards<\/a>, benefitting the Audubon Society.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Couple with Iris Murdoch on how to see more clearly and love more purely<\/a>, then revisit Martha Nussbaum\u2019s superb litmus test for how to know whether you really love a person<\/a> and Simone de Beauvoir on how two souls can interact with one another in a meaningful way<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
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