We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love

by Robert A. Johnson

Women also have been taught to idealize masculine values at the expense of the feminine side of life. Many women have spent their lives in a constant feeling of inferiority because they felt that to be feminine was “second best.” Women have been trained that only masculine activities, thinking, power, and achieving have any real value. Thus Western woman finds herself in the same psychological dilemma as Western man: developing a one-sided, competitive mastery of the masculine qualities at the expense of her feminine side.

Romantic love is the single greatest energy system in the Western psyche. In our culture it has supplanted religion as the arena in which men and women seek meaning, transcendence, wholeness, and ecstasy. As a mass phenomenon, romantic love is peculiar to the West. We are so accustomed to living with the beliefs and assumptions of romantic love that we think it is the only form of “love” on which marriage or love relationships can be based.

When we are “in love” we believe we have found the ultimate meaning of life, revealed in another human being. We feel we are finally completed, that we have found the missing parts of ourselves. Life suddenly seems to have a wholeness, a superhuman intensity that lifts us high above the ordinary plain of existence. For us, these are the sure signs of “true love.” The psychological package includes an unconscious demand that our lover or spouse always provide us with this feeling of ecstasy and intensity.

Despite our ecstasy when we are “in love,” we spend much of our time with a deep sense of loneliness, alienation, and frustration over our inability to make genuinely loving and committed relationships. Usually we blame other people for failing us; it doesn’t occur to us that perhaps it is we who need to change our own unconscious attitudes—the expectations and demands we impose on our relationships and on other people. This is the great wound in the Western psyche. It is the primary psychological problem of our Western culture. Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness.

The ideal of romantic love burst into Western society during the Middle Ages. It first appeared in our literature in the myth of Tristan and Iseult, then in the love poems and songs of the troubadours. It was called “courtly love”; its model was the brave knight who worshiped a fair lady as his inspiration, the symbol of all beauty and perfection, the ideal that moved him to be noble, spiritual, refined, and high-minded. In our time we have mixed courtly love into our sexual relationships and marriages, but we still hold the medieval belief that true love has to be the ecstatic adoration of a man or woman who carries, for us, the image of perfection.

Like Tristan, we are the children of sadness. Western people are children of inner poverty, though outwardly we have everything. Probably no other people in history have been so lonely, so alienated, so confused over values, so neurotic. We have dominated our environment with sledge-hammer force and electronic precision. We amass riches on an unprecedented scale. But few of us, very few indeed, are at peace with ourselves, secure in our relationships, content in our loves, or at home in the world.

No aspect of the human psyche can live in a healthy state unless it is balanced by its complementary opposite.

Many Western people, caught up in misunderstandings of Eastern religions or philosophy, make an ideal of getting rid of the ego. We need to understand that the ego is absolutely necessary; it has a vital role to play in the great drama of evolving consciousness. The ego has the specific task of going to the inner “Ireland,” of making the synthesis among the different centers of consciousness within the vast universe of the psyche.

We are all so caught up in the belief that romantic love is “true love” that we use the term for many things that are not romantic love at all. We assume that if it is love, it must be “romance,” and if it is romance, it must be “love.” The fact that we say “romance” when we mean “love” shows us that underneath our language there is a psychological muddle. Our confusion in language is the symptom that tells us we have lost the consciousness of what love is, what romance is, and what the differences are between them.

It is difficult to look objectively at romance; it is painful, for we fear that reality will drive out love, and that life will then be cold and dismal. But one of the great needs of modern people is to learn the difference between human love as a basis for relationship, and romantic love as an inner ideal, a path to the inner world. Love does not suffer by being freed from the belief systems of romantic love. Love’s status will only improve as love is distinguished from romance.

Jung once quoted a medieval alchemist who said, “Only what is separated may be properly joined.” When two things are muddled together they need to be separated, distinguished, and untangled so that they may later be rejoined in a workable synthesis.

Romantic love began as a path of spiritual aspiration; unconsciously, we seek that same path in romantic love today. In the symbolism of the love potion we are face to face suddenly with the greatest paradox and the deepest mystery in our modern Western lives: What we seek constantly in romantic love is not human love or human relationship alone; we also seek a religious experience, a vision of wholeness.

Romantic love has always been inextricably tied to spiritual aspiration. This is so obvious that it would seem unnecessary to say it, yet we all avert our gaze and miss the obvious. It is a truth too close to see. We only need to look at the love stories, the poetry, the songs that come from our romantic era, and we find that man-in-love has made of woman a symbol of something universal, something inward, eternal, and transcendent. What he sees in woman makes him feel that he has finally realized himself, that he sees all the meaning of life. He sees a special reality revealed in her; he feels completed, ennobled, refined, spiritualized, uplifted, transformed into a new, better, and whole man.

It is because we won’t consciously give a place to spiritual aspiration in our modern lives. It is out of fashion, we don’t understand what it is, and we won’t admit to it. We aren’t consciously interested in wholeness—only in production, control, and power; we don’t believe in the spirit—only in what is physical and sexual. But our urge toward the soul finds its way involuntarily into the one place we would never look for it—into the projections, the ideals, the ecstasies and despairs, the passions and strivings, of romantic love. For lack of any other channel, any other form in which it could be lived in our modern culture, our religious instinct has migrated almost completely into the one secret place where it is allowed to live sub rosa: romantic love. This is why we feel that our lives are absolutely meaning less except when we are “in love,” and that is why romantic love has become the single greatest psychological force in our culture.

It is a momentous discovery that we have taken our instinct for wholeness and projected it completely into our loves. We have taken the imago dei out of the temple, out of heaven, and suddenly relocated it here in our midst, contained in the relationship between two human beings. This is the incredible reversal of human instincts, the momentous rechanneling of human energies, that was accomplished in the sorcery of the love potion. In the feeling of being possessed by our loves, of being caught up in some power that completely overwhelms us, we rediscover our religious life. So long as we are “in love” with someone, the world takes on a brightness and meaningfulness that no mortal human being could ever bestow. But when we fall “out of love” the world suddenly seems dismal and empty, even though we are still with the same human being who had inspired such rapture before. This is why men and women put such impossible demands on each other in their relationships: We actually believe unconsciously that this mortal human being has the responsibility for making our lives whole, keeping us happy, making our lives meaningful, intense, and ecstatic!

A man actually begins to demand of his wife or girlfriend that she be the goddess, that she be his soul and bring him a constant, ecstatic sense of perfection. Rather than look within himself, where anima natively dwells, he demands his soul of his external environment; he demands it of woman. He is usually so busy projecting his inner ideal out onto her that he rarely sees the value and the beauty of the woman who is actually there. And if his projection suddenly evaporates and he is no longer “in love” in the romantic sense, then he finds himself in a terrible conflict. He wants to follow his projection as it flies off and alights on another woman, like a butterfly that moves from flower to flower.

The courtly belief that true love can only exist outside marriage is still with us today, unconsciously affecting us more than we know. A man expects his wife to take care of the children, have food on the table, contribute to the family income, and back him up in the daily struggles of human life. But some other part of him wants her to be the incarnation of anima, the holy Lady in the sky who is always beautiful and perfect. He wonders how the pure and shining goddess whom he adored turned into this ordinary wife who seems utterly unreasonable. A woman sees her husband working, paying the bills, getting the car repaired, and defending his empires, living the ordinariness of life. She wonders what happened to the knight who adored and worshiped her when he was “courting” her, in the days when everything was so intense, so ecstatic, so blissful. The old unconscious belief returns to haunt them, whispering that “true love” is somewhere else, that it can’t be found within the ordinariness of marriage.

These are the terrible splits that we all carry around within us. On one hand, we want stability and relationship with an ordinary human being; on the other hand, we unconsciously demand someone who will be the incarnation of soul, who will reveal the godhead and the Realm of Light, who will move us to a state of religious adoration and fill our lives with ecstasy. Here we find, still living within us, the Catharist fantasy, the religious ideal in disguise.

The feminine, whether in a woman or a man, will usually drop her grudges, and forget the wounds of the past if she is offered genuine relatedness and affection in the present. This is one of the most noble and beautiful instincts in woman, one of the ways that she serves and transforms life.

But a commitment to passion is not a substitute for commitment to a human being. In our culture we have these two feelings completely confused. We are all committed to finding passion, we are all committed to being eternally “in love”; and we imagine that this is the same thing as being committed to a person. But the passion fades; the passion migrates to someone else we feel attracted to. If we are committed only to follow where passion leads, then there can be no true loyalty to an individual person.

The withdrawal of romantic projections also gives him the power to see woman as she is, to relate to her and value her as a person rather than as the carrier of his lost soul and of his unlived life. It opens the possibility of relating to a woman as an individual, as an equal, as a being in her own right. It enables him to begin to know her as she is, in all her complexity, in all her strengths and gifts—so different from his own and yet so necessary for his world. Strangely, most men react to this stage of romantic love—this breaking of the spell—as though it were a great misfortune! It is the crucial point in an evolution, the opening of a wonderful possibility; but somehow he convinces himself that it is a disaster.

The issue is equally difficult for women. Many women are ready to rise up in rebellion over being put in the perpetual role of housekeeper, child-bearer, and servant. But few women object to being made the screen on which men project anima. Our culture trains women that their role is not to be human beings but to be mirrors who reflect back to a man his ideal or his fantasy. She must struggle to resemble the current Hollywood starlets; she must dress and groom herself and behave in such a way as to make herself into the collective image of anima. She must not be an individual so much as the incarnation of men’s fantasy.

If he has no relationship to her as one human being to another, then there is nothing left when the projections evaporate.

Ultimately, the only enduring relationships will be between couples who consent to see each other as ordinary, imperfect people and who love each other without illusion and without inflated expectations.

Our desperate need is to realize that we need both qualities in life: We need individuality and we also need relationship to a particular person. We can’t have one at the expense of the other; no man can be fully an individual unless he is fully related, and his capacity for genuine relatedness grows in proportion as he becomes a complete individual. These two aspects of life are yoked together by a deep and ancient bond, for they are really two sides of the same archetype, two faces of the same reality.

Yet most men follow Tristan’s pattern. When a flesh-and-blood, mortal human appears in a man’s life who offers him love and relatedness, he ends in rejecting her because she can’t measure up to the idealized perfection—Iseult the Fair—who can only live in his inner mind.

One of the great paradoxes in romantic love is that it never produces human relationship as long as it stays romantic. It produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals; but people never seem to settle into relationship with each other as flesh-and-blood human beings until they are out of the romantic love stage, until they love each other instead of being “in love.”

We don’t like anything that is “simple”: To us “simple” means dull or dense or stupid. We have forgotten that simplicity is a need in human life: It is the human art of finding meaning and joy in the small, natural, and less dramatic things. At its highest, it is a consciousness that sees through the confusions we invent to the essential, uncomplicated reality of life. But in our era, we have a collective prejudice against Iseult of the White Hands. If a direct, uncomplicated, simple relationship offers us happiness, we won’t accept it. It is “too simple,” “too dull.”

We marry in form, we say the words, but we don’t inwardly make the commitment. There is a provisional quality in most relationships; each person secretly writes an escape clause into it. Each of us reserves the right to break his or her commitment to this physical person if a passionate vision should happen to be projected on another person.

It simply never enters our romantic heads that there is something strange about seeking a so-called “love” for the sake of my fulfillment, my thrills, my dreams coming true, my fantasy, my “need to be loved,” my ideal of the perfect love, my security, my entertainment. When we genuinely love another person, it is a spontaneous act of being, an identification with the other person that causes us to affirm, value, and honor him or her, to desire that person’s happiness and well-being. In those rare moments when we are loving, rather than focused on our own egos, we stop asking what dreams this person is going to fulfill for us, what intense and extraordinary adventures he or she is going to provide.

Suffering is the inevitable path that must be trod on the way to consciousness, the inevitable price for the transformation we seek. By no means can we escape it; we who try to evade it never succeed; and we are twice unlucky, for we pay the price, anyway, but miss our transformation. There is a terrible and immutable law at work: We only transform when we take our suffering consciously and voluntarily; to attempt to evade only puts us into the karmic cycles that repeat endlessly and produce nothing.

Only when my ego has a capacity for reverence, only when respect and awe flow from me, can anything be “sacred” for me.

If there is such a thing as psychological blasphemy, it is to take what is sacred and try to convert it to something else; it is to try to make the sacred into grist for the ego’s mill. Psychological sin does not consist in sex nor in being physical nor in “immorality” but rather in calling a thing other than what it really is, treating it as something other than what it is, pretending to do one thing while doing another. This is the sin against consciousness, the refusal to take life consciously.

To return anima to the basilica is a sacrificial act. All men have the option of trying to live anima through other people. To give up that attempt takes a conscious act of sacrifice; one must sacrifice a whole level of existence in order to move on to another. From the ego’s viewpoint, it looks like death. To give up living anima by projection means to pull most of the artificial intensity out of relationships; it means that things will seem quieter and less exciting. To put his soul in the cathedral and stop trying to live it though a woman means that a man removes an entire dimension of his life from his human relationship and re-establishes it elsewhere, on another level of himself—a level that he can’t live outwardly, that he must live by himself.

Therefore, when I say that “I love,” it is not I who love, but, in reality, Love who acts through me. Love is not so much something I do as something that I am. Love is not a doing but a state of being—a relatedness, a connectedness to another mortal, an identification with her or him that simply flows within me and through me, independent of my intentions or my efforts.

Love is the power within us that affirms and values another human being as he or she is. Human love affirms that person who is actually there, rather than the ideal we would like him or her to be or the projection that flows from our minds. Love is the inner god who opens our blind eyes to the beauty, value, and quality of the other person. Love causes us to value that person as a total, individual self, and this means that we accept the negative side as well as the positive, the imperfections as well as the admirable qualities. When one truly loves the human being rather than the projection, one loves the shadow just as one loves the rest. One accepts the other person’s totality.

Human love causes a man to see the intrinsic value in a woman; therefore love leads him to honor and serve her, rather than to try to use her for his ego’s purposes. When love is guiding him, he is concerned with her needs and her well-being, not fixated on his own wants and whims.

Love alters our sense of importance. Through love we see that the other individual has as great a value in the cosmos as our own; it becomes just as important to us that he or she should be whole, should live fully, ...

Thus love is by its very nature the exact opposite of egocentricity. We use the word love loosely. We use it to dignify any number of demands for attention, power, security, or entertainment from other people. But when we are looking out for our own self-styled “needs,” our own desires, our own dreams, and our power over people, this is not love. Love is utterly distinct from our ego’s desires and power plays. It leads in a different lirection: toward the goodness, the value, and the needs of the people around us.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not vaunt itself, is not puffed up…. Love does not seek her own way, is not easily provoked, is not anxious to suspect evil…bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails: but whether there be prophecies, they shall fail, whether there be tongues, they shall cease, whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.

Romance must, by its very nature, deteriorate into egotism. For romance is not a love that is directed at another human being; the passion of romance is always directed at our own projections, our own expectations, our own fantasies. In a very real sense, it is a love not of another person, but of ourselves.

Many years ago a wise friend gave me a name for human love. She called it “stirring-the-oatmeal” love. She was right: Within this phrase, if we will humble ourselves enough to look, is the very essence of what human love is, and it shows us the principal differences between human love and romance. Stirring oatmeal is an humble act—not exciting or thrilling. But it symbolizes a relatedness that brings love down to earth. It represents a willingness to share ordinary human life, to find meaning in the simple, unromantic tasks: earning a living, living within a budget, putting out the garbage, feeding the baby in the middle of the night. To “stir the oatmeal” means to find the relatedness, the value, even the beauty, in simple and ordinary things, not to eternally demand a cosmic drama, an entertainment, or an extraordinary intensity in everything. Like the rice hulling of the Zen monks, the spinning wheel of Ghandi, the tent making of Saint Paul, it represents the discovery of the sacred in the midst of the humble and ordinary.

When a couple are genuinely related to each other, they are willing to enter into the whole spectrum of human life together. They transform even the unexciting, difficult, and mundane things into a joyful and fulfilling component of life. By contrast, romantic love can only last so long as a couple are “high” on one another, so long as the money lasts and the entertainments are exciting. “Stirring the oatmeal” means that two people take their love off the airy level of exciting fantasy and convert it into earthy, practical immediacy. Love is content to do many things that ego is bored with. Love is willing to work with the other person’s moods and unreasonableness. Love is willing to fix breakfast and balance the checkbook. Love is willing to do these “oatmeal” things of life because it is related to a person, not a projection.

Human love sees another person as an individual and makes an individualized relationship to him or her. Romantic love sees the other person only as a role player in the drama.

Human love necessarily includes friendship: friendship within relationship, within marriage, between husband and wife. When a man and a woman are truly friends, they know each other’s difficult points and weaknesses, but they are not inclined to stand in judgment on them. They are more concerned with helping each other and enjoying each other than they are with finding fault. Friends, genuine friends, are like Kaherdin: They want to affirm rather than to judge; they don’t coddle, but neither do they dwell on our inadequacies. Friends back each other up in the tough times, help each other with the sordid and ordinary tasks of life. They don’t impose impossible standards on each other, they don’t ask for perfection, and they help each other rather than grind each other down with demands.

When two people are “in love,” people commonly say that they are “more than just friends.” But in the long run, they seem to treat each other as less than friends. Most people think that being “in love” is a much more intimate, much more “meaningful,” relationship than “mere” friendship. Why, then, do couples refuse each other the selfless love, the kindness and good will, that they readily give to their friends? People can’t ask of their friends that they carry all their projections, be scapegoats for all their moods, keep them feeling happy, and make life complete for them. Why do couples impose these demands on each other?