Shauna Cooper

Honors in Philosophy and Religion

Major: Philosophy and Religion Minor: Asian Studies

Supervisor: Matthew Eshleman, Philosophy and Religion

An Existential Critique of Romantic Love

Should it be so surprising to discover that the essence of romantic love is conflict? The overwhelming anecdotal and empirical evidence stands on its own: over 51% of marriages end in divorce, over 80% of honeymooners report serious argument and dissension during their consummating romantic excursion. Does the silent and uncomfortable laughter reveal our recognition of the truth of this 'outrageous' thesis? The inclination will be almost inevitable: focus on the successful” 49%. Surely we find here conflict’s resolution. To these so called success stories, we counter that they either resolve themselves into friendship, where the embers of erotic passion slowly extinguish and die, or cultivate periodic series of conflicts in order to maintain erotic love’s voluptuous heat. Do we all “know” this truth but nonetheless remain unwilling to accept it? Does cultivated conflict require willful ignorance? This thesis argues that prominent accounts of romantic love found in the history of philosophy exhibit an important structural homology. Accounts of romantic love tend to begin with various observations regarding conflict, whether conflict within oneself, as between reason and appetites, conflict between two people, as in competing desires and issues of superiority and control, or conflicts in cultural principles, as in how young men (later to be active members of society) can play passive roles with their older male lovers. Sometimes the conflict may be more obviously existential: humans experience a fundamental incompleteness and long to find wholeness in their other half. Romantic love, in this case, offers the only hope of self-completion in the dyad (or unity within the duality) oneself-with-another. It will be shown, that nothing could be further from the truth. Human existence longs for its impossible completion (in various ways, only one of which involves romance) and in the inevitable failure to achieve wholeness one generates various forms of conflict. Romantic love thrives on conflict, perhaps driven by the insatiable but inevitably unsatisfied longing for wholeness. Conflict fuels romantic love, where conflict resolution always dissolves the passion of romance into something other than love.