In that regard, should we assume that the missing component that makes love “romantic” or “limeric” is irrationality?
My instinct is that if someone has a gooey, excessive feeling that the other is Significant it counts as romantic, but if one had a rational, evidence based belief that the other is Significant, it would not be considered romantic enough, even if the feeling of emotional bond would be much more resilient in the second example.
To use a more concrete example:
1. Bill meets Alice and falls madly in love with her. He does irrational, excessively symbolic and juvenile things to impress her. They break up anyway after a turbulent 3 months. Their Love is Romantic.
2. Frank meets Jane on a professional dating app, and they see with perfect clarity that their values, ideologies, libidos, tastes and lifestyles are perfectly aligned. They marry and spent 57 years together in an easy bliss, until they die. Their relationship would not be qualified as romantic, even though it generated more happiness and a stronger bond.
Therefore, I would suggest that the important component of romance are: irrationality, excessiveness, emotional risk and playing against bad statistical odds. In other words, drama.
I’ve been married just under 27 years now, and ooey gooeyness has been on a long slow uptrend, so I don’t think that irrationality, drama, or short-livedness have anything to do with it. We were together for five years before that, and I asked her to marry me because at some point it became obvious that I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life without her.
Granted, the first year or two of knowing each other was rather turbulent, but during that time I mostly didn’t see her as The One or really even very Significant. That was something that took time, moving from FWBs to VCFWBs to romantic feels.
I think that drama is what we see portrayed in media as romantic, but that’s because the genre of said media is drama (or comedy). And just generally, things in media have to be made more dramatic in order to be entertaining. It’s usually not considered entertainment to see two people who are sweet on each other break into smiles every time they see each other and practically moan at any form of physical contact with one another—unless the genre of the piece is “slice of life” or “fluff”, and most popular media is not that.
In that regard, should we assume that the missing component that makes love “romantic” or “limeric” is irrationality?
My instinct is that if someone has a gooey, excessive feeling that the other is Significant it counts as romantic, but if one had a rational, evidence based belief that the other is Significant, it would not be considered romantic enough, even if the feeling of emotional bond would be much more resilient in the second example.
To use a more concrete example:
1. Bill meets Alice and falls madly in love with her. He does irrational, excessively symbolic and juvenile things to impress her. They break up anyway after a turbulent 3 months. Their Love is Romantic.
2. Frank meets Jane on a professional dating app, and they see with perfect clarity that their values, ideologies, libidos, tastes and lifestyles are perfectly aligned. They marry and spent 57 years together in an easy bliss, until they die. Their relationship would not be qualified as romantic, even though it generated more happiness and a stronger bond.
Therefore, I would suggest that the important component of romance are: irrationality, excessiveness, emotional risk and playing against bad statistical odds. In other words, drama.
I’ve been married just under 27 years now, and ooey gooeyness has been on a long slow uptrend, so I don’t think that irrationality, drama, or short-livedness have anything to do with it. We were together for five years before that, and I asked her to marry me because at some point it became obvious that I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life without her.
Granted, the first year or two of knowing each other was rather turbulent, but during that time I mostly didn’t see her as The One or really even very Significant. That was something that took time, moving from FWBs to VCFWBs to romantic feels.
I think that drama is what we see portrayed in media as romantic, but that’s because the genre of said media is drama (or comedy). And just generally, things in media have to be made more dramatic in order to be entertaining. It’s usually not considered entertainment to see two people who are sweet on each other break into smiles every time they see each other and practically moan at any form of physical contact with one another—unless the genre of the piece is “slice of life” or “fluff”, and most popular media is not that.