Romantic Love: An analysis of Andrew Sullivan?s Article

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Many people want to have a romantic love in their life; however, romance is such abstract feeling so that we do not know whether it exists or not. In many cases, we can find that romantic love do exist in varieties of movie, song, and even books. Therefore, some people do believe that romantic love exists, and they feel that romantic love does not seem to be abstract. For example, we can find in many movies that the main male character sees the main female character, and then all of a sudden, he realizes that she is the one he wants to be with for the rest of his life, and vice versa. We also can find the same scenes in numerous of songs and books. After all of these movies, songs, and books, we seem to be hypnotized; there is such thing as we called “romantic love.” In the American Heritage Dictionary, romantic is defined “expressive of or conducive to love.” However, what is love? According to the American Heritage Dictionary, love is defined as deep affection and warm feeling for another. Besides this one, love also have another definition such as, the emotion of sex and romance; strong sexual desire for another person. The ideal romantic love—expressive of deep affection and warm feeling for another—is what we’ve been taught the true meaning of romantic love is. But according to the American Heritage Dictionary, romantic love can also mean the expressive of strong sexual desire for another person. It comes down to one question—Does the ideal romantic love really exist or not. According to Andrew Sullivan in the Love Bloat: Why Obsess Over Romance?, there is not such thing called romantic love as we idealized, and his opinion about romantic love is right; there is not such thing called romantic love.
In the Love Bloat: Why Obsess Over Romance?, Sullivan says that the concept of romantic love is crock by any serious person before the 19th century. And Sullivan applies Shakespeare’s idea of love—it comes; it goes. If taken too seriously, it kills. Sullivan also gives some his idea of what relationships truly are, and which are useful economic bargains. Sullivan uses Rousseau as another support for his opinion about romantic love; Rousseau saw bourgeois love as a salve for the empty emotional center of restrained, law-bound societies. Rousseau wanted to substitute the passion of people for truth and honor and power with something just as absorbing but nowhere near as dangerous.

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