Falling in Love
According to Shrek, Plato, and C. S. Lewis
When Shrek finally manages to cross the moat of boiling lava, escape the incinerating breath of the dragon, and get to Princess Fiona’s bedroom on the top of the castle, he shakes her roughly and shouts,
“Wake up!”
The princess is indignant. “What kind of greeting is that?” she demands. “You’re supposed to wake me with a gentle kiss!”
Shrek just rolls his eyes, and says: “Oh yeah? Where did you get that idea from?” “I read it in a book,” Fiona responds with utter confidence.
Would Fiona not have fallen in love with Shrek had she never read the story of Sleeping Beauty? Did the idea of falling in love with a complete stranger really just come from a book? The experience feels so overwhelming that most of us think of it as being as universal as mother- love itself. Yet according to the 17th Century French writer, François de la Rochefoucauld, “we only fall in love because we keep reading about it” — in love stories and poetry.
The phrase “romantic love” was first coined in 1675. Yet the word “romantic” is much older. It comes from the Latin word “roman” which means “story” (usually a story about a girl falling in love with a boy). So if the literal meaning of “romantic love” is “story-love,” then La Rochefoucauld could be right: we may fall in love because we keep reading stories or watching movies about people falling in love. I guess we could call it the “Shrek-effect.”
Yet according to anthropologist William Jankowiak (University of Nevada), a specialist in cross-cultural love and sex, romantic love is also found in countries with no access to our love stories. “In my cross-cultural study of romantic love,” he writes, “we found it in 146 out of 166 sampled cultures.”
But why would a Bantu boy in Zimbabwe fall in love with a Bantu girl without ever reading a love story? Where on earth would he even get the idea from without stories like Sleeping Beauty or The Fault Is In Our Stars? Is “falling in love” written into our DNA? Is it somehow necessary for our survival as a species? If it is, then why have most cultures throughout history suppressed romantic love as a dangerous emotion which could disrupt the almost universal tradition of arranged marriages?
Josh Mathews, a former student of mine teaching English at a large Chinese university, told me recently about walking past the college soccer field late at night and seeing it covered with bodies: hundreds of Chinese students kissing and fondling each other in the dark. Yet very few of them, he says, will ever end up marrying each other. For most students, their parents have already arranged their marriages, often before they are even born. Yet “romantic love” still flourishes on Chinese campuses because it is the only period in their lives in which they will be able to “choose” their own partners. And when they graduate, it is all over. No “happily ever after” like in the story books.
So the feelings of romantic love may indeed be universal. Yet linking these feelings to marriage may not be. Love and marriage may only “go together like a horse and carriage” in musicals like Oklahoma. (And even in the real Oklahoma, the romantic love “high” seldom lasts for more than a year or two after the marriage vows have been spoken).
And yet…I feel that the real definition of romantic love has not yet been spoken of in this essay. There is another theory of romantic love that I believe completely trumps both the “storybook” and the DNA theories mentioned previously and provides the most compelling definition of romantic love we have.
And for this theory we need to return to Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher who wrote the first great treatise on “falling in love” — clearly a universal experience that the Greeks named after their god, Eros (which is exactly what happens when you are impaled by his arrow — you fall! — desperately, suddenly, and inexplicably — in love).
In his famous love treatise, The Phaedrus, Plato concludes that our ability to fall in love with a total stranger must be some sort of “flashback” (anamnesis he called it: a memory from a previous life) of someone we met in a previous existence. Our souls, he argued, have existed for thousands of years before they took up residence in our bodies. What else could explain such a sudden yearning for someone we know nothing about? So when we fall in love (or are impaled by Eros’ arrow), our souls are recognizing someone we may have previously been in love with. And it drives us crazy because nothing else on earth seems able to satisfy this inconsolable memory. For Plato therefore, falling in love is a remembering, and the wisest of us — -the true lovers — -have the best memories! Plato, therefore, concludes that the experience of falling in love is supernatural — -something caused by the gods, rather than by love stories or DNA.
It is also the only theory that seems to explain my own inconsolable experience of falling in love as a college sophomore: when Kay first smiled at me it felt like a sudden lurch of “memory.” I was nineteen. And she was eighteen. I had met many girls. But I had never before felt this. After years of female deprivation growing up in an all-boys boarding school in South Africa, my romantic dreams of true love were finally coming true!
But I made a strange and agonizing discovery: I discovered that the more time I spent with her, the more unbearable my yearning for her became. I found it hard to sleep, hard to swallow, and impossible to study. Waves of euphoria kept rushing over me and then receding, leaving me with a desperate ache — -perhaps a premonition of the deeper heartache that awaited me. I had no idea who this petite sophomore really was. I only knew that I was experiencing something I could never explain. Was it a strange neural hurricane sweeping through the amygdala of my fore-brain? (And if so, what triggered it?) I had read dozens of love stories, but none of them seemed to be coming to mind. My grades that semester plummeted to a 1.4 GPA. And my love for Kay remained stubbornly unrequited.
Yet what Plato helped me to see was that my feelings for her were very real — -even though never fully reciprocated. They were real because they were supernatural — a divine vision of who she really was: a girl created in the very image of God. And seeing this image can be an overwhelming sight.
CS Lewis says that we all carry on us a “weight of Glory” (God’s image stamped upon us) which would blind us were we to recognize it.
And this, perhaps, is what love at first sight really is: a sudden recognition of this divine weight. But it’s a vision that seems to fade because we cannot hold onto such a sight for long. And so we fall out of love and declare it an illusion. Perhaps we should admit that it is our eyes that fade, and not the vision itself. Lewis believed that only in heaven would we be able to sustain the heady experience of “falling in love” without our hard drives crashing. And given eternity, we would have both the time and the supernatural eyesight to bear the incredible weight of Glory in everyone we meet. But here on earth, we must be satisfied with the occasional stab of romantic love: perhaps a maddeningly short preview of the Real Story to come.
