Is Romantic love the Big Daddy of Love??
Love is a powerful feeling, often the reason most people walk around content.
I confess- love for a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a pet, a friend or a relative is behind my many decisions. I accept that with joy, for what is life without embracing and being embraced by a myriad of people and experiencing a variety of emotions that aid emotional growth. You will notice I have excluded one prominent kind of love above - romantic love (Love for God and Country, I set aside as out of scope for this note). This is because if love-gurus (for want of a better term) are to be believed, then romantic love is a peg deeper than other kinds. I wouldn't know, for I have never been in love.
These lesser loves bring happiness and pain for sure but not one of them is as elevating or devastating as romantic love can be, they claim. The glories of romantic love are too numerous to recount. As evidence they present marvelous structures, lovely sonnets and plays. The love-gurus site a couple of scenarios to strengthen their claim on the devastation romantic love causes- Does a man consider ending his life because his mother or father rejected him? Does he lose the will to be happy because a pet died, or because his friends think him sub-human??
Do they have a point?
Non-believers say such responses are from people who are emotionally fragile or have been conditioned by the environment around them to act a certain way. Their argument is that such people would have been laid low by a number of other painful experiences brought on by not getting what they want most. An emotionally strong person have moped a bit and gotten over a lost love, gotten on with life, they state.
Have there been cases where people have been devastated to the extent of being unable to be function normally by another kind of love? Or been so inspired by love for a blood relative that they built a majestic building a la Taj or wrote soaring plays paying homage to the long suffering sibling? Non Believers say yes - Many a sonnet has been written as ode to a loving Mother, tales of parental sacrifice are legion, so are tales of awe-inspiring friendships.
Has romantic love gotten the credit for rousing such depth of emotion unwittingly because it has been used as a facade to generate more excitement in the hearer of the story? Glorious plays that celebrate romantic love will still have been written- maybe because it is easier to sell the notion of one person coming to mean more to another than anyone or anything else? Romantic love has the power to hurt and elevate to about the same degree as other kinds of love scream the non-believers. All kinds of love affects people to their limits of endurance.
Is it therefore merely romantic to extol romantic love with such power? Or is romantic love truly the Big Daddy of Love?
