Is Romance Dead?

Selfishness isn't usually the word we use to describe love.
Of all the nonsense written about love, none is more absurd than the notion that ideal love is selfless. To love is to see myself in you and to wish to celebrate myself with you. What I love is the embodiment of my values in another person. Love is an act of self-assertion, self-expression and a celebration of being alive.

I'm not talking about acting like nothing matters but your own needs. I'm talking about having a healthy respect for one's own needs and interests, coupled with an understanding that that's true for everyone else. Self-esteem is vital. It has become something of a cliché to observe that if we do not love ourselves, we cannot love anyone else. That is true enough, but it is only part of the picture. If we do not love ourselves, it is almost impossible to believe fully that we are loved by someone else. It is almost impossible to accept love.

Do you believe in love at first sight?
To love a person is to know and love the person. But we can pick up an enormous amount about another human being just by exchanging a couple of sentences. It's not yet knowledge, it's an intuition that motivates you to want to find out more. You meet a man who makes a profound impression on you. He asks you out, and over time you find that he's who you thought he was. You find yourself feeling more and more. I wouldn't call that falling in love instantly, but it can feel like it was instant because of the strong immediate attraction. It became love after you had validated it by experience.

You received a lot of publicity many years ago about your open marriage and affair with Ayn Rand, who was also married at the time. What do you think now about the problems posed by jealousy and the idea of non-exclusive sexual relationships?
I think that a non-exclusive relationship is an almost certain recipe for disaster. Cultures that take extramarital sex for granted are not cultures in which marriage is associated with intense passion. When we love passionately, I believe the desire for sexual exclusivity is entirely normal.

If we wish to minimize problems of jealousy, we must never give our partner grounds to doubt our honesty. And we must never ignore or refuse to deal with our partner's painful feelings.

Most couples or individuals who have experimented with sexually "open" relationships in their younger years are generally inclined, by the time they are in their 40s or early 50s, to favor sexual exclusivity. There is the feeling that romantic love, in the context of an exclusive relationship, may in the end be the most exciting adventure there is. This is my own conviction.

© 2008