Romantic love involves fidelity, enchantment, dreaming. Libertine love is made of adventure, is lasciviousness, is unfaithful, and doesn’t cultivate the poetry or the elevation of the loved being. Romantic and libertine loves are at opposed poles.
It’s in these terms that we usually place the issue. But the reality isn’t always entirely like that. Things can be more contradictory than we usually admit.
Firstly, and as we all know, romantic love isn’t an asexual love. Sex is at the heart of most romantic loves, inspiring and giving them content. Even the very first great chanted medieval love – the one involving Heloise and Abelard – is a profoundly sexual love. Sex isn’t an exclusive of libertine love.
Secondly, libertine love is not necessarily a dissolute love, without rules, without poetry, lyricism, reduced to sex and its quest. There are exceptions. An example? The Art of Loveof Ovid, the great classic treaty on libertine love.
The Art of Love is decidedly an unromantic work. It can even be classified as dissolute and amoral, with some fundament. Yet on the whole the love presented by Ovid is chiefly a game of adventure, surely involving seduction, adventure and infidelity, but without ever sinking to brutality, exploration or obscenity. On the contrary. The poetic element in the Ovid love is very strong.
Firstly, and as we all know, romantic love isn’t an asexual love. Sex is at the heart of most romantic loves, inspiring and giving them content. Even the very first great chanted medieval love – the one involving Heloise and Abelard – is a profoundly sexual love. Sex isn’t an exclusive of libertine love.
Secondly, libertine love is not necessarily a dissolute love, without rules, without poetry, lyricism, reduced to sex and its quest. There are exceptions. An example? The Art of Loveof Ovid, the great classic treaty on libertine love.
The Art of Love is decidedly an unromantic work. It can even be classified as dissolute and amoral, with some fundament. Yet on the whole the love presented by Ovid is chiefly a game of adventure, surely involving seduction, adventure and infidelity, but without ever sinking to brutality, exploration or obscenity. On the contrary. The poetic element in the Ovid love is very strong.
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