Romance Vs. Love

Romance and love are not the same thing.


In my last article I worked on coming to a better understanding of what love is. While the dictionary definitions of love are okay, the definitions for romance seem bad. They all seem to say something like the feeling of mystery associated with love. Meh. Maybe. Maybe it's about the unknown possibilities of the future. I could make a case for that. But I'm going to go a different direction.

If love is either a valuation, an identity fusion, or an incorporation of another's value scale, romance is the process of falling in love.

When you're eating a food just because your friend pressured you into it, then, after a few chews, you realize that you like it. Then, after another bite, you realize that you really like it. Then, after another serving, you realize that you love it. That process of moving from indifference to love was romance. We don't usually recognize it as such because we don't know what romance means, but alas, there it is.

When you see yourself as more and more a part of a political group rather than as an individual, you are in the romantic position of falling in love through identity fusion with an ideology. It will end badly for almost all of the humans you have contact with.

When a man and a woman are integrating and adjusting their individual value hierarchies to incorporate part of each other's, then they are in the romantic process of falling in love. That's what we more traditionally mean, but we don't usually seem to know what we mean even when we point out that something is romantic. It's the consideration of the other person's value scale.

That's the best formulation that I've reached so far, and I think it's superior to any other take I've seen. But, I am biased.

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