Romantic love

Although each experience is frequently claimed to be unique, falling in love is often described as being accompanied by physical sensations, including loss of appetite, breathlessness. It can be experienced as a delirium and is often described as a fever. This experience is matched by a sense of excitement, risk and fear at revealing one's true self. There is a feeling of being caught up in a great emotion by which one is swept away. The exultation of love seems to offer a new kind of freedom, a freedom from the confines of the self. Preoccupation with oneself is exchanged, however temporarily, for a consuming interest in another. All uncertainties are eradicated, except that concerning whether one will continue to be loved by the beloved. These levels of desire and exultation alternate with feelings of withdrawal, boredom, self-doubt in a continuing process of vacillation.

The aim of love is nothing less than to overcome separateness and achieve union or merger with the beloved. In that imaginative merger the lover achieves both an exaltation of feeling and a profound sense of release. Lesser pleasures, and even pain, may be ignored in pursuit of the complex and elusive gratifications it promises. The process of falling in love is thus a grand obsession. Repetitive thinking about the beloved is an integral part of the experience and just as distinctive as the feeling state. Mutual passionate love, as the most complete form of romantic love, is distinguished by its intensity, even though it may be based on mutual destructiveness. The mutuality is in no sense sameness, lovers glory in their differences. For Ibn al-Arabi, for example, the separation of degree between the sexes is the very reason for their mutual inclination, the women bending towards the man (sybolized by the curved shape of Adam's rib), the man bending towards the woman as something once part of him that has been separated from him. For Aristophanes, too, the lover is seeking for the other half that he or she was originally joined to but separated from.

As an act of the imagination, love is often the greatest creative triumph of a lifetime. In its very nature as an act of the imagination lies the source of its power. It can exploit the lover's illusions and delusions, for both good and ill, as well as leading the lover to transcendent truths. It can demand a significant reordering of values and priorities, presenting the content and conditions requisite for dramatic change in self. Not only does it provide a major route to self-transcendence, but it also opens the way to self-realization and self-transformation. It creates a situation in which the self is exposed to new risks and enlarged possibilities thus providing the opportunity for growth. It acquires meaning and offers a sense of liberation to the extent that it enables a flexibility in personality that breaks through conventional psychological barriers and customs. As such it opens the possibility of new phases of life and realignments of the personality. This change in the sense of self, experienced by the lover as the novelty and originality of love, is at the core of love. This results in part from the multiple identifications in which the lover participates when falling in love, propelling the person to new commitments and away from old ones, and changing the boundaries of the self. The self grows through the desire for merger with the other. There may be a feeling of being born again. Love acts as a change agent because it is an explorative imaginative transaction between two people, which at its most sublime offers a partial escape from unremitting subjectivity. Despite its frequently transient nature, it offers access to the unconscious, lights up the emotional life, and brings internal change that often outlives the experience itself.

The value attached to romantic love varies from culture to culture, depending on what kinds of transcendental experience are esteemed and the degree of emphasis placed on personal change and development. Love can be viewed as a paradigm for any profound alignment of personality, such as those that occur in profound experiences of religious conversion. Romantic love has always been inextricably linked to spiritual aspiration.