British-French writer and historian Hilaire Belloc: “There is -as the greatest of the ancient Greeks discovered- a certain indissoluble Trinity of Truth, Beauty and Goodness. You cannot deny or attack one of these three without at the same time denying or attacking both the others.”
Some individuals suffering romantic rejection were researched recently. According to Journal of Neurophysiology (2010), recovery from a breakup may be akin to recovering from drug addiction: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers recorded the brain activity of adults who had previously been rejected. Upon viewing photographs of their former partners, several key areas of participants' brains were activated: the ventral tegmental area (involved in feelings of romantic love) which controls motivation and reward; the nucleus accumbens and orbitofrontal/prefrontal cortex, which are associated with craving and addiction (specifically the dopaminergic reward system); the insular cortex and the anterior cingulate cortex associated with physical pain and distress. "Romantic love, under both happy and unhappy circumstances, may be a "natural addiction" said neuroscientist Lucy Brown at Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "Our findings suggest that the pain of romantic rejection may be a necessary part of life that nature built into our anatomy and physiology." Source: jn.physiology.org
In his memorable essay Love in the Western World (originally published in French in 1938, revised in 1952, and followed in 1961 by Essays on the Myths of Love), French author Denis de Rougemont sought to understand the intricate relationship between the erotic and the religious in the tradition of the troubadours and their romantic heirs. From a Platonic perspective, the Idea is more real than its manifestations on earth, and for the medieval poet, as for the medieval philosopher, visible realities are always the symbol and the sign of more essential, invisible truths (Étienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, 1922). From that perspective, the psychological phenomenon that Stendhal called “crystallization”, which makes the beloved appear glowing with all perfections, takes on a very different meaning. Love does not lie; simply, its truth is not of this world. The key to Beatrice’s cryptic identity in The Divine Comedy is provided by Dante in an earlier book titled Vita Nuova (The New Life). Here Dante first introduces “my mind’s glorious lady, she who was called by many Beatrice, by those who did not know what it meant to so name her” (the name Beatrice means “she who confers blessing”). Nine times in his life, Beatrice appeared to him, Dante says. The first time, Beatrice “greeted me so virtuously, so much so that I saw then to the very end of grace.” Beatrice is the essence of feminine grace and virtues, manifested in all women: “my lady came into such grace that not only was she honoured and praised, but through her many were also honoured and praised.” In several passages, Dante indicates that when he is sensitive to the charm of real women (Beatrice’s friends, for example), it is Beatrice that he sees through them: “They have seen perfection of all welcome / who see my lady among the other ladies.” Robert Graves wrote that, “The purpose of poetry is religious invocation of the Muse,” whom he also called the White Goddess and the Mother of All Living. Painters and sculptors have also devoted much effort to capturing and communicating the essence of feminine grace. The aesthetic experience, according to Schopenhauer, means getting lost in the contemplation of the Platonic Idea behind the phenomenon, thus escaping the cycle of unfulfilled desires.
Gérard de Nerval (1808-1855), the emblematic French romantic poet, gave another beautiful expression of this theme in his last novel Aurélia (he was found dead soon after finishing it). As the narrator gets convinced by some sign that his death is near, he falls sick and, in his delirium, sees a woman of supernatural beauty, whose body grows until embracing the whole cosmos. The romantic ideal of love as a mystical encounter with the eternal feminine, or the Goddess, has had a very profound influence on European culture. The main reason why romanticism is mostly foreign to Jewish culture is that there can be no truly romantic conception of love without faith in the immortality of the soul, and Jewish anthropology is fundamentally materialistic (read my article “Israel as One Man”). It is therefore no surprise that romanticism has been regarded with contempt by most Jewish intellectuals. Kevin MacDonald (A Culture of Critique) explains it by an inherited Jewish culture where love was seen “as an invention of the alien gentile culture and thus morally suspect.” From the 1930s, American Jewish authors found in the theories of Freud and his Jewish disciples the justification for assaulting the romantic ideal and challenging the obscenity laws. Ludwig Lewisohn, “the most prominent Jewish writer in interwar America,” is a case in point. He had been analyzed briefly by Freud, and was a close friend of Otto Rank. Like Rank, Lewisohn liked to “portray traditional, unassimilated Jewish sexuality as uniquely healthy.” He also shared Wilhelm Reich’s ideas (The Mass Psychology of Fascism, 1934), that anti-Semitism is a symptom of sexual frustration and can be cured by liberating the Gentiles’ libido (a message echoed in Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization, 1955, as well as in Theodor Adorno’s The Authoritarian Personality, 1950). So did Isaac Rosenfeld, who said: “I regard anti-Semitism as a symptom of a serious, underlying psycho-sexual disease of epidemic proportion in our society.”
In Anton Myrer’s novel The Last Convertible, set in the 1940s, the lovable narrator, George Virdon, a solidly middle-class product of a public high school who is at Harvard only because of a scholarship, describes the particular snobbery of the “St. Grotlesex” men—that is, the graduates of St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, Groton, and Middlesex—who “by and large kept to themselves, dined and hung out at their exclusive final clubs, took a very casual attitude toward classes and grades, and very nearly constituted a college within the college. A Groton man sat next to me in a course on the Hapsburg Empire and never said a single word to me. Not one. It wasn’t that he cut me, exactly—I don’t think he ever even saw me. Some, like me, can accept it with equanimity and go their way. For others it eats away at the vitals like acid: they may suppress it, but they never get over it.” Source: aeon.co
“Although Emophilia correlates with anxious attachment and sociosexuality, it predicts life outcomes (Jones, 2015) and motivational forces (Jones & Curtis, 2017) not accounted for by the other variables. Further, the personality profile of emophilia is unique compared to other relationship variables such as insecure attachment and sociosexuality. Specifically, with respect to the Big Five personality traits: anxious attachment is significantly and positively correlated with neuroticism, and sociosexuality is significantly and negatively correlated with agreeableness. However, emophilia is uncorrelated with all Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (Jones, 2017). Finally, emophilia has a unique predictive quality in some of the realms of relationships such as emotional infidelity, lower age of first marriage, or likelihood to engage in unprotected sex (Jones, 2015; Jones & Paulhus, 2012). Therefore, emophilia is important in explaining variance in relationships, and because of their peculiar emotional disposition, the affected individual may overlook the downside of dark personality traits in a partner, or even be attracted to them.” Source: www.sciencedirect.com
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