Romance Myth No.3: "I want your love, I don't wanna be friends!"

          You can’t possibly be attracted to your loving and capable best friend. Ew. You have to love a “mysterious” person that you know nothing about. And even when you start dating and eventually get married, be careful not to get to know them too well – friendship will suck all of the romance right out of your relationship.

Let's say I'm...Bella Swan. I've got a choice to make:



             

Jacob Black:

attractive friend who does anything for me and loves me to bits, but who I've known since I was a kid.

 

 
Edward Cullen:
A thrilling guy who's a total mystery to me.

(& sparkly to boot.)

 

And the winner is...

Of course it's Edward. How could it be anyone but Edward? He's a mysterious vampire man with a tragic past. He even murdered a few people, just cuz he needed lunch – wow. That’s excitement: dating someone who just might kill you at any second, because he loves you so much. Who can resist? So you see, Jacob had to get shafted, because he was a  friend – and the Romantic Myth says: friends are boring!

Why Friends Can't Win in Romance:
Robert A. Johnson explains this phenomenon in his wonderful book, WE: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love (which you should totally read, by the way):

“When two people are ‘in love,’ people commonly say that they are ‘more than just friends.’ But in the long run, they seem to treat each other as less than friends. […C]ouples refuse each other the selfless love, the kindness and good will, that they readily give to their friends […] People can’t ask of their friends that they carry all their projections, be scapegoats for all their moods, keep them feeling happy, and make life complete for them. Why do couples impose these demands on each other? Because the cult of romance teaches us that we have the right to expect that all our projections will be borne—all our desires satisfied, and all our fantasies made to come true—in the person we are ‘in love’ with.” (p.198, emphasis added)

Romance: The Selfish Love
In other words, Romantic love makes us into “Me Monsters”. Romantic love is ultimately “egotism, the use of each other to create passion for its own sake [… It’s] about seeking a so-called love for the sake of my fulfillment, my thrills, my dreams coming true, my fantasy, my ‘need to be loved,’ my ideal of the perfect love, my security, my entertainment.” (Johnson, p.142).



Friendship & Selfless Love
Romance is “all about me.” But Friendship is based in what we might call human love, selfless love, or Charity.  Johnson further explains:

"If a man and woman are friends to each other, then they are ‘neighbors’ as well as lovers; their relationship is suddenly subject to Christ’s dictum: ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’.”
(p.197)

     Romance “produces drama, daring adventures, wondrous, intense love scenes, jealousies, and betrayals” (p.133). Friendship creates human relationships between flesh-and-blood human beings, because people choose to “love each other instead of being ‘in love’” (p.133). Being in love is something that happens to you. Loving someone, being a friend to someone, is something that you choose to do.
     Thus, “Romance and friendship are […] natural enemies with completely opposing motives. Sometimes people say ‘I don’t want to be friends with my husband [or wife]; it would take all the romance out of our marriage" (p.197). That is true - friendship, and loving concern for the other person, will take all of the me-centered 'romance' out of a relationship. But this is not a bad thing:



"It is true: Friendship does take the artificial drama and intensity out of a relationship, but it also takes away the egocentricity and the impossibility and replaces the drama with something human and real.” (p.197)

What this means for you:

Feelings of Romance (or ‘being in love’) are centered in the self, and tend to change over time. They are a sandy foundation upon which to build a relationship. Friendship, selfless love, Charity – this kind of love is the bedrock upon which we can build our strongest relationships. The choice to love someone and be their friend is a choice that you can make, every day. So make friendship, or selfless love, the foundation for your loving relationships, and let ‘Romance’ and ‘excitement’ be the occasional candle-lit dinners and starry evenings – the cherry on top.