Lovers' Dreams: Are They Always Illusions?

Romantic love combines intense emotional attachment with desire to be loved in return. It also involves seeing the person that you love as embodying your personal ideals of manhood or womanhood. Whether romantic idealization happens on a first meeting or the hundredth, it is as if a veil has been lifted from your eyes. A vision descends upon you. The vision strikes you as a revelation of something true and important. If it didn't, it wouldn't feel like falling in love.

In romance, idealization is part of the deal. Does romance always involve a fantasy of a perfect love? Often, but not always. Idealization is different from fantasy.

Susan Cheever's frank memoir of sexual addiction, Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction. Cheever says, "We tell our young men and women that 'falling in love' is the basis for building a life; it is not....Falling in love is a wonderful, addictive, obsessive experience that usually lasts less than twenty months...." (65-66). Cheever found herself addicted to the dopamine-rush of infatuation. As soon as the newness of the love experience wore off, she needed to move on to a new partner in order to experience the same "high."

Rodgers and Hammerstein have their Prince in the musical "Cinderella" ask the crucial question: "Are you the sweet creation of a lover's dream or are you really as wonderful as you seem?" The Prince wants to know whether his feelings are true love or infatuation. Infatuation is an ideal vision that's wildly out of sync with who the person you are in love with is.

Cheever seems to think that falling in love is always infatuation. Who could possibly be as perfect as he or she seems to us when we have freshly fallen in love? But here is a contrasting proposal: "true love" is when your idealization ascribes features to the beloved that are part of what that person can and should become. In cases where someone ascribes a level of intelligence or compassion to her beloved that he at present lacks but can and should grow into, seeing him through the eyes of love is genuinely creative. What it creates is not fantasy but reality.

Is this true love or infatuation? That's not an easy question to answer. Even if you could be sure that it's love instead of infatuation, another very large question remains unanswered: Will love endure? No one, when in love, can at the same time believe that he or she will ever feel differently than they do at present. But often at a corner of one's awareness there is the fact of people who have been in love and then ceased to love. Whether idealization is a genuine insight or delusional, it is often ephemeral. Sometimes the vision involved in romantic love disappears as suddenly and involuntarily as it comes, though more often it recedes gradually.

For some it lasts for a lifetime. I've seen it done.