It is time to be honest about love.
We are going to argue that love—truly romantic love—rejected as cheap and backwards these days, will save the world.
First, we admit that love is rare, and it dies rather quickly. Everyone experiences this. We like something if it benefits us, and all sorts of human relationships are based on practical arrangements. Love, and here we will skip a definition, since it refers to what most of us have experienced at some point: it is mad, complete, mystical, and full of desire. It is not friendship. It can strike us before puberty, but after puberty, the charisma involved largely partakes of sexuality.
It is a truism to say love requires focus. Love must be intense, have intensity—if it is what we know as love, it must be intense—and this brings us to love’s desire for beauty. It wouldn’t make sense for love to involve many things, for this would be to dilute and diminish by spreading too thin, all that love is, and we agree love must have intensity.
Love must have a physical dimension, and to have the force and importance love requires, love should be rare, but not so rare as to be beyond human possibility, and a certain social comprehension. Individual human beauty fits this criterion—human beauty is rare, invokes intensity and focus, and though rare, is accessible.
In the same manner that durable, attractive, and rare metals such as silver and gold will always signify value in terms of wealth in society, human beauty, whether we like it or not, is the coin of love.
We begin with individual human beauty.
But now we have two more elements.
These elements are based on the idea that love is an act.
Do we mean in the sense that “acting” is fake? “To be able to act” is simply what a successful person is able to do. One can say that beauty is “fake,” in the context of love; but this is to assume that the attractive, which is desired, is insincere, but how so? Acting, like beauty, might be construed as fake in “matters of the heart,” but this view, in the name of a fake “depth,” is the superficial one. If something is truly desired, and if any action, including “acting,” belongs to the category of achieving what is desired, how can it then be deemed superficial? We are forced to use acting, action, and act, and all these three words imply—since we are not talking of friendship or the spiritual, but the concentrated madness of love.
When we say “acting,” we do not include lying, or being dishonest in any way which hurts the beloved. We mean “acting” with the goal of loving one person. The “act” is for love, not for “playing around.”
After beauty, there are two layers of “acting” involved:
One: micro-acting, which refers to the natural charm of the person, an unconscious extension of physical attractiveness, and
Two: macro-acting, which involves the actual “behavior of love;” making vows and uttering words of promise, committment, passion, excitement, praise and, naturally, love.
Micro-acting is crucial. One can be physically attractive, but have very little actual charm. Physical beauty is necessary, but even necessary is micro-acting, the way a person smiles, their personality, how they “act.” We have all seen the attractive face which loses all its beauty the moment we experience that dull something in the person behind it. Beauty exists cleverly and minutely.
Macro-acting takes work.
Micro-acting is just the way the person is.
All three, personal beauty, micro-acting, and macro-acting, mutually enhance each other, and all three are present in love.
Acting, even as we are describing it here, in a heightened, non-pejorative way, is typically seen as wretched, superficial, dishonest, and unseemly.
But what we are saying here is that acting is at the heart of romantic love, and romantic love could not exist without it.
Romantic love is not necessary to marriage and children; there are many societies where marriage is arranged, or where women are second class citizens, or worse, and therefore breeding does not require love at all.
Here we notice two things. Romantic love, which may lead to marriage and children, is not necessary to these two things.
But when it is, it requires women to be free and equal to men.
If this is true, is the western tradition of romantic love directly involved in equality for women?
And if romantic love does require “acting,” is this why romantic love is easy for other societies to disparage, and why romantic love is increasingly viewed as insincere, useless, and crazy—especially with increasing contact between the west—and societies (Islam, for instance) which put more of a premium on breeding, and submissive women, than romantic love?
Recall that the major trope of romantic love as “madness” comes from Plato, who opined human breeding farms as a national ideal. (Plato redeems himself in other places, defending love, and the equality of women, but his pragmatic side had moments in his famous society blueprint, “The Republic.”)
What if romantic love is the true path to free and equal women, to a free and equal society, and love itself?
What if romantic love faces grave danger before the more practical forces of not only societies which enslave women, but groups who view romantic love as a backwards and superficial act?
Much has been made recently of the unlikely alliance between feminists and Muslims—how could these two groups possibly be allied?
Both oppose romantic love.
Islam prioritizes modesty—marriage in which the woman is subordinate.
Romantic love does not fit into this scheme.
Feminists (and many sexual progressives) dislike romantic love—since it prioritizes attractive and flirtatious females. Indicted here is the great western tradition of dead white male literature of the roaming, independent, pining male poets, and their beautiful female muses.
But the great tradition of romantic love does not feature enslaved, uneducated, subordinate women. Nor does it feature empty-headed, sexual bimbos, either. And women can be beautiful in millions of different ways.
The Romantic poets, Keats and Shelley, loved educated women.
Equals. Women who could appreciate their poetry. Women (think of Mary Shelley) who were writers, as well.
Poe’s “Ligeia” is an entrancing, mentally and spiritually powerful, woman. Poe rejected as a literary ideal the merely sexual or physically attractive female. Flirtatious women meant nothing to Poe. But the woman poet was a source of great admiration for the American.
The great tradition of Romantic love features strong women. Otherwise it is perverted Romanticism.
Two wars. One should never fight two wars.
Women do not put on uniforms and go to war against other women. Men do that.
In nations where men fight other men and keep their women veiled and subordinate, men fight two wars, one against men, and another against their women.
These societies which fight two wars tend to lose out to the countries in the west—whose women are free and educated—the result of the western romantic literary tradition.
Here’s to Romanticism—often portrayed as reactionary, but it is quite the opposite.
Our readers have noticed we have championed the poet, Ben Mazer, who is just now bringing out his Selected Poems to a great deal of acclaim.
Ben Mazer and Scarriet are leading the revival of Romantic poetry.
We must admit that romance is an act—in the superficial meaning of that word.
We must admit to love’s superficiality.
Even as we defend it.
It is through poetry that micro-acting and macro-acting become one; and the poet achieves the charm of the lover—which all desire to possess.
Romantic love may just be the answer to world peace.
If the world heeds this essay.
Scarriet 
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