Robert A. Johnson (1) (1921–2018)

I expect everyone who has been in romantic relationships has experienced that boom-and-bust cycle of passion, aka “the honeymoon phase.” The flame burns extremely brightly in the initial weeks or months or years: sex all the time, you spend most of your days dreaming about the other person, it feels like something deep and meaningful has finally entered your life; on the other hand, every slight is charged with the greatest despair, you are plunged into confusions and uncertainties, maybe you neglect your other relationships. Slowly (but not slowly enough to escape notice), the passion drops off: less sex, your partner’s plain humanness becomes more evident, the incredible highs and lows of feeling begin to flatten. You start noticing other people, you consider what they might have to offer that you partner doesn’t, you feel whether your partner isn’t really “the one,” but who knows, maybe should you just stick it out, maybe this is a rough spot, maybe the old passion is just hiding around the corner, at the end some long talk you two need to have. At this point you either end the relationship (conveniently, you have been reserving the perfect excuse: you aren’t totally sexual compatible with them; one of you moved and you couldn’t do long-distance; you are just better as friends in the long-run, you don’t share the same hobbies or interests, etc.), or you swallow your dissatisfaction and try to tough it out.

To me and possibly to you (who?), this is a familiar cycle. I have gone through it in every romantic relationship I have ever been in, playing both the roles of the passionate and the despairing. I have harbored my secret exits for when my partner stopped exciting me, and my partners have taken their own exits when I stopped exciting them. This cyclical drama has been the center of probably the greatest amount of mental energy I have invested into anything, ever. Over and over, the pattern holds.

To Robert A. Johnson, this is the basic condition of Western man with regard to romantic love.

There are a few main points I took from this book.

(1) Our Western society—stripped of all other outlets for spiritual life—has invested all of its spiritual energy into romantic love, hoping to live out the entirety of the soul in what it projects onto romantic partners.

(2) Romantic love is not synonymous with human love; in fact they are closer to mutually exclusive concepts. Romantic love has taken the form of the passion I wrote about above: being “in love” rather than just “loving” someone, the selfish use(!) of another person to live out one’s own unexpressed soul. This is a delusion—the process of projecting onto another person the contents of one’s own soul, expecting them to match up to what one lacks in oneself, praising them only so far as they correlate to that ideal. Human love, on the other hand, is a recognition of another person for their simple, obvious humanity, totally unrelated to whatever is unexpressed in one’s own soul. It is a warm, friendly affection and loyalty toward the person they really are, not as we want them to be.

(3) We instinctively think that romantic love—for all its delusions and pains, even if it involves using another person for one’s own passions—is much more important than human love, because we know, more than we know almost anything else, how important it feels. We feel we can find human love in any corner of life, if we are willing to look for it, but romantic love is rare. It is bizarre, perspective-shifting, imbued with intense meaning and depth; it feels like nothing we (or else anyone) have ever felt. Johnson believes this knowledge we all seem have of romantic love is a misrecognition. Rather, he believes that these incredible depths we associate with romantic love are actually to do with the soul, since we all reflexively project our souls onto our partners in our romantic loves. It is not romantic love that is so important, but the exploration and expression of the inner, unknown psyche—the soul.

(4) We in the West cannot simply choose to stick to human love, to stop projecting in romantic love. The missing passion will gnaw away at us until we address it. Some people find expression of the soul in collective organized religion, some in contemplative meditation, some in yoga, some in concentrated creativity, etc. The important thing is that we cannot leave the soul unexplored, or it will inevitably seep out in projection. We must come to it on its own terms, and in doing so, work toward a more total understanding and expression of our selves.

Couple of more technical review notes: this book’s conclusion was a little boring. Maybe it was just me, but I was getting sleepy near the end there. Another thing, probably 20 pages could have been cut from this thing simply by eliminating rephrasings. Johnson has a habit here of saying something, and then saying it again. Sometimes it’s helpful for illuminating difficult concepts; sometimes it feels redundant.

But overall I think this was wonderful and revelatory. I do not need to play out the same old scenes for all of my life. Also, I think this Jungian approach to psychology is the most real-feeling psychology I have ever come across. It actually seems to map onto my life, inner and outer, without stretching its premises too far. I will have to check out some more stuff. Ok bye.… (mere)