Can we reimagine romance?

I don’t think of romance as a mind-independent category. Not only is it socially influenced, it is personally constructed (unique to each person) and necessarily exclusive (can only be applied to a limited number people in your life).

• Romance Is Personally Constructed and Necessarily Exclusive
• I think that this means that each person can individually reimagine romance, and in communicating and practicing it with other people, the overall social concept of romance will change over time.

With romance being a social construction that means that it can be changed! That says nothing of the difficulty or feasibility of making such changes, but it does entail technical possibility.

There are a number of different (reasonable) positions that you can hold in regards to reimagining romance.

• Romantic Apologist: Someone who thinks that romance is the right way to organize society/relationships and/or that romantic love is the highest form of love.
  • While the Romantic Apologist is not the position I would find myself in, I do think that it can be an enlightened position. I do not think it is necessarily a conservative position that believes that we got romance “right” in society (i.e. that it might need some more work), but that romance is still a high human good that ought to be pursued.
• Romantic Reformer: Romance has its place, but romance itself or values surrounding it have to be changed.
  • I would think that most people would be right around here, or at least the more critical readers. People might disagree about the extent of reformation or the kinds of things that need to be changed, but they would generally agree that we do not have romance “right” in some kind of important way(s).
• Romantic Abolitionist: Romance has no place in society and should be abandoned altogether and instead embracing love in general.
  • This sounds a lot more radical than it actually is. We have to remember that romance as a category is quite new, relatively speaking. This position has the potential to be extremely transformational, but it has to be done in a way that puts love first and suffuses it into everything.

I think that I used to fall somewhere between the Reformer and Abolitionist positions because while I recognized the appeal of romance and letting people construct it for themselves while de-centering it, I chose not to identify with it.

I think that both the Reformer and Abolitionist are most ideologically opposed even though they seem to be more in alignment because of the central debate of incremental/gradual change versus radical transformation.