Do we expect too much from love?

In Anthony Trollope’s novel, The Duke’s Children, the Duke of Omnium learns that his children wish to marry for love. For 800 pages he seeks to frustrate them. “What am I to say, Sir?” asks his son, the Marquess of Silverbridge, in despair. “I love the girl better than my life. What is a man to do when he feels like that?” Lady Mary Palliser tells her father that she loves Frank Tregear, a man without rank or money, more than anyone else in the world. “Then you must conquer your love!” the Duke replies. “It is disgraceful and it must be conquered!” But can it be?

Love, WH Auden pointed out in reference to Romeo & Juliet, is at its most powerful when it is most frustrated. But even at its most powerful, can love bear the burden that we have placed on it—the burden of delivering the highest levels of human happiness?

Even cultures most distrustful of love—countries like India, where arranged marriage is still prevalent—have succumbed in our times to the perfume of romance. Bollywood now outdoes Hollywood for rampant passion in the vein of this line from Trollope: “he felt as he looked at her that the only thing in the world worth living for, was to have her for his own.”

One might think that the soaring divorce rates in the UK and US would hose down that sort of passion, and belief in it. Mr Boncassen is surely right in The Duke’s Children when he observes that love may lead to great misfortune. “Young people when they love rarely think of more than the present moment. If they did, the bloom would be gone from their romance. But others have to do this for them.”

Many Victorian novelists stared at the tortuous question, is passion or fidelity the higher virtue in marriage? They set out with great candour the disaster to which passion may lead. This, surely, was the moral Tolstoy intended Anna Karenina to yield in the world’s most perfect novel on intelligent love. Yet alongside the Victorian novel stood the less intelligent Victorian poem, which preached to willing millions a simple trust in slush and the truth of the throbbing breast. It ended up with Rupert Brooke and the coronation of sentiment over tea at 3 in Grantchester.

The 20th and 21st centuries, in poetry and the novel, have been more hardheaded—but the comics, the magazines and the movies have continued to swoon over undying romance.

"In the next moment she was close in his arms with his lips pressed to hers. ‘Love you! Oh, my darling!— You have come across my life, and have swallowed me up, and made me all your own’.” These are lines as readily written in Hollywood in 2013 as in Trollope in 1879.

How has this trust in love come about? The Cambridge philosopher Simon May points to the loss of God from human consciousness and the elevation of human love as a substitute—the only, and perhaps inadequate, substitute.

Because love of the divine is no longer the passion of multitudes, secular love has taken over. But can secular love deliver for millions?

Godfrey Barker will be debating the question “Is Love Real?” on 29th May atHowTheLightGetsIn, the world’s largest philosophy festival, held annually from 23rd May-2nd June in Hay-on-Wye