Opinion/Brown: Why Romeo was a creep, and other insights about love
There are certain friends that, whenever you hang out with them, time flies by. You notice that when you look around and all the other tables in the restaurant have new occupants. Scott Andrews is one of those people. He was the chairman of the Humanities Department at Cape Cod Academy when I was there, and, for years, one of my teaching colleagues.
I didn't especially enjoy the process of growing up, but I would almost be willing to be a kid again if that allowed me to sit around his table in philosophy class.
Scott has taught English and history as well as philosophy and he shared an insight from a few years back that I'll return to in a little bit. First, dear reader, we need to talk about love.
The play "Romeo and Juliet" is a good mirror to reflect the different ways cultures have understood romantic love. If you'll recall, Romeo and Juliet came from powerful families that hated each other. So when the kids fall in love, they know this isn't news they can share with their parents. They just want to be together. “Love will find a way,” they always say, but this story ends badly. By the final curtain, both teenagers are dead.
During all the time I taught the play, the lesson everyone seemed to take from it was simple. If the parents had simply listened to their kids, they would have both been alive at the end of the play — and happily married. Maybe the age-old feud between the families might have finally found a loving resolution.
The idea of romantic love being the only true foundation for marriage is historically recent. “Love and marriage, love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage” went the old song back in the horse and buggy days. But that's not necessarily what "Romeo and Juliet" meant, and probably not what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote it.
All the way back to classical times, romantic love has been understood as a loose cannon. By the way, the “loose cannon” analogy goes back to the days of sailing ships when cannons were mounted on four-wheeled carriages. Imagine the rolling decks of a sailing ship at sea. If God forbid the cannon ever broke loose from its ropes, the pitching ship will send this multi-ton monster careening around the deck, smashing things and crushing anyone in its way. The ancients imagined romantic love like that. Everyone knew what it was. Everyone respected its power. But romantic love was also fickle. No one understood exactly why people fell in love in the first place, nor why, after several months, they often fell out of love again, wailing with their broken hearts.
Consequently, you'd never want to build a marriage out of romantic love. It just wasn't dependable. Traditional marriages were practical things, and families and often family businesses unified on the theory that you could trust your in-laws better than total strangers. With a little luck, it was hoped a married couple might even learn to love each other. But everyone knew stories about how good marriages were torn apart when one of the partners became infatuated with someone else. And there we were. If your kids got married, everyone rejoiced. But if your kids fell in love, you might want to lock them up until they got over it.
Originally, "Romeo and Juliet" was a cautionary tale about romantic love; if the kids had obeyed their parents, they would still be alive at the play’s end. But then, Shakespeare wouldn’t have had his story about star-crossed lovers.
Times change. “What you want,” someone told me years ago, is "friendship plus desire.” Something that lasts.
I promised I'd tell you how my conversation with Scott Andrews fits into all this. Looking back a few years, he remembered the kids reading "Romeo and Juliet" had an altogether different take on it. For them, especially for the girls, Romeo is a creep. He's a stalker! He follows Juliet all the time. He's even standing under her bedroom window in the middle of the night, for God's sake. If that doesn't make him a creep, what would?
That's certainly not the only thing Scott and I talked about over lunch. He's an astute student of history and our conversations about politics occupied a lot of our time. But those conversations ended in a much more dismal place, and we've had campaign ads plastered all over our TV screens night after night. So, I thought you might appreciate a break.
Valentine's Day is again upon us. We'll be expected to get all mushy and sentimental — and spend a total of $26 billion. The ancient Greeks would think we’ve lost our minds.
Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.
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This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Valentine's Day: Why Romeo was a creep, and other insights about love
