The Subject Is Romance: Don’tcha Just Love It? : Lovers and the Lovelorn Can Learn the Affairs of the Heart at UCLA Course

Isn’t it romantic? Music in the night, A dream that can be heard. Isn’t it romantic? Moving shadows write the oldest magic word. I hear the breezes playing in the trees above. While all the world is saying you were meant for love. Isn’t it romantic? Merely to be young on such a night as this? Isn’t it romantic? Every note that’s sung is like a lover’s kiss. Sweet symbols in the moonlight, do you mean that I will fall in love perchance? Isn’t it romance? Isn’t it romance? --Richard Rodgers and Jerome Hart, copyright 1931 by Famous Music Corp.

Sometimes, it seems, the most romantic thing about romance is the idea of it. In real life (and for some reason, people always forget to talk about this) romance is often as frustrating as it is exhilarating. It’s illusive, confusing and hard work. And, it seems, it’s what everybody wants these days.

Yes, it’s true. Romance, stuck in a closet during the ‘60s and ‘70s in favor of sexual freedom and liberation from commitment, is back.

Complications Abound

But put aside any notions of romance as long, lingering looks, slow dancing to special songs and walks along the beach at sunset; today’s true romance is intertwined with complications:

--New York-based psychologist Ellen McGrath calls romance “a crisis of the ‘80s for women.”

--Encino psychologist Berta Davis calls it a phase, “a wondrous sense of specialness,” that a couple may experience in the beginning of their relationship--but is doomed to be short-lived.

--Beverly Hills psychologist Nathaniel Branden contends romantic love is neither fantasy nor aberration, “but one of the great possibilities of our existence, one of the great adventures and one of the great challenges.” However, he said, “What I’m interested in is why so many go down to despair, defeat and disappointment.”

These would not seem to be hopeful signs. But psychologists and other love specialists are not worried.

After all, such problems are what therapists are for. Even without indulging in a few $75-an-hour sessions to learn the hows and whys of romantic love, there are plenty of other ways to try romance. The ‘80s have seen romance explode into a hot-selling commodity. There are glossy paperback psychology books, weekend encounter sessions in the mountains and university extension classes.

Usually these classes are conducted under a title like “Making Relationships Work” or “Men and Intimacy.” But this fall, UCLA Extension has gone to the crux of the matter with “Romance,” an eight-week class on Wednesday nights and one Friday night beginning Oct. 9. Covered are evolution of the concept of romantic love, cultural archetypes and visual images of romance, what people want from love today, psychological issues, differences in male and female romantic visions, romantic novels and how romance is viewed in films.

Barrie Bortnick, dean of the Extension’s humanities and social sciences department, said the inspiration for the class was triggered by seeing a number of articles on relationships and hearing Linda Ronstadt (who’s tentatively scheduled for one session) sing popular old love ballads.

“The idea,” Bortnick said, “was to link the ideas of romance in the past to the present, and to get into the issues of what’s romantic, what are the issues today.”

A lot of talk about something that was always assumed to be instinctive?

Yes, but perhaps that’s the problem. Doing what comes naturally just isn’t good enough anymore. At least, if you want romance to last forever.

This is romance in the ‘80s and this is where the psychologists come in. Apparently a distinctly American phenomena and apparently an outgrowth of the human potential movement, today’s couples seem to want it all: They want a good long-term relationship and they want the romance to last.

Reaction to ‘60s, ‘70s

It’s a reaction to the disposable society of the ‘60s and ‘70s, said Brentwood psychotherapist Joan Dasteel, who will moderate the UCLA course. “People were disenchanted with that perspective. Today they’re trying to find happiness in a relationship . . . It’s a shift from the era when the emphasis was on divorce. Today, they’re finding a sense of gratification in staying with someone, in making a relationship work.”

Even given good intentions, however, a couple may find it hard to perpetuate a lifetime romance. Especially, as most psychologists remind people, romance wasn’t meant to last forever. Romance is only the first stage in a relationship. The second stage is commitment.

Romance, said McGrath, who’s on the faculty at UC Irvine and New York University in addition to practicing clinical psychology in New York, “is based on idealization, idealizing the other person. It’s a feeling of wholeness, not merely a sexual attraction, but a feeling of greatest happiness. It involves intrusive thinking, thinking only of the other person. There’s usually an acute longing for reciprocation, an enormous fear of rejection and a feeling of buoyancy.

“It’s an unreal state. It doesn’t last that long. It can’t.”

The second stage, commitment, is more genuine, McGrath said. “It’s based on knowing who you are. You’re appreciative of them (the partner) because they care for you even knowing who you are. And they are that way about you. It’s a more real stage. It’s more comfortable. If people base a relationship on stage two, rather than one, a relationship has a better chance of succeeding.”

Accepting the notion of romance as merely the first stage in a relationship, even that’s not as blissful as it used to be--thanks, psychologists say, to the women’s movement.

According to McGrath, many women who had a traditional childhood and traditional romantic experiences then allowed their adult lives to be shaped by the women’s movement are experiencing great anxiety. “These women have become successful in the outside world and they need to exert control. Then they come home and can’t figure out . . . how to be in charge of their destiny and still be intimate.”

As for men, “they’re incredibly confused,” McGrath said. “Men and women both have a strong inherent need for romance. But for men, there’s usually an idealization of women. It comes from either idealizing or rejecting their mothers . . . now they are encountering women who are not fitting the traditional roles that men have conferred on them. And women aren’t helping because women aren’t really clear about what they want. That’s why we’re seeing so many surveys that suggest that men often feel like they’re sex objects.”

Romance is Selling

That’s also why romance is selling, McGrath contended. “I just finished teaching a relationship course and it was enormous--200 to 300 people and there were more men than women in the audience. Ten years ago, there would have been 20 or 30 in the class and the ratio would have been 4-to-1, women over men.

“What I’m seeing, though, is that women are more into the idea of romance and men are interested in relationships. Men feel more ungrounded on issues of romance. The questions I get are, ‘How to be intimate?,’ ‘How do I survive?,’ ‘What do women even want?’ ”

Providing answers has probably made Nathaniel Branden, director of the Biocentric Institute in Los Angeles and author of four books on subjects related to love, including “The Psychology of Romantic Love,” a candidate for “Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.”

He’s a self-described veteran and a true believer in romantic love, a term he prefers to the word romance and which he defines as “a passionate spiritual-emotional-sexual attachment between a man and a woman that reflects a high regard for the value of each other’s person.”

Branden’s concept of romantic love allows for confusion over traditional roles as created by the women’s movement. It allows for squabbles between the partners. It allows for the symbols of romantic love--say flowers, candy, cute cards--as ways of giving form to a feeling.

Branden, who will trace the history of romantic love “from the caves to now” and offer “A Rational View of Romance” during two meetings of the UCLA program on romance, contends that all it means to be romantic is “to treat the relationship as important.”

When relationships fall apart, he likes to say, “It’s not that love has failed people, it’s that people have failed love.”

People who know how to make love work, he says: tend to express love verbally; be physically affectionate; express their love sexually; express their appreciation and admiration for each other; talk more with each other than anybody else about their hopes, feelings, dreams; offer each other an emotional support system; express love with gifts or tasks performed to lighten the burden of the partner’s life; accept demands or put up with shortcomings that would be far less acceptable in any other person; and create time to be alone together.

Time Is the Key

Do all that, he contends, and a relationship will only grow more romantic with the passing of time.

Of course, some psychologists are skeptical that romance has value in contemporary relationships. Glossing over romance as “a teen-age falling-in-love thing,” Francesca M. Cancian, professor of sociology at UC Irvine and author of “Love in America,” worries that many people want romance to be the answer to all good things in life.

“They want from romance things that love can’t provide, like religion or happiness at work. And when they find out they can’t get these things, they start hating their partner or they come to the realization they have to find these things in other places.”

Psychologist Berta Davis sees hope for romance within the scope of an ongoing relationship, but added that “within the phase of commitment, the initial blush of romance, excitement, intrigue changes. Security is substituted for novelty.”

Inevitably, she said, a couple experiences deterrents to romance. Like children or their jobs or spending free time with friends rather than alone with each other.

“When a couple first gets together, they put aside one or two days a week to go out. There is anticipation. They groom themselves. They prepare themselves both psychically and physically for coming together. In the more permanent phase of their relationship, that aspect is lost. The couple gets involved in the mutuality of their economic situation, in-law concerns, whatever. Many couples don’t put aside special time for each other and issues around sexuality, intimacy, take a bottom seat.”

The truth of the matter, said Cancian, is that while people are indeed looking for a way to have romance that lasts--”it is going to have to be different. Couples can keep the passion and the intensity, but not every day.”

However, that’s OK, Berta Davis said. “There’s something very special connected to the sharing of a life. It’s connected to holding hands, just reaching out. People don’t need for a romance to be lust and passion every day.”

Joan Dasteel finds it reassuring that people are even interested in romance. “It’s a nice part of life,” she said. “We get so caught up with problems, we sometimes forget what an enriching experience romance is.”