Is Romantic Love Immoral?

Love’s biological function and the loftier, moral enterprise

Photo by Jasmine Carter, from Pexels

I know, the title is blasphemous.

There’s perhaps nothing more recommended than love. A loveless life is a rotten waste, as we’re told endlessly, and as we tell ourselves.

But while serial monogamy is thousands of years old, so is polygamy, and the romantic idolizing of love is only several centuries old in the West, going back to Romanticism and to the Troubadours’ reworking of the Cathar heresy. We take for granted the imperative to find a “soul mate” or to marry for love, but that’s largely because of a sales pitch that helps us cope with the downside of family life in industrial, consumer societies.

At any rate, these are just some sobering observations to motivate the question of whether romantic love isn’t self-evidently good, after all. Maybe this kind of love is even wrong on certain moral grounds.

Love’s Ambiguous Moral Status

Still, at first glance the question seems absurd since if morality is about doing the right thing, and what we ought to be pursuing is our happiness, romantic love surely helps us achieve that goal. Maybe love is even a necessary condition of happiness, in which case love could hardly be morally wrong.