precious-corpse:

romantic love is fun to fantasize about but should never be attempted in real life

as someone who’s a big sucker for a good fictional romance but is pretty much aromantic in real life, I do tend to live by this motto taken at face value

however. as a person annoyingly prone to messing around with language, etymology and definitions… I also find myself trying to find the most outrageous other ways to interpret it

“Platonic” generally means “as Plato described,” and Plato wrote a hell of a lot of different things about love, so “Platonic love” can reasonably be taken to mean a whole lot of different random shit depending on whatever you wanna say

But “Romantic love,” meanwhile, seems to trace its origins most clearly to the Romantic era of European history, which in turn has various complex connections to the influence of the Roman empire

arguably, “The Sorrows of Young Werther”… though definitely not a romance novel by any present definition… may be the most iconic example of a Romantic-era portrayal of what we now call Romantic love, from which many elements of others have stemmed since then

(a Werther’s original, if you will)

but yeah nothing in that miserable story should be attempted in real life. RIP young W and the L he took