Romance requires effort

The argument

The position concedes the strongest point made against romantic love and denies that it settles anything. Romantic love may not be a natural feeling or expression — it may be a cultural invention rather than something the species arrives with — but it has become real because people enjoy the idea of romance and act on that enjoyment. What is invented and then practised is not thereby unreal; it is real in the way that practices are real. The comparison offered is with music. Making music takes time, effort, purpose, and practice, and nobody concludes from that effort that music is fake. Romance works the same way: it takes effort and purpose to put into practice for those we care about. The attention, the gestures, the sustained interest in another person's life — none of it appears unbidden, and all of it has to be done deliberately before it can be done well. What practice produces is fluency. Once we put romance into practice enough, it becomes second nature in relationships, arriving without deliberation in the way a learned skill eventually does. That is the sense in which the feeling is genuine: a musician who no longer thinks about the fingering is not pretending to play, and a person for whom romantic attention has become automatic is not performing an emotion they lack. We as intelligent beings can practice romance in any of our relationships, in the same way music might come naturally to someone who devotes all of their time and energy into mastering it. The naturalness is the product of the devotion rather than a precondition for it. Romantic love is therefore real because we make it real. Its reality consists in being practised into existence — which is how most of the things people value most come to exist at all.

Context

The vast majority of people in relationships find it difficult to include romance on a regular basis.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics reply that this argument concedes too much to the other side. If romantic love is 'not a natural feeling' and exists only because we practise it, that makes it a cultural construct or performance — which is closer to saying it is not real, in the sense the debate cares about (a genuine, felt emotion), than that it is. The music analogy cuts against the claim, since music is a human artifact, so likening love to it suggests love is invented rather than intrinsic. And much love is experienced as spontaneous and involuntary, without the deliberate effort the argument makes constitutive of it.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Calling romantic love a deliberate practice rather than a natural feeling arguably makes it a constructed performance, not a real emotion, which weakens rather than supports its reality. [Rejecting P2] The music analogy implies love is a learned human artifact — a point that leans toward invention, not authenticity. [Rejecting P3] Much romantic love is felt as spontaneous and involuntary, without the sustained effort the argument treats as essential to it. [Rejecting C] 'Real because we make it real' redefines 'real' as 'enacted,' which does not answer whether romantic love is a genuine feeling.