Libertine and Romantic Loves
vs Poetry, Fidelity and Dissolution
Romantic love involves fidelity, enchantment, dreaming.
Libertine love is made of adventure, is lasciviousness, is
unfaithful, and doesn’t cultivate the poetry or the
elevation of the loved being. Romantic and libertine loves
are at opposed poles.
It’s in these terms that we usually place the issue. But the
reality isn’t always entirely like that. Things can be more
contradictory than we usually admit.
Firstly, and as we all know, romantic love isn’t an asexual
love. Sex is at the heart of most romantic loves, inspiring
and giving them content. Even the very first great chanted
medieval love – the one involving Heloise and Abelard – is a
profoundly sexual love. Sex isn’t an exclusive of libertine
love.
Secondly, libertine love is not necessarily a dissolute
love, without rules, without poetry, lyricism, reduced to
sex and its quest. There are exceptions. An example? The
Art of Love of Ovid, the great classic treaty on
libertine love.
The Art of Love is decidedly an unromantic work. It
can even be classified as dissolute and amoral, with some
fundament. Yet on the whole the love presented by Ovid is
chiefly a game of adventure, surely involving seduction,
adventure and infidelity, but without ever sinking to
brutality, exploration or obscenity. On the contrary. The
poetic element in the Ovid love is very strong.
Unexpectedly…
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Quotations
Excerpt of Ovid's The Art of Love
Ovid, 43 b. C. - 17 a. C, Roman writer
Now for the trickiest, subtlest part: how to get
Your darling well entangled in the net.
Men everywhere, you have something to learn, so attend!
And you, the common people, kindly lend
My enterprise your favour till the end.
First and foremost, feel confidence that all
Girls can be caught; just spread your nets, they'll fall.
Hounds will run from a hare, birds in spring sit dumb,
Cicadas in summer keep mum,
Sooner than a girl, wooed charmingly, will resist:
Even one you think doesn't want it wants to be kissed.
Women, like men, adore secret affairs,
But our skill in dissembling is less than theirs.
If we males unanimously agreed
Not to move first, females, crushed, would take the lead.
In lush fields the heifer moos to the bull, the mare
Whinnies at stallions in the open air;
Men's sex-urge is less primitive, less raw,
Our lust is bound by the limits of the law.
But as for women... Byblis was mad for her brother
And bravely atoned for her sin with a suicide's noose.
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