Romance

One of the striking differences between the fourteenth century, when a man was free to roam, and these drab days of regimentation is the difference in the concept of love.
In those far off days, a young man in Spring time might obsess about a girl. My friend, Dick, spent his whole life struck with awesome wonder at the loveliness of the fair sex.
Back then love and lust and desire were all part of one parcel for us common folk. Desire did not seem to preclude tenderness.
The overseer classes, the clerks and the knights, and the rulers at court, had their troubadours, and they created Romance.
In those days Dualist religion was all the rage; The spiritual was good; the physical was bad. For the hierarchs, Dualism meant that women were hated. Women embodied temptation, attachment to the physical world. They were only loved when they became disembodied, when the sexual instinct was taken out of love. Instead of being honoured, as we peasants honoured women, the hierarchs divided women into 'good' girls and 'bad' girls.
This they called Romance.
Romance really came into its own about two hundred years ago, with the triumph of  Property throughout Europe. As capital accumulated and violence was centralized in the hierarchy, the countryside began to be viewed as a spectacle, something detached from the self. Likewise, other people began to be viewed as things, to be viewed and consumed from the perspective of the self.
We all became tourists, visitors, here for the sensation.
Again, women were disembodied, as people became more detached from reality.
Romance is essentially a collection of sensations from the point of view of the self, and when the self tires of the object of its ‘love’ it moves onto something, or somebody, else.
But back in the fourteenth century, for all the faults of the Roman Church, we saw Love less as Romance, and more as Charity.
Charity meant giving and supporting the loved one, not exploiting her. Physical love was not simply an exchange of experiences. We did not mine our beloved for fresh experiences.
But now, in a world of exchange, how are the children to learn how to cherish?