CHAPTER 1.

RELATIONSHIPS: ROMANTICISM

Pygmalion and your Love life

By Alain de Botton

In Book 10 of the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses, we’re

introduced to one of the world’s more curious but telling myths:
a Cypriot sculptor called Pygmalion has developed a problem
with women. He has seen the daughters of a local man called
Propoetus refuse to honour Venus, the goddess of love, and
then turn to prostitution. As a result, he has decided he is ‘not
interested in women’ and devotes himself to his work instead.
But, for old time’s sake, he does carve a woman out of ivory,
shaped into exactly the form he has always longed for. When
she is finished, as he gazes up at her nakedness, Pygmalion
discovers that he has fallen deeply in love. Bereft at the
thought that she is merely a statue, he implores Venus to take
pity on him. In exchange for a ritual offering, she turns the
ivory figure into a real woman, who awakes and instantly
reciprocates Pygmalion’s feelings. They fall into a rapturous kiss
and he starts to explore one of her breasts (Ovid leaves the
rest to our imagination). Soon after, Pygmalion and his lover
decide to get married, have a child and live happily ever after.
What is striking from a historical point of view is exactly
where and when this myth took off: Europe and North America
in the second half of the nineteenth century. The story had
always been known; now it became venerated. It was the
second most painted subject in all of culture in this period –
handled by, among others, Auguste Rodin, Jean-Léon Gérôme
(four times), Edward Burne-Jones (five times), and Ernest
Norman – as well as being covered by playwrights, song-writers
and poets.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1890
Edward Burne-Jones, The Soul Attains, 1878
 Ernest Normand, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1886
The story’s popularity was not a matter of chance, it
coincided exactly with a movement of ideas that flourished at
this time known to historians as Romanticism. Romanticism
proposed a very different vision of relationships to that which
had existed hitherto. It argued that passionate love was the
only possible basis on which two people could form a good
relationship: kindness, mild attraction, intellectual sympathy
and a commitment to growing old in each other’s company
were no longer enough. Nor was one meant to dwell on
practical considerations like views on money or on household
management or the opinions of parents (such matters were
simply and tellingly now deemed ‘un-Romantic’). Romantics
believed that true lovers would understand each other
intuitively, without needing to use words; there would simply
be a sudden sympathy of souls – and a strong feeling that one
had always known this person, perhaps in another life.
Furthermore, love would be born immediately: one would lay
eyes on someone and know at once. Through intuition, one
could within minutes locate a person with whom to spend the
rest of one’s days. The swifter and more dramatic the process,
the safer the relationship was assumed to be. Thinking too
much about love was a dangerous sign (and very un-Romantic
too). There was certainly no need to have a conversation with
one’s lover. The Romantics also assumed that true love
involved a perfect combination of sexual attraction and spiritual
sympathy; it was unimaginable that one wouldn’t be very
turned on by a partner one loved, or find that one fancied
someone whose character one wasn’t so interested in (along
the way, Romanticism turned adultery from a problem into a
catastrophe). Romanticism reconfigured love as the entire
meaning of life – not a passing adolescent fantasy or a species
of madness, as it had until then typically been considered. No
longer did friendship, work, religion, philosophy, hobbies, travel
or politics hold out any promises: one’s happiness would be
entirely dependent on discovering a lifelong soulmate, who
would render everyone and everything else superfluous.
One begins to see why Pygmalion might have been
rediscovered by Romanticism. He represented everything that
this ideology believed in: his passion developed at first sight,
he didn’t need to do any talking; he didn’t have to get to
understand his statue-lover; he didn’t bother to find out about
her views or aspirations. He loved her completely and at the
same time didn’t know a thing about her – beyond her shape.
It was going to be forever and involve children, but not even a
hello was in order. Beneath a veneer of cultural prestige, the
story was close to insane or, more politely, just very Romantic.
Pygmalion’s influence on emotional culture was surpassed
only by one other Romantic couple (who were also the most
popular topic for late nineteenth century painters): Romeo and
Juliet. Romanticism recategorised Shakespeare’s play from
being judged among his weakest and most forgettable to the
greatest work he wrote. London and Paris were not to be
without a performance of the play throughout the second half
of the nineteenth century. From a rather pitiful and implausible
tale of teenage love, the play was re-evaluated as capturing
everything that love was meant to be – for all people, for all
time. The story of the boy and girl from Verona was meant to
be a reliable guide to love for university graduates and recently
qualified accountants, this was to be the compass by which
married couples in Neuilly sur Seine and Leamington Spa were
to navigate their emotions. This wasn’t simply entertainment; it
was (the unusually gory ending aside) a roadmap.
Pietro Roi, The Death of Romeo and Juliet, 1866

Ford Madox Brown, The Balcony Scene, 1870

 Unfortunately, Romanticism did not stay neatly within the
confines of art and literature; it wasn’t just an intellectual
exercise. It began to influence people’s actual assessments of
themselves and others. It altered what happened on trains and
at parties, in bedrooms and in seaside resorts. One didn’t need
to have read Ovid or Shakespeare to be impacted; the
Romantic influence pervaded one’s mind all the same. Its
influence spread to every nation, Romanticism became the
official religion of modernity, it filled in for our loss of faith in
saints and deities and even encouraged us, not coincidentally,
to call our lovers ‘angel’. The new religion’s victory became
total, it could no longer be escaped or even thought about
properly. It shaped the instinctive way in which a boy and a girl
in downtown Manila might think of their emotions after seeing a
film together or guide a home-maker in Seattle in her
assessment of her marriage. People who didn’t feel Romantic
emotions learnt to pretend they did – just to survive – and
might feel that there was something very wrong with them for
finding the Pygmalion story somewhat odd.
 Abraham Solomon, The Meeting, And at first Meeting Loved,
1854
Along the way, Romanticism became the single greatest
obstacle to our ability to have successful relationships; it
became a disaster for love. To get a sense of the hurdles it
created, we need only imagine how many problems Pygmalion
and his carved wife might have run into in the years after their
miraculous union – and how unprepared the cult of
Romanticism would have left them (as it does all of us).
Romanticism works with a charmingly innocent view of our
instincts – and the chances of their reliability. It forgets that
what we call ‘falling in love’ tends to be a process of refinding a
love that evokes for us the sort of emotional relationship we
knew in childhood, which for many of us involved pain,
distance, suffering, neglect and frustration. Our instincts tend
to guide us not so much to a pure being who will finally make
us happy – so much as a troublingly familiar figure who will
make us unhappy in just the way we are used to from
childhood, and whom we feel drawn to by a psychological
impulse to repeat patterns of suffering.
Not only does Romanticism venerate an instinct which we
should be hugely suspicious of, it then drains us of any will to
get to know our partners properly, because it suggests that we
know them already. It makes conversation feel laborious. It
associates patient analysis with pedantry: true lovers are
meant to communicate by mysterious motions of the soul. The
result is that like Mrs Pygmalion, lovers end up as figments of
each other’s over-hasty imaginations. 
This in turn leads us into constant outbreaks of sulking,
whereby we become furious with our partners for having failed
to understand us for things which we haven’t bothered to
explain – so convinced are we that true lovers simply know
what’s in their partner’s hearts. 
We develop unecessarily militant views on sex; we imagine
that we should be able to be totally honest about our desires
but then find that sex and love can sometimes run in opposite
directions – at which point we panic and may call time on
otherwise perfectly sound relationships. So bewitched are we
by the image of true lovers admiring everything about one
another, we fail to see how much of love could be a business of
two people gently guiding each other to become better versions
of themselves. We insist, often quite crossly, that a true lover
should accept us ‘for who we really are’ – a terrifying possibility
at any point. We picture love as a feeling of awe at another’s
perfection; we don’t remember that it might also be a species
of patience and benevolence towards a partner’s frailties and
less than admirable dimensions. 
No wonder if the modern age has not only obsessed more
about love than any other – it has also singularly failed to help
us get into and succeed at the relationships we do attempt. The
future won’t belong to Romanticism. It will belong to a proper
analysis of Romanticism’s flaws, a historical post-mortem out of
which can emerge a kinder, more thoughtful, more
psychological and more loving approach to others. We will learn
to send Pygmalion to therapy, rather than the art gallery.