Just Friends: Romance and Friendship

"Just friends!" my daughters would assure me, all through adolescence, when I would inquire about a male friend. Looking back, I think they were being honest. Something in my family's emotional DNA: we were for the most part, all (happily) delayed in the development of our romantic faculties. But we made up for lost time: at the end of college or soon after we all met someone, fell in love, married and lived (imperfectly but for the most part) happily ever after. This raises the question: when does a friendship become romance? Indeed, what is a romance? I will define it: a mutually exclusive, possessive relationship in which the lovers share and seek Joy through a union that is deep, intense and multi-leveled (emotional, intellectual, spiritual, physical and social). Romance, ideally, is a movement into spousal or conjugal union, marriage. What distinguishes romance from friendship is its exclusive and possessive nature. Interiorly, what structures it is the act to seek:  to search for fulfillment in a union with my beloved.  In a romance, I look to my beloved...I seek...for a fullness of joy and satisfaction. Romance is a disastrously unstable relationship:  the higher the elation the deeper the eventual sadness. A crash is inevitable since the euphoria is a transient satisfaction of profound if unrecognized interior loneliness that the beloved can never fully quench. Yet, in the best of circumstance, when couched in an context of maturity, faith, virtue, family and fidelity, Romance can mature into patient, enduring, sacrificial and finally satisfying spousal union. But it must go through the dark night...and many stormy mornings, rainy afternoons, and freezing evenings. If the quality of Joy abounds in romance, it is equally true that all loves are structured by Joy. And so, there can be a romance-like quality to many a relationship which remains, nevertheless, a friendship. Feelings of delight and desire come and go like the breeze and the sunshine and are themselves not constitutive of romance. What is decisive is the "turning" and the "seeking" and the "looking" for happiness from the one who is loved. This definition helps clarify the foggy notion of emotional or psychological adultery. While physical adultery is clear, graphic and easily identifiable, the emotional is not. Yet, we can imagine a married person, a priest or religious who remains physically abstinent but is not genuinely faithful and chaste. But is not a feeling or emotion, however intense, that despoils the heart and soul. Rather, it is an interior act of the will, a looking toward the beloved in the manner of idolatry, a turning away from the spouse or the sacred vow. And so feelings of delight and desire will invade our ordinary friendships randomly, unwillingly, inevitably. They can charm, inspire, encourage and enlighten us! They can frustrate, embarrass, seduce, and demoralize us! In the agony and the ecstasy of romance, they are fruitful when they move us, in God's grace, to renew, deepen and intensify our abiding and fundamental fidelity: to spouse and family, to God,  to vocation and mission and to all our friendships. The Gospel announces that life is ultimately the Great Romance: of love between our Bridegroom and ourselves. Penultimately, romance eventuates in Calvary: some denoument of loss, sadness and tragedy. But this is a purifying movement into the Great Union of love. May all the agonies and ecstacies of love move us into intimacy with our Great Lover and purify us in all our loves!