Of all the cultural inventions of the West, romantic love is surely one of the most curious. The notion that sex and sexual passion, rooted in the material body, can be a vehicle for transcendence beyond the physical is rather bizarre. Even a prototypical Romantic like Lord Byron had his doubts. He chastises Plato, whose writings on the transcendent powers of Eros are some of the earliest precursors to this idea, for his “confounded fantasies”—ultimately, nothing but fancy pretexts for fornication.

However incoherent, romantic love has had remarkable staying power. Today it provides the default attitudes toward sexual passion not just in the West, but elsewhere as well, through a popular culture that has been romantic love’s most successful vehicle. And one can argue that this influence has been, for the most part, baleful. For one thing, romantic love, particularly in the debased form promulgated by popular culture, creates expectations for sexual experience fated to disappointment in the grubby, quotidian work of human relationships, where sexual passion is frequently a destructive, disruptive force—what Sophocles called an “insane despot.” Moreover, the attitudes encouraged by this ideal are, in many respects, those of callow youths, who are already prone to utopian goals, impatience with delayed gratification, and a narcissistic dissatisfaction with reality, which cares nothing about how intensely one feels or desires.

A rich and complex topic, then, is romantic love, comprising social history, philosophy, and particularly the imaginative literature that