Page 7 - Advanced Romance

4 Advanced Romance*
context of the revolutions of the 1960s and beyond. It will peer through the silky veils of ardor that reinforce the sanctity of romance—whether it be expressed in traditional ways or more creative types of monogamies, non-monogamies, or other sexual MO’s.
That is, romantic fundamentalism camouflages freethinking about love. It is a subject so exquisitely tender and massively protected that it usually requires poetic reverence to even approach. I’m going to analyze this fundamentalism immediately, but not before I say that a good, life-long monogamy could be as good as love gets. Whether it be heterosexual or LGBTQ+. If you have such a monogamy, read no further. It’s not worth risking what you’ve got.
For all the rest of us, to paraphrase Yeats’ tombstone quote: “Cast a cold [yet still very affectionate] eye on love.”2 To see if, like fish, there’s a fundamentalist love ocean in which we’re swimming, but that we haven’t rigorously investigated.
To think outside that pervasive, infinitely persuasive, romance ocean is no easy task. Many poems and
songs and religions have sighed—almost declared as law—that it’s fruitless to try to unravel love’s mysteries. Fruitless, sacrilegious and dangerous. For instance:
Some enchanted evening, you will find a stranger,
you will find a stranger, across a crowded room