ABSTRACT
Romantic love as a Western cultural ideal is often held to be a modern invention. Historically, romantic love has been thought of as destructive to men and as radical and provocative. More recently, Marilyn Friedman has argued that romantic love is destructive of women's personal autonomy. In the case of romantic love, as Friedman puts it, 'gender identity being what it is socialized to be in our culture, the heterosexual, romantic merger of identities compromises women's autonomy more than it does that of their male partners'. Romantic love, in fact, requires a certain degree of liberation from traditionally oppressive lifestyles and living arrangements. As Robert Solomon points out: Romantic love emerges only with the relative liberation of women from traditional subservient social and economic roles. Romantic love is radical in its nature, as a result of its underlying psychological structure, which can make it similar to mental illness.
