'The flight from any responsible "incarnational" love is characteristic of the literature of romantic love. Hardly a single example of romance in married love exists in all of the Western romantic love tradition. Lovers scarcely know each other and are more in love with love than with each other. Death always intervenes before there is any significant chance for two people to know each other as they really are. Death, therefore, obscures the need for self-giving kind of love (agape) to supplement and save this romantic love (eros) from its essential preoccupation with self and its idealized projections. The end or destiny of romantic love as a religion is always death, either of the love or of the lovers. Thus death obscures for its adherents the essential self-centredness and flight that is characteristic of romantic love. All seems to end in daggers, poison, or mutual suicide. The twentieth century has a rather sentimental version of the fatal end: marriage. (Oh how we danced the night we were wed..."Romantic love can last only until marriage.'
C FitzSimmons Allsion, The Cruelty of Heresy, p.63.
