Romeo and Juliet – Star crossed lovers or emblems of the essence of romantic love?

Charles Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet – an opera that we saw last night – boils a familiar play down to its essential elements and presents them in a straightforward way.  How can you not know that Romeo, a Montague, goes to the costume ball of his sworn enemy – the Capulets, with his trusty friend Mercutio?  While there, he falls deeply in love with Juliet, the daughter of Count Capulet, though she is being betrothed, by her cousin Tybalt, to Paris.  Romeo woos Juliet, first at the ball and then, when he is kicked out, beneath her window in the famous balcony scene.  Then, the next day, after being secretly married to Juliet by a priest who imagines decreasing the warring tensions between the families, Romeo is confronted by Tybalt.  Romeo, who cannot say the real reason, refuses to fight his new secret brother-in-law.  Tybalt calls Romeo a coward at which point Mercutio takes up the challenge to defend Romeo's honor.  Romeo, intending to stop the fighting, disarms Mercutio just as Tybalt attacks, killing Mercutio.  To avenge Mercutio, Romeo kills Tybalt – and runs to Juliet, his new wife, after killing her cousin and being exiled from Verona by the Duke.  They have their wedding night – she forgives him for she knows that his murder was an act of passion.  They plan to escape Verona together and part with sweet sorrow after the dawn arrives. 

The next day, Juliet discovers that she is to marry Paris and the priest who wed her to Romeo concocts a plan where he will give her a potion that will make it look like she has died and her funeral will prevent the second marriage and she will wake up in the tomb and escape with Romeo, whom the priest will inform of the ruse.  Romeo, distraught at hearing of her death, heads straight to the tomb (picking up some poison on the way) without receiving the intended message from the priest.  After he takes the poison, he sings again of his love, and Juliet awakes (unlike in Shakespeare, the two have one last moment together).  When Juliet realizes that he has taken all of his poison and is dying, she kills herself by plunging a knife into herself.

This play – and the opera and the many other art forms (Shakespeare in Love and West Side Story spring to mind) is so familiar – and so frequently billed as the tragedy of star-crossed lovers, that I found myself wondering, as I listened to it, whether it wasn’t really just the tragedy of romantic love period.  The first moment that this occurred to me was in the balcony scene.  The beginning of this scene in the opera involves Juliet ruminating out loud about her new found love for Romeo – not knowing that Romeo himself is hiding in the dark beneath the window, and when she discovers that he is there, she is not overcome with joy, but with fear.  She worries what he will do with the information that he has surreptitiously received.  I realized how we protect ourselves when we truly feel romantic love.  To let anyone else know that we have feeling for someone is scary business.  We feel, and the music wonderfully portrayed it when Juliet discovers Romeo listening, vulnerable.

Now, there is a bit of a double standard here.  Romeo was loudly proclaiming his “love” for Juliet earlier in the evening – without acknowledging the least bit of vulnerability.  We could chalk this up to gender differences, with men traditionally having less to worry about in pledging their troth – they won’t become pregnant and they are the empowered members of the pair – but I think that, while that can fall along traditional gender lines, the issues are actually shared by both lovers.  There is a bravado to sharing our feelings for another – to letting the world know of our love – and in doing that, we are vulnerable, but also prepared to protect ourselves if that love is not returned.  But when we let the other know that we are not just casting around, but actually feel something profound for this particular individual – particularly if the other has already expressed interest, we are suddenly standing on the edge of an abyss – everything will be different if we cross that divide.  The divide is concretized in the play and the opera because marriage is a necessary outcome of love at that time between these people, but I think the feeling of crossing a divide is an important component of romantic love.

The chasm that separates the Montagues and the Capulets – enmity between these two families – has been the explanation for the dividing line between Romeo and Juliet – but, just as with the gender differences above, I think there is a potential that a more universal experience is being covered up by the particulars of the families.  I think that allying with another family – any family – is a foreign experience.  Even if you grew up next to each other, the habits and traditions of the family next door are slightly different than your own.  And each of the members of the marriage will experience the traditions of the other family as foreign.  So that loving – and especially marrying – another is moving into foreign territory.  From this perspective, all marriages are cross cultural.

But it is not just that the traditions are different; marriage – at least a romantic marriage – is a kind of death.  At its best, it is the (partial) death of one’s selfish regard for oneself.  We have to give up being the cared for one within our family – the one whose cousin Tybalt will find a suitable marriage partner for – and we have to become executives in the family.  But we also have to take our lover’s needs into account.  Indeed, we strangely want to put them at the forefront (in the best of loves), even if that means that our own needs don’t get attended to – that our own needs become dead to us.  And we revel in this.  In moments of true love, we feel good giving something up for someone we love (O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi comes to mind here).  Romantic love has, at its base, a kind of selflessness.

Now, whether a lover is, in fact, moved to be selfless – well, there’s a rub.  Many of our romances don’t turn out to be so romantic.  But when our cultural expectation is that romantic love will result in something like the experience of Romeo and Juliet, if our lover isn’t willing to split with his or her family for us – if our lover isn’t willing to commit suicide at the thought of not being with us, then we question whether they really do love us.  And this becomes the source of endless bits of friction in the marriages and the relationships of so many people.

Perhaps that has something to do with the treatment of dreams and sleep, daytime and nighttime in the opera.  In the opening scene, Romeo is hesitant to go to the party, and Mercutio makes fun of his anxieties by essentially calling them the product of a nightmare.  We know that he should be wary, for we know what the ultimate outcome of the night will be.  The scenes between Romeo and Juliet happen only at night - at the party - beneath the balcony - early in the morning when they are wed - their wedding night - and then in the crypt.  Daytime is filled with the nightmares of murdering Tybalt and Juliet being pushed towards marrying Paris.  The two lovers play with extending the night - it is the place of dreams and also of love for them - and welcoming the day, when they want to cut short their interaction because it is going in unwanted directions.  Romeo at one point commands the day not to come - essentially telling the earth to stop revolving - so that he can have more time with Juliet.

But their time together is dream time - it is, on some level, not real.  They don't really know each other.  They have barely met.  They are attracted to each other - and imagine each other - and discover, in the little time that they have, that they are as the other imagined them - but they don't spend time outside of the night together - they don't leave the world of dreams to discover the realities of the world.  When those realities intrude - when Juliet discovers Romeo has killed her cousin, she quickly forgives him, even before he has asked for it.  They are each who the other imagines them (dreams them) to be - and they are, together, who we dream them to be - the legendary lovers.

A little discussed aspect of the psychoanalytic relationship with a therapist is that this is one of the few places where the form of the relationship is not just fair game for discussion, but it becomes central to the work.  Further, there is an emphasis of the experience of the relationship from the perspective of one of the partners in that relationship – the patient or client.  Their experience of the relationship is privileged.  The therapist’s experience of the relationship, while important, is used to better understand the experience of the patient or client.  If the client is disappointed because the therapist did not act in a particular way, the client’s disappointment becomes a focus of discussion – why and how was the patient disappointed?  This doesn’t necessarily lead to changes in the relationship – but it does lead to being able to talk about what the expectations in the relationship are.  In love relationships it can be hard to talk about those expectations – for among other reasons because to articulate something like the belief that the other’s actions betray their lack of love; well, that is putting the complainer in the position of Juliet letting Romeo know that she loves him and fears that he does not return that love– it makes her vulnerable and gives him power.  So those thoughts stay underground.  In good psychotherapy, those thoughts surface to be discussed and, when things go well, to be understood and worked through.

I once joined a group of men in monthly discussions.  We called ourselves a men’s group, but, though two of us were therapists, we didn’t have a “leader” and we didn’t really have an agenda.  We got together to talk about the things that were important in our lives.  I found it oddly gratifying to discover that one of the other members, not a therapist at all – in fact he worked on the grounds crew of the local parks board cutting grass – noted that relationships were the hardest things in life to navigate.  It helped me realize that people outside of my profession get that what it is that we do is both difficult and very important.

As a side and ending note, I once attended a workshop by a group of family therapists who were demonstrating how their family therapy suicide prevention plan worked with families who had a suicidal teenager, and they used the Capulets, with Juliet as the suicidal teenager.  It was a fascinating model and a fascinating demonstration, but it was also the case that it came with a disclaimer – they wanted people to know that great art – in this case tragedy – would not be prevented by their therapy.  I would disagree and agree with that statement.  First, I think that some kinds of tragedy, teen age suicide among them, can be prevented by discovering and addressing the forces that are leading towards that as a viable option.  I think that, as upsetting as it would have been for Count Capulet to welcome a Montague – especially the murderer of Tybalt – into the family – he would prefer that to losing his daughter.  How that would be navigated, I don’t know.

But I agree with the other side of the coin.  I think that marriages – truly romantic marriages – and then those that aspire to be but aren’t – are tragedies.  They involve the deaths of the lovers – who end up on a funeral pyre together.  In the best of those tragedies, a new pair of people emerge – a couple that has been transformed – for good and ill – by the process of loving each other.  And we continue to hold out hope – more than 400 years after Shakespeare first introduced them to us – that we, like Romeo and Juliet, can be transformed by love.

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