Seven Love Types (Part 10): Legendary Lovers

In Shakespeare’s well-known play, the young lovers Romeo and Juliette fall hopelessly in love despite their families’ violent feuding. They pay for their love with their lives, yet we are left feeling that their against-all-odds love was tragically worth it. The same dynamics occur for Tony and Maria in Westside Story. Their romance is set against divided storge belonging loyalties, but becomes the catalyst for agape and xenia understanding between the families and hope for a better future.

In Wagner’s Opera, based on the legend of Tristan und Isolde, the lovers fall in love after drinking a magic potion. More powerful than a gin and tonic, this magic potion symbolizes the hidden power of love waiting to be unleashed. When you feel love, it’s like magic compelling you to do strange things. They engage in the forbidden. Tristan was to transport the beautiful Isolde across the sea to be the bride for King Mark. The sea symbolizes Tristan’s swelling, uncontrollable emotions. Falling in love would cost lives. Foolishness. Yet they fall in love and are immediately in peril. Under the cover of night, a symbol of passion, they hide and sexually consummate their love; away from the sensible, garish day, a symbol of reason. But, like Romeo and Juliette, death awaits them. In death, the unending passionate night, they join completely and forever. Their sexual passion becomes a deep coming together of bodies, minds, destinies; and united expression.

Although the legend ends in a double death, their love is a triumph. Who would not want to be so struck by the power of love, a force so strong, that it would overcome fear of death? Who doesn’t want to follow their passions and turn away from the daily grind of social convention? Wouldn’t you want just a little of Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliette or Westside Story love going on in your life?

That’s why the movie The Notebook was such a hit. It has the legendary flavor of putting love above social convention, but it ends happily rather than in tragedy. Noah and Allie, believe it or not, are like Tristan and Isolde. Isolde is destined to marry a king, whereas Allie is groomed to be with a successful society man. Tristan is “lower class” as is Noah. Yet, Noah and Allie, as Tristan and Isolde, in their sexual passion, turn their backs on social convention and fight for love. Fortunately, Noah and Allie live in a society tolerant of their love, so they go on to have children and experience old age.

These and many other stories extoll love. We admire Tristan and Isolde for giving up life for true love; we admire Noah and Allie for putting love before money and social conventions, we admire Tony & Maria and Romeo & Juliet for turning their backs on feuding families: Thus, with a kiss, I die. Does someone in your family hate your choice of love partner? It hurts so much, but … congratulations, you have a bit of Romeo and Juliet’s struggle happening in your love-life.

In these and other fictional love-tragedies, love is elevated as the ultimate human experience: Orpheus and Eurydice, Paris and Helen of Troy, Antony and Cleopatra, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tony and Marie (Westside Story), Marie and the Captain (The Sound of Music), The Age of Adeline, Overboard, The Five Year Engagement, La La Land, The Vow, About Time, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and so many more. We humans crave true love. If we cannot experience it ourselves, we live it vicariously through fiction: movies, books and songs. But what if legendary love could somehow become real life? Sometimes real life becomes legend, as with Pierre Abelard and Helöise, the real-life story about a historically significant career ruined by love.

Abelard and Helöise

Pierre Abelard (1079-1142) was one of the greatest theologians of his century. In his thirties and teaching at the university, he was at the height of his intellectual prowess when he met seventeen-year-old Helöise, the niece of an influential Parisian church leader. Abelard was entrusted with the task of educating her. Educate her he did; in Latin, mathematics, theology, philosophy, and sexual pleasure. Or did she teach him? Did they learn together? Her writings reveal their passion. As a monk Abelard was expected to keep his chastity, but Helöise fell pregnant. This caused a scandal and church leaders emasculate Abelard, like de-sexing a dog. The shame threw him into a deep depression.

Their son, Astralobe, was named after a scientific invention in defiance of the church. Helöise went into a nunnery and Abelard into a monastery. The exceedingly intelligent Helöise rose to be the head of her order and she founded orphanages and homes for widows. Abelard continued a limited academic career.

Why am I telling you this true-life love story? To illustrate that prototypical love can be lived out; dreams can become real. And because their legendary love-relationship encompassed all Seven Love Types.

Multiple types of love

Mentoring love. Abelard and Helöise met in a mentoring relationship: he was the teacher, she was the student. This mentoring relationship opened the door to their erotic romance.

Erotic romance. Abelard and Helöise shared sexual romantic love; their commitment to each other became life-long.

Storge belonging-love. With their child they created a family with belonging love; they belonged together and also created belonging in the communities they founded.

Epithumia liking-love. They shared common interests: reason, science and serving the community. Their writings tell us they liked each other’s bodies and minds. (Maybe they played scrabble together as well.)

Philia friendship love. There was a strong friendship component in their relationship and with their fellow monks and nuns in the communities they founded.

Xenia love to strangers. They were hospitable to strangers, particularly orphans and widows who needed help.

Agape altruism. The relationship between Helöise and Abelard encompassed the ideal of contributing beyond themselves; to make the world a better place. This they accomplished through setting up communities, charities, through their child and through their writings.

Their relationship exemplified the gamut of Seven Love Types. Perhaps that’s why their relationship stands as an inspiration to lovers through the centuries and across the world. Their gravesite holds prominence in Paris’s Pere Lachais Cemetery. Thousands of lovers pay homage to the real-life couple who lived out a legendary, passionate love.

That’s the power of love. It makes life worthwhile and it affects all of us. It helps to know about the different types of love and to live out the different types of love, to help make love more of a reality in all of our lives. The world could use more love; all Seven Types.

Love to you.