In the Buddhist tradition, Theravadan and other, one of the five hindrances is "sensory desire". Romantic love obviously includes sensory desire, therefore romantic love is a hindrance.
In my experience, the other hindrances are also well represented in the "usual" cycle of a romantic love affair! In fact, there is little to top a romantic love affair for generating hindrances.
Others seem to be extolling the virtues of a long and happy marriage in this thread. But can you move from the turmoil of "romantic love" into "the happiest of marriages" , one in which the five hindrances play no part? Can a marriage ever be as free of the hindrances as the life of a solitary hermit? At least the hermit only has his own hindrances to deal with! And he doesn't have to deal with any of the hangovers of romantic love that remain in a marriage.
I haven't read much on the problems of romantic love in the Buddhist texts I've encountered. Is it because romantic love is one of West's many bad inventions?
"The greatest obstacle to pleasure, Epicurus thought, even more so than pain and fear, is delusion, especially fantasies that delude us into thinking that we can attain something that exceeds the limits of our finite nature. It is this fantasy of infinite pleasure that helps explain our tragic proneness to romantic love. As Stephen Greenblatt describes in The Swerve, "in the misguided belief that [our] happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.""
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