One time I asked the Swiss-French philosopher Jeanne Hersch what she thought the French model for romantic love was. Her response was instant: C’est Tristan.

That twelfth-century tale, which exists in many versions, goes like this: Tristan, a Cornish knight, is assigned by his uncle, King Mark of Cornwall, to conduct Iseult, designated bride of the king, to the court of her bridegroom. During their sea voyage, Tristan and Iseult drink a liquor that, unbeknownst to either, has the power to instill a mutually indissoluble passion. Their clandestine meetings and eventual death (his at the hand of the betrayed King Mark, hers of grief) follow inexorably thereafter.

As you can see, their romance is not explainable in terms of psychology, sociology, or sophisticated studies in compatibility. The lovers have no power to turn it aside. It hits them like a stroke of lightning, or, in French, le coup de foudre.

In the fourteenth century, Dante Alighieri is said to have greeted his Beatrice only once, on a street in Florence. He had no chance to say a word to her. One look sufficed and he produced his Divine Comedy. That’s Dante’s three-part poetic depiction of his imagined journey through hell, purgatory, and heaven – where he pictures himself coming face to face with Beatrice at last. Again, without psychology or compatibility studies.

When I first saw lovers walking hand in hand down the streets of Paris, neither I nor the other American girls on Fulbright grants had ever seen anything like it. The couples acted as if they adored each other. Their erotic openness was astonishing to us. No American girl would have given the game away so frontally. At the same time, the dance of the lovers seemed choreographed. They had a way of walking, of exchanging languorous glances and looking away again, that appeared fresh but at the same time traditional. The couples had not invented the dance. The culture provided the model. They had merely stepped into it.

Even the French love songs of the day underscored the dance steps, though they added a cool warning: lovers are all the same, while they love – for as long as they love! It seemed that modern French youth accepted the Tristan template without question but modified it in one respect: romantic love was all-consuming but temporary. The modern lovers would outlive their love. The coup de foudre, the stroke of lightning, was still a law unto itself – but now only while it lasted!

When I met Jerry, I had pretty much worked out my life as a modern woman. I loved teaching philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York. I lived in a nice studio apartment in the nice neighborhood where I’d grown up. The museums – the Carnegie, the National Academy of Design, the Metropolitan Museum and the Frick were all reachable on foot. Since I was divorced, nobody could say that I’d been afraid to try marriage. To me it seemed that nothing in the whole world could upset such a well-balanced apple cart.

Jerry came into my life when the academic organization he headed helped me and a few other concerned professors save what was then the college’s award-winning core curriculum. I was so busy with saving the college that I had no time to notice the fact that, simultaneously, I was falling in love. A lot of people who knew me noticed it. But I didn’t.

After we won the college fight, Jerry and I met for dinner and I did notice the spark between us. Later we spent an afternoon together at the Metropolitan Museum, sharing personal histories in a carefully objective style. By then, I did notice that something unusual might be going on. And right away, I took such protective measures as were open to a person with my training in philosophy.

I decided to bracket what phenomenologist Edmund Husserl called “the natural attitude” of personal involvement or commitment. Keeping any personal stakes within brackets, one looks at the phenomena in one’s own consciousness noncommittally – as appearances merely.

It didn’t work! Much to my astonishment, the opposite happened. I had the sensation of falling down a bottomless well. Mentally I tried climbing back up the sides of the well, but it was no use. I just slid down again!

Seeing that my predicament was as serious as it was surprising, I resolved to consult professorial friends in other departments who might have light to shed on this subjective happening. I tried colleagues in Psychology, Sociology and certain cross-cultural niches. Every one of these profs assured me that what I’d experienced was an abnormal state, but one familiar to experts in their disciplines. It was, they assured me, an enjoyable but temporary species of madness. However, not to worry. Recovery might take a few months, but then I would snap out of it.

I have no doubt that they meant well. And I am sure their advice would have fit a number of such cases. However, I didn’t believe them. Neither did Jerry who, on his side, hadn’t previously believed in romantic love and was also consulting books by the experts.

Neither Jerry nor I tried to fit our open-eyed experience into the categories wielded by experts. We both took our romantic love seriously enough to trust it. It wasn’t a symptom of madness. To both of us, it looked like …

sanity in depth.

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