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Perreault Magazine - 95 -
Now, it is time to get to the point of this email.
Question:
Ever had a relationship which was one sided? Ever fell head over heel for a person who turned out to be married? Ever found yourself infatuated with a person who is living on other side of the world, or had a different sexual orientation? Maybe someone who was perfect, but 30 years younger? Or maybe you found your "soul-mate" only to discover they are a "functioning" addict?
Most of us, being humans and reincarnating on earth, have encountered these encounters...
These love affairs, these flings, dalliances, liaisons, and sparks of unreasonable ecstasy, are all too often scorned upon by ourselves, and dismissed by our friends and family. They are judged, classified as impossible loves, or past-lives patterns that must be exorcised. They are explained as father issues, mother issues, midlife-crises issues, Saturn Return (first and second) and other unfaltering categorizations. These loves that vibrate the heart in such fluctuating frequencies are described as destructive, terrible, meaningless, and inevitably leading to a dead-end. And what can I say? Our friends are right. These impossible one-sides, (or three-sided) loves lead nowhere.
However, after experiencing such an impossible love recently, I had a chance to look at these kind of relationships in a more, let us say, personal manner. Usually I am the empath, the counselor, the therapist, doing my best to pick up the pieces and help those who fell into a love with no hope. Suddenly, finding myself in the company of the heartbroken, I realized there is another, more constructive and romantic way to look at these destructive loves. No longer are they impossible, forbidden, and abominate affairs. From now on, I declared them as COURTLY LOVES! A noble love experienced by the greatest and most illustrious men and women in the High Middle Ages of Western Europe. We are no longer addicts, delusional and self-destructive pathetic lovers but knights and ladies, kings and queens who in our pain inspire and conceive countless poems, work of art, music, stories and ballads. Courtly Love was popularized by the godless troubadours who immortalized the sorrows of the mortal coils like constellations of Greek heroes and heroines. These wise storytellers lived and work in the same period when the Kabbalistic wrote the Zohar and when Rumi channeled his poems.
court·ly love
noun
1. a highly conventionalized medieval tradition of love between a knight and a married noblewoman, first developed by the troubadours of Southern France and extensively employed in European literature of the time. The love of the knight for his lady was regarded as an ennobling passion and the relationship was typically unconsummated.
These courtly loves were impossible loves and they were perfect in their imperfection. Lancelot fell in love with Guinevere who was not only his queen but also married to his best friend, King Arthur. He fought in her name, wrote her poems, and I am sure she visited his more erotic dreams, but their love was kept in the "spiritual ethereal" realm, never materializing in the corporeal sense. Some historians write on the possible influence of the Old Testament book Song of Songs on the form and essence of Courtly Love.