Romanticism is deeply hopeful

• Romanticism tells us that a long-term marriage can have all the excitement of a love affair.
• Romanticism proposed that true love must mean an end to all loneliness.
• Romanticism believed that choosing a partner should be about letting oneself be guided by feelings, rather than practical considerations.
• Romanticism believes that true love is synonymous with accepting everything about someone.

It's normative points include:

• we should meet a person of extraordinary inner and outer beauty and immediately feel a special attraction to them, and they to us
• we should understand one another intuitively
• we don’t need an education in love
• we should have no secrets and spend constant time together
• we should raise a family without any loss of intensity
• our lover must be our soulmate, best friend, co-parent, co-chauffeur, accountant, household manager and spiritual guide

... are crucial elements of wisdom, realism and maturity. Our love stories excite us to expect things of love that are neither very possible nor very practical.

We learn to judge ourselves by the hopes and expectations fostered by a misleading artistic medium.

Emma Bovary in Madame Bovary (1856) spent her childhood immersed in Romantic fiction. As a result, she’s expecting that her husband will be someone who understands her soul perfectly.

When she does get married to the kind, thoughtful but human. But she is quickly bored by the routines of married life. She is convinced that her life has gone profoundly wrong for one central reason: because it’s so different from what the novels she knows told her it would be.