The Wall Street Journal had a long (approx. 6,000
words) Saturday (2/9) article about Toby Young and her love affair with John
Manard.
Toby is a 48 year old mother of grown children, married to the same man (a fire chief) she met in high school. She was a successful business woman and important community figure living near Kansas City.
John is 27 years old, serving a life sentence for his role in a murder. Toby and John spent a great deal of time together while Toby worked as a volunteer in John's prison.
Toby helped John escape from prison and ran off with him for a few weeks of raw sex before the two of them were caught.
The story will become a movie for those of my readers who don't have a WSJ subscription.
There is plenty of speculation in the WSJ article about what happened to cause Toby to give up her successful life for divorce, humiliation and a term in prison. To me there is no question. Toby was motivated by pure romantic love, which makes its victim blinded by passion. If you haven't been there, you won't understand.
This blog is to point out what Romantic is. Romantic is the worldview behind romantic love. The Romantic Era began at the founding of the United States. Romantic is associated with Goethe, Keats and Rousseau (see Wikipedia ). Romanticism is the intense set of passions surrounding the image of 'a strong man who acts as a protector of a sensitive woman, on a pedestal, who devotes her life to the delicate process of understanding the emergent world that lies behind reality...the sensitive world that appears out the fog like a ship at sea.'
In many ways romantic
is the worldview of a 13 year old with surging hormones...the same
passion that makes people very religious and drives some others to be
suicide bombers (for the love of Allah.)
I have always found Romantic to be disconcerting but I live in a Romantic society. Most films with an American ending have a happily-ever-after story line. Just what Toby was hoping for with John.
Obama is riding a wave of Romanticism.