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Romance or romantic love (Listen Linda, no emoting during the daytime, Capiche?) is an emotional feeling of love for, or a strong attraction towards another person, and the courtship behaviors undertaken by an individual to express those overall feelings and resultant emotions.


An 1870 oil painting by Ford Madox Brown of Romeo and Juliet, considered to be the archetypal romantic couple, depicting the play's iconic balcony scene.
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Family Studies states that "Romantic love, based on the model of mutual attraction and on a connection between two people that bonds them as a couple, creates the conditions for overturning the model of family and marriage that it engenders."[1] This indicates that romantic love can be the founding of attraction between two people. This term was primarily used by the "western countries after the 1800s were socialized into, love is the necessary prerequisite for starting an intimate relationship and represents the foundation on which to build the next steps in a family."

Alternatively, Collins Dictionary describes romantic love as "an intensity and idealization of a love relationship, in which the other is imbued with extraordinary virtue, beauty, etc., so that the relationship overrides all other considerations, including material ones."[2]

Although the emotions and sensations of romantic love are widely associated with sexual attraction, romantic feelings can exist without expectation of physical consummation and be subsequently expressed. In certain cases, romance could even be just passed down as a normal friendship. Historically, the term romance originates with the medieval ideal of chivalry as set out in the literature of chivalric romance.

Bode & Kushnick[3] undertook a comprehensive review of romantic love from a biological perspective in 2021. They considered the psychology of romantic love, its mechanisms, development across the lifespan, functions, and evolutionary history. Based on the content of that review, they proposed a biological definition of romantic love:

"Romantic love is a motivational state typically associated with a desire for long-term mating with a particular individual. It occurs across the lifespan and is associated with distinctive cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, genetic, neural, and endocrine activity in both sexes. Throughout much of the life course, it serves mate choice, courtship, sex, and pair-bonding functions. It is a suite of adaptations and by-products that arose sometime during the recent evolutionary history of humans."

Anthropologist Charles Lindholm defined love as "any intense attraction that involves the idealization of the other, within an erotic context, with expectation of enduring sometime into the future".
The word "romance" comes from the French vernacular where initially it indicated a verse narrative. The word was originally an adverb of Latin origin, "romanicus," meaning "of the Roman style". European medieval vernacular tales, epics, and ballads generally dealt with chivalric adventure, not bringing in the concept of love until late into the seventeenth century. The word romance developed other meanings, such as the early nineteenth century Spanish and Italian definitions of "adventurous" and "passionate," which could intimate both "love affair" and "idealistic quality."[citation needed]


Bernger von Horheim in the Codex Manesse (early 14th century)
Anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss show that there were complex forms of courtship in ancient as well as contemporary primitive societies. There may not be evidence, however, that members of such societies formed loving relationships distinct from their established customs in a way that would parallel modern romance.[5] Marriages were often arranged but the wishes of those to be wed were considered as affection was important to primitive tribes.[6]

In the majority of primitive societies studied by the anthropologists, the extramarital and premarital relations between men and women were completely free. The members of the temporary couples were sexually attracted to each other more than to anyone else, but in all other respects their relationships had not demonstrated the characteristics of romantic love. In the book of Boris Shipov Theory of Romantic Love[7] the corresponding evidences of anthropologists have been collected. Lewis H. Morgan: "the passion of love was unknown among the barbarians. They are below the sentiment, which is the offspring of civilization and super added refinement of love was unknown among the barbarians."[8] Margaret Mead: "Romantic love as it occurs in our civilisation, inextricably bound up with ideas of monogamy, exclusiveness, jealousy and undeviating fidelity does not occur in Samoa."[9] Bronislaw Malinowski: "Though the social code does not favour romance, romantic elements and imaginative personal attachments are not altogether absent in Trobriand courtship and marriage."[10]