Because romantic passion has led to countless broken lives and marriages, many people have turned against it and condemned it altogether. Writers such as Denis de Rougemont, Scott Peck, and Robert Johnson regard it as the antithesis of mature human love. As de Rougemont writes, “Passion-love is … an impoverishment of one's being… Passion wrecks the very notion of marriage.”   What these writers rightly criticise is the misguided attempt to make a relationship the main source of our spiritual fulfillment. Yet in trying to set things straight, they go to the other extreme-discounting any larger dimension of passion altogether. When Peck writes, "Love is not a feeling, [but] an act of will," he is arguing for all work, no play, for earth at the expense of heaven. In so doing, he fails to appreciate the unconditional nature of passion-as a deep resonance with life's great beauty-underneath all the distorted forms it may take. Devaluing passion or trying to exclude it from marriage only diminishes the vital spark between a man and a woman that propels their journey forward. This leaves us stuck with a hollow, stagnant form, along with an irresistible urge to break out of its constraints.  

So while indulging in addictive passion promotes delusion and death, denouncing passion altogether only maintains the crippling schism between heaven and earth-romantic inspiration and marital commitment-that has plagued love in the Western world for centuries. Neither inflating passion nor condemning it gives us a path.  The heavenly side of passion is an ecstatic urge to break out of our habitual patterns and realise a vaster sense of being. Yet unless we can ground this energy, by bringing it into an I-Thou relationship, it will take a distorted form. When we split off its heavenly side from earth, we "fall in love with love," becoming more enamored with our own excitement than with the reality of an ongoing partnership. Fearing that bringing passion down to earth will ruin our high, we are unwilling to bring it into one-pointed focus, to engage with a real person with any constancy or commitment, to take hold.