Romance and value ?

Even though there often appears to be traces of romance and love being intertwined in various cultures and societies throughout history, Gary Zukav, best selling author of Seat of the Soul and Soul Stories, views romantic love as being an illusion, stating that the concept of romantic love can never be truly fulfilling. He states that "Romance is your desire to make yourself complete through another person rather than through your own inner work.", thus isolating the idea of romance from the concept of "true love." His argument is that "real love" is more beneficial than romantic involvement alone.[16]
Romantic love may, then, be a sexual love[17] that attempts to transcend, in some cases entirely, mere needs driven by physical appearances, lust, or material and social gain. This transcending, ultimately, implies not just that personality is more essential, which could be considered a truism, and a view that might appear without much regard to virtue, ranging from the noble to the most shallow character. Rather, romance tends to strive to see, or suppose it can see, personality as attractive in a fundamentally higher sense. In some religions, all forms of love (and art) may be regarded as indirectly seeking God--and therefore adding to a relationship with God--whereas at the same time, such lesser objects of love are sometimes regarded as distinct from God and an obstacle in the path of spirituality.
Not only theologians, but many philosophers debate this, especially in continental philosophy in existentialism, and in analytic philosophy, in views such as emotivism.[18] Things lesser than personality, however, as well as the practical aspects of personality, always play a role in romance's arousal and justification.
Romance then, raises questions of emotivism (or in a more pejorative sense, nihilism) such as whether spiritual attraction, of the world, might not actually rise above or distinguish itself from that of the body or aesthetic sensibility. While Buddha taught a philosophy of compassion and love, still in his philosophy of anatman or non-self spiritual appearances are of a piece with the world and essentially empty. The contradiction between compassion and anatman seems to be a part of Buddhism. In that case a seemingly negative insight can result in very different overall views, for example if one compares Buddha and Shakespeare with Nietzsche. Kierkegaard also addressed these ideas in works such as Either/Or and Stages on Life's Way.[19]
Romantic love is contrasted with platonic love which in all usages precludes sexual relations, yet only in the modern usage does it take on a fully asexual sense, rather than the classical sense in which sexual drives are sublimated. Sublimation tends to be forgotten in casual thought about love aside from its emergence in psychoanalysis and Nietzsche. Unrequited love can be romantic, if only in a comic or tragic sense, or in the sense that sublimation itself is comparable to romance, where the spirituality of both art and egalitarian ideals is combined with strong character and emotions. This situation is typical of the period of romanticism, but that term is distinct from any romance that might arise within it.[20] Romantic love might be requited emotionally and physically while not being consummated, to which one or both parties might agree.