LOVE AS UNION WITH THE BELOVED

In the speech which Plato has him deliver in the Symposium, Aristophanes explains how Zeus split all human beings down the middle. Consequently every man or woman is only half a complete creature, and goes through life with a passionate longing to find his or her complement in order to be reunited with it. He then reports how Hephaestus, the smith of the gods, asks two lovers: ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night in one another's company? for if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt and fuse you together, so that being two you shall become one.’ Although Aristophanes is not expressing Plato's own views, he is referring to a feature which in one form or another is characteristic for romantic love throughout all ages. This feature is especially prominent in romanticism and in mysticism.

What is the nature of this union which romantic lovers desire to achieve? In what sense do they wish to be ‘melted and fused together’ by Hephaestus? Does the lover ‘experience a strange urgency to dissolve his own individuality in that of the other and, vice versa, to absorb the individuality of the beloved into his own’, as Ortega y Gasset claims? And how should this kind of merging be understood? Or do lovers merely desire a kind of close relationship in which the individuality of each partner is preserved and left intact?