SOURCE: Davis, Joseph K. “Campbell on Myth, Romantic Love, and Marriage.” In Uses of Comparative Mythology: Essays on the Work of Joseph Campbell, edited by Kenneth L. Golden, pp. 105-19. New York: Garland Publishing, 1992.

In the following essay, Davis delineates Campbell's treatment of romantic love.

Among the constant, continuing themes Joseph Campbell explores through his method of comparative mythology, none is more provocative, certainly none more timely, than that of romantic or passionate love and its expected outcome, marriage. Recognizing that in the West romantic love and marriage exist today in genuine crisis, Campbell speaks throughout his works to aspects and attributes of this subject from a perspective at once mythopoeic in its formulation, historical in its development, and personally transformative to individuals by its appearance and force in their lives. From Campbell's treatment in his books and collected essays and from his comments in those last volumes...