Seven couples who showed the world that love is forever
It’s that time of year: Candy hearts appear on grocery store shelves, and Hallmark sales soar as we declare our love with cards and roses. While this holiday may feel saccharine and highly commercialized, it actually has a long and interesting history. However, that isn’t the focus of this article—we want to talk about LOVE! Love is eternal and universal, right? Not so, according to a group of European and American scholars, including Denis de Rougemont, who argue that romance and passion were largely European inventions, products of medieval Western society and “natural” only in the modern world. People outside the modern West, these scholars imply, did not love like we do.
Garbage, I say. And with all the love in my heart, I’m prepared to do what historians love to do—use evidence to refute this love-hating claim.
To make you less inclined to dismiss the rest of my argument as one-sided, I’ll happily concede that Eleanor of Aquitaine (c. 1122–1204) was one of the great lovers of history—a woman who inspired devotion, married both a French and an English king, and then out-thought and out-lived them both. As a patron, Eleanor transformed her court in Aquitaine into a center of romance, gathering troubadours who developed a language of longing, devotion, and desire. But love and passion—both formal and everyday—long predate Eleanor and flourish far beyond medieval Europe.
Here, then, is a list of great lovers and love traditions—stretching across centuries and circling the globe—that demonstrates just how universal romantic love really is.
- On the Swahili coast of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the epic hero Fumo Liyongo was not only a warrior and poet but also a lover who lived in a world of longing, desire, and vulnerability. Poems attributed to him praise the beauty of beloved women and lament painful separations, revealing a conception of love that was intense, embodied, and emotionally risky.
- Is there any greater expression of companionship and desire than these lines?
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou,
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
In verses like these, Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) celebrates intimacy, pleasure, and romance at the Persian court nearly a century before troubadours began singing in western Europe.
- Among the most desired women in history was Yang Guifei (719–756), whose relationship with the Tang emperor Xuanzong (r. 712–756) became legendary. Xuanzong’s passion for Yang Guifei was so consuming that he neglected governance, ritual, and restraint. As he withdrew from state affairs to spend his days and nights with his lover, her family rose in power until the emperor’s failure to rule helped trigger the An Lushan Rebellion, which forced the couple to flee the capital, sealing their tragic fate.
- In pre-Columbian central Mexico, Nahua poets composed courtly songs known as xōchicuīcatl (flower songs), using metaphors of flowers, jade, and quetzal feathers to express longing, joy, and vulnerability. The fifteenth-century ruler Nezahualcóyotl of Texcoco was especially renowned for poems that portrayed love as intense but fleeting—a flower that blooms brilliantly, only to fade.
- The Mughal emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) was one of history’s great lovers, although he is sometimes overshadowed by his remarkable wife Nur Jahan. So intelligent and politically adept was she that Jahangir effectively ruled alongside her, and foreign diplomats reportedly brought gifts for both, uncertain which spouse truly held power. Yet even this partnership is eclipsed by another Mughal love story: Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), who built the Taj Mahal as a monumental expression of devotion to his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal.
- The prize for sheer ferocity of love, however, may belong to the Hawaiian royal couple Kapiʻolani (1781–1841) and Naihe (1790–1831). Their bond was not refined or poetic. Rather, it was bold, public, and unyielding. Hawaiian traditions remember them as lovers who fought as fiercely as they loved, whose shared passion and loyalty were powerful enough to defy even the volcano goddess, Pele.
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Taken together, these stories make one thing clear: Romantic love did not wait patiently for medieval Europe to invent it. It has always existed in human history, and the evidence appears again and again across cultures, centuries, and continents, proving that passion, longing, devotion, and vulnerability are universal features of the human experience.