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If romantic love is a story, what is it a story about? Johnson's answer is the heart of the book, and it borrows a single Jungian term: projection. When we fall in love, he argues, we are not chiefly seeing the other person. We are seeing something in ourselves — an image we carry inside, luminous and half-divine — and we cast it outward onto a suitable human screen. Jung called the inner feminine image in a man the anima, the inner masculine image in a woman the animus. Romantic love is the moment that inner figure lights up and appears to walk toward us in the flesh.

This explains the strange grandeur of falling in love, the way the beloved seems to glow. What we are actually encountering, Johnson says, is a spiritual longing — a hunger that older cultures directed toward God, toward the sacred, toward the whole of life. In the modern West, having lost much of that religious container, we have nowhere to put the longing except into one other person. So the beloved is asked to be not a partner but a deity: to give life meaning, to heal old wounds, to make us whole. No human can carry that, and the myth knew it — which is why Isolde is always just out of reach.

The predictable arc of romantic love, in Johnson's telling, is that the projection collapses. The intoxication cannot last, because reality wears it down. One morning the beloved is simply a person again — sometimes an irritating one. This is the phase most couples experience as failure, the moment when "we're not in love anymore" seems to describe an objective loss. Johnson calls it something else: the beginning of the actual relationship, and the hardest passage in it.

In the Tristan story this crisis is dodged. The lovers never have to withdraw their projections, because the myth kills them first, freezing the passion at its peak. That is the myth's warning as much as its beauty. If we insist on keeping the intoxication — chasing it through affairs, through fantasy, through serial new beginnings — we are choosing Tristan's path, loving the potion rather than the person. We stay loyal to the feeling and betray the human who was supposed to produce it.

Step back from Tristan and a larger diagnosis emerges. Johnson thinks romantic love became so overwhelming in the West precisely because the West emptied out its other channels for the sacred. In cultures with living religious and communal forms, the hunger for transcendence has many outlets. Strip those away and the hunger doesn't vanish — it concentrates, and it lands on the nearest available target, which turns out to be the person we sleep beside. We have quietly asked marriage to do the work that once belonged to God, and then wondered why it buckles.

This is why he insists the problem is not too much love but a confusion about what love is for. Romantic love, he argues, is genuinely a spiritual experience wearing a personal disguise. The glow, the sense of the absolute, the feeling of meaning — these are real intimations, but they point inward and upward, not merely across the dinner table. When we mistake the messenger for the message, we crush the messenger. The other person cannot be both a human companion and a religion.

Tristan and Isolde die reaching for each other, and for eight centuries that ending has read as the summit of love. Johnson reads it as a diagnosis. The passion was so pure it could not tolerate a shared life; it needed the beloved perpetually out of reach, because what it truly loved was the reaching. The book's quiet argument is that we have been handed this story as instruction, and that we keep obeying it — falling, glowing, disenchanting, concluding we chose wrong, and setting off to fall again.