The False Premise of True Love - Part II

(This is a continuation of a previous blog entry, “The False Premise of True Love”)

After writing the first part of this exposition on finding “True Love,” I came across a piece of writing by C.S. Lewis that spoke on the same subject and expressed the same ideas. I like to think I could have phrased it as well as he did, but I am no C.S. Lewis, so I will be quoting him liberally as we explore what true love is, and whether or not there are any films that accurately portray it.

As mentioned before, entertainment media portrays love as purely romantic, exciting, and fun. Those are all aspects of love, but are only a small part of it. If we think that is all that love should be, we end up feeling like our relationships have fallen short of what we deserved. The initial part of being in love is often called the “honeymoon phase,” because it is so romantic, thrilling, and fun. C.S. Lewis calls it “being in love,” and says this about it:

[Being in love] is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling, [and] no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity...Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called "being in love" usually does not last.

If the old fairytale ending "They lived happily ever after" is taken to mean "They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married," then it says what probably never was nor ever could be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships?

 

Any of us that have known someone about to get married can relate to that last statement – I have seen straight A students in college slip to B’s and C’s, a man that owned his own business get way behind in fulfilling orders, and I myself remember not getting any sleep during that time because I was so preoccupied with being romantic or taking 3 hours to say goodbye on the phone. Being in love is fun, but it is emotionally and physically impossible to sustain. The honeymoon has to end eventually – it’s natural, normal, and perfectly okay. Lewis explains:

…ceasing to be "in love" need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit ...They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be "in love" with someone else. "Being in love" first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

It is possible to be “in love” with anyone that we have some sort of strong romantic, physical, or exciting attraction to. But that attraction – that exciting feeling of being “in love” – does not mean that you have or will ever develop the deeper, unifying love that holds people together until they die. Being “in love” is relatively easy, but “loving” is significantly more difficult, and requires a lot of investment.

Everyone has experienced this deeper, more difficult love. It is what binds families together despite disagreement, trials, and sometimes over great distances. It takes work for me to stay in touch and be invested in the lives of my brothers and sister and parents as life scatters us about and preoccupies me with my own problems. There are cousins and friends whose relationships I have regretfully let go over time – not because I didn’t care, but because I didn’t do what was necessary to maintain them.

“Happily ever after” only happens when two people realize their lives can be made complete, and their joy filled, by being fully invested in each other as companions. They agree to work their way through the tough times and the dull times because the joy they find in each other is worth the effort and sacrifice they have to put into it. It’s not thrilling – it’s fulfilling.

If you disagree with me, of course, you will say, "He knows nothing about it..." You may quite possibly be right. But before you say that, make quite sure that you are judging me by what you really know from your own experience and from watching the lives of your friends, and not by ideas you have derived from novels and films. This is not so easy to do as people think. Our experience is colored through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on "being in love" forever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change—not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last.

C.S. Lewis has said it perfectly – and it is good advice for more than just love. How many of us have given up a hobby or abandoned practicing a new talent because the thrill wore off? A lot of people want to learn to play an instrument, but few spend the tedious hours necessary to master an instrument and experience the joy that playing an instrument can bring. Careers grow tedious, exotic places become ordinary, and caring for a pet can feel burdensome – but if we stick with it, each will yield great rewards. Why would true love be any different?

With that being said, I would like to list the movies that have very accurate portrayals of what true love is like. There are not many, but for those of us lucky enough to have found true love, these movies stand out:

• Up. Pixar weaves a powerful story of commitment and love through a life of joy, trials, and setbacks, all in the first five minutes of the film.
• The Village. Not typically thought of as a love story, but the scene with Ivy and Lucius talking on the porch about their relationship was one of the most convincing portrayals of love I have seen in a movie, furthered by the sacrifices that Ivy then makes for Lucius.
• The Vow. Kind of depressing, but shows what you will do for someone you love, and what the commitment of marriage should really mean. If you read the true story behind it and you aren't moved, then you have no soul.
• The Notebook. The first part of the movie is typical Hollywood staged romance, and the girl is a total jerk that the guy was way to good for...but the love story between them when they are older, with him going and reading to her everyday just for a moment of being with the woman he loved - that's true love.
• The Family Man. This movie does a great job of portraying how unromantic being married can be, but how great the rewards being partners in marriage and child rearing can be. I cannot watch the end of this movie without crying.

What's the difference between these and all the other romantic comedies out there? Anyone can love and be happy when your relationship is novel and times are good - and that's what most romances portray. But these movies convinced me not only that the characters loved each other, but that they loved each other with a commitment that would last beyond the fun times and romantic gestures of their prime years and clear through the heartaches, roadblocks, and grueling day-to-day grind that life inevitably is. Happily ever after isn't "We're both happy to be together until hard times hit." Happily ever after means "We're happy because we're together when the hard times hit."

The False Premise of True Love

Ahhh, romance.  It surrounds us, it moves us, it motivates us.  Deep down inside, most of us want to find someone to live "happily ever after" with.  The problem with finding true love, though, is just that - finding it.  It is terribly elusive.  Right now, only half of the adults in the U.S. are married.  Not only that, for every two couples getting married, one couple is getting divorced.  That means that, statistically speaking, you have a 1 in 4 chance of a happy, lifelong commitment to someone you love.

Bummer.

So who's to blame for that?  A lot of people.  Especially people themselves.  But I think that the Romance industry, especially romance for entertainment, is contributing to the problem.  And considering the female gender spends more time watching the "Lifetime" channel than males do, I'm going to go farther and say that Hollywood is hurting girls more than it is hurting guys when it comes to finding true love.

The problem here is that none of us were around to watch our parents fall in love.  If we see a couple now that has been married happily for sixty years, what we don't get to see is how that love first came about.  The only love stories we get to see from their genesis are on TV and in movies.  It's a major problem that very few people seem to recognize.

Everyone is quick to point out how unrealistic television and movie portrayals of war, child birth, fires, car wrecks, fist fights, and computer hacking are.  In fact, many groups vehemently protest the way Hollywood depicts violence, drug and alcohol use, vehicle handling, etc.  They even protest the unrealistic expectations set by celebrity physiques.  But I never hear anyone protesting how they portray people falling in love, even though it is equally unrealistic, and I can prove it.

The typical movie love story goes like this: Guy and girl meet, eventually like each other, have a major catastrophe that almost causes them to break up forever, but then someone says something to make it all better, they get back together, and the credits roll across the screen.  In and of itself, that is pretty realistic.  I know a lot of couples that had relationships like that.  They are all divorced, or they broke up before getting married.  It is a totally unrealistic plot for a love story that ends in "happily ever after."

So if it is so unrealistic, why is it so common?  Three reasons.

First, fiction is usually a lot more fun that reality.  No one wants to see the hero dive through a window and then bleed to death from multiple deep lacerations - it's way more fun if he emerges from the shower of glass unscathed.  The same is true of romantic cinema.  We want to see our characters overcome impossible challenges to find true love.  However, when we take that formula and apply it to reality, it just doesn't work.  The Bachelor and The Bachelorette have been trying to apply typical romantic formulas for a combined 23 seasons.  Candlelight dinners, wine, roses, exotic dates, fancy settings, very attractive men and women having fun together - how could that not result in love?  But it hasn't.  Out of 23 couples, one is married, and one is engaged.  All of the others broke up.  That is a 91% rate of FAILURE!  It's enjoyable to watch and fantasize about, but it just ain't real.

Compare this to The Biggest Loser - a bunch of grossly overweight people under extreme stress, struggling and working together, forming camaraderie as they pursue a common goal.  In just 13 seasons, there are seven couples that have formed and stayed together, three of which are married, and two of which are engaged.  That would make The Biggest Loser 442% more romantic than The Bachelor and The Bachelorette combined.  Obviously the process of falling in love has more to do with friendship and common goals than it does with physical attraction and fancy dinners.

Second, the people making the romantic movies have no idea what they are talking about.  I researched the backgrounds of the writers, directors, and stars of the top romantic films of the last year to see who was married and who was not (marriage being an easy to measure indicator of possibly being in love).  Of the 20 people I could find information for on their relationship status, 13 were divorced or hadn't been married, and seven were married.  That means that two thirds of the people responsible for portraying true love on the big screen this year have no idea what it is or how to find it.  Throw in the fact that celebrities in general have over twice the rate of divorce as regular Americans, and it is clear that these are not the people that we should be looking to for models of how to find love.

Third, it's emotional pornography.  Just like guys want to watch movies and believe that every girl in the world just wants to strip naked and get busy with the nearest guy, girls want to watch sappy romances and believe that true love is...well, romantic, and that they will get to have a similar love story.  Writers and producers in the porn and romance industries know what sells, so that's what they make.

While I would like to advocate that we should all boycott romance movies (so Friday night dates with my wife would consist entirely of manly movies), that isn't necessary.  What is necessary is that we all keep in mind four things when we go to the movies:

• When you jump through glass, you get cut. 
• When you stand up in a room engulfed by flames, your lungs cook and you die.
• When you duck behind a car door to avoid bullets, bullets go right through and still hit you.
• When people fall in love and resolve their problems in 110 minutes, if they made a sequel it would be about that couple getting divorced.

If people don't keep this in mind, the influence of Hollywood Romance can interfere with finding true love in two ways.  First, most of the relationships in these stories are based on superficial qualities - physical attraction, some sort of tension, witty banter - not on qualities that are important to a healthy, lasting relationship.  It gives a completely wrong impression of what you should be looking for in a partner.  Second, these movies show the "honey moon" phase that always exists at the beginning of a relationship, when things are fun, partners are still discovering each other, and the rest of life looks rosy.  Problem is that the credits roll before this phase ends, leaving the impression that love is always like that.  When life hits, people compare the gritty reality of what they are going through to the romantic glitz they see in theaters and decide what they have isn't the love they were promised, and they give up.

So what does true love look like?  Are there any movies that portray it realistically?  I will answer that in my next post.

Disclaimer:  I know that marriage is not the only measure, or best measure, for true love.  Two people can be at the beginning of a great relationship and not be married yet, and two people can be married and not happy.  Also, some people don't believe in marriage, but most do. And without watching a relationship until one of the people is dead to say it really did last, it is impossible to measure "happily ever after", so I use marriage as a convenient metric.

Vampire Romance - How Reality Bites

Is there a connection between why girls loved the "Twilight" series and why girls date jerks?  Could we learn anything from the Edward and Bella other than girls like guys who suck?

Vampire romance has been around for a while, but "Twilight" really made it popular with the teenage audience.  As a high school teacher, I was thrilled to see so many girls reading something other thane text messages at lunch, but I was very curious - why were women so interested in Vampires?  Being an academic, I did some research, conducted some surveys, and even read "Twilight" for myself. (I hope you all appreciate the sacrifices I made to write this article.)  In the end, I came to some interesting conclusions about what we can learn about women from vampire romance, and what women could learn about love from these fictional flings.

When I asked women of different ages and from different places to describe vampires, there was a long list of traits - older/mature, experienced, strong, well traveled, perpetually young, rich, multi-lingual, suave, etc. but the top three characteristics were:

• Vampires are mysterious and a bit dangerous.
• Vampires are handsome and know how to charm women.
• Vampires can be changed by falling in love with the right woman. 

Over and over again, as women described vampires, they used terms like "kind of dangerous," "a little dangerous," or "just dangerous enough to be exciting."  They rationalized the true nature of vampires, including the fact they were dangerous as if it were some small quirk that just happened to make them sexy - like Russel Crowe's accent.

This provided me with a huge breakthrough on how women think about men.  Think about what vampires really are and what the world would be like if they truly existed.  They are the ultimate hunters - possessing strength and cunning but without mercy or souls.  Strong enough to take life by force, they enjoy employing camouflage and luring victims willingly to their death.  Every father would fear the monsters that hid in plain sight and stole their daughters from the safety of their own communities.    In a world with real vampires, every woman that fell for a vampire thinking that she loved him and he truly loved her and she could change him would show up with a neck piercing and a fatal case of dehydration.  That's the reality of vampires.  Women have rationalized one of the most deadly creatures ever imagined into being "just a bit" dangerous.

What does this mean about real women in the real world with real men?  It means there is almost no limit to the number or severity of character flaws that a woman can rationalize away if a man meets one or more of the following requirements:

• His flaws make him exciting because he is intriguing or a bit dangerous.
• He's a player that is good looking and/or a smooth operator.
• He makes a woman believe that she can change him with their love.

This is a major problem for women.  While the odds of meeting a nice guy are better than the odds of meeting a vegan vampire, they are only slightly better.  The majority of males- especially teenage males - are jerks.  They care nothing for love or commitment or even friendship when it comes to the opposite sex - they just care about the sex.  Like vampires, these men will deceitfully woo a woman until she satisfies his hunger, then he'll dump her like a cold corpse.  They know that if they frame themselves as exciting, dangerous, smooth, or reform-able then women will willingly waltz past all the red flags and straight into their trap.

So how does this change the world?  I don't know.  I just thought it was an interesting insight.