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.