Angela Mollard: Let’s remove the filters from our view of romantic love
If love was a product — like an air fryer or a whipper snipper — it would have been withdrawn from the shelves for failing to live up to the claims on its packaging, writes Angela Mollard.
Opinion
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We were driving to a party when I remarked to my partner that the birthday boy and his wife seemed like a very happy couple.
“Why do you think that?” he said.
“Because she’s always posting lovely things about him on Facebook,” I replied.
My partner was quiet because he knew the reality.
Apparently, they were not happy. In fact, their marriage was on the brink of collapse, yet they felt compelled to frantically maintain the pretence.
Isn’t it time we got honest about love?
In the centuries since it was codified by marriage and in the decade or so it’s been commodified by social media we’re still buying into the fairytale, even though statistics and some very smart people suggest it needs a rebrand.
The acclaimed therapist Esther Perel says there’s a growing army of people disenchanted by love, while actor Dame Emma Thompson this week used her platform to proclaim that romantic love is a “myth” and “quite dangerous”.
Despite being in a relationship with actor Greg Wise since 1995, the Oscar-winner advocated a more pragmatic approach to affairs of the heart. “To think sensibly about love and the way it can grow is essential,” she said.
“Long-term relationships are hugely difficult and complicated. If anyone thinks that ‘happy ever after’ has a place in our lives, forget it.”
Perel, meanwhile, has revealed that her work largely involves dismantling the myth of modern love.
As she says of the married: “They bought the product, got it home, and found that it was missing a few pieces. So they come to the repair shop to fix it so it looks like what’s on the box.”
These couples, she says, are upset “when the romantic ideal doesn’t jibe with the unromantic reality”.
It’s no secret that I’m a member of the disenchanted army she refers to.
A broken marriage is the end game of that disillusion, but it is also, for many, the beginning of a new education in love.
What I now know is that romantic love has been recklessly and grievously misrepresented.
If love were a product like, say, an air fryer or a whipper snipper, it would have been withdrawn from the shelves for failing to live up to the claims on its packaging.
In no other realm of life — even beauty products — are we seduced by something so seemingly magical and extraordinary only to find that the means to making it work are inside ourselves and that we will spend a lifetime tinkering in the hope it might, eventually, operate optimally.
This is not a bad thing. Anything else we want to do well, we have to practise extremely hard.
And yet love is something we embrace in a haze of hope and pheromones, secretly convinced that, despite centuries of literature to the contrary, we have been uniquely anointed.
That love comes with massive hype, no instruction, indulgent and expensive ceremonies, and a cultural catalogue that promotes romance as a rose-strewn and transcendent state is one of the true failings of humanity.
If it all sounds rather bleak it shouldn’t be. When Thompson says it’s “philosophically helpful and uplifting” to see romantic love as a myth, she’s not suggesting we abandon love but disentangle from the ludicrous expectations heaped on it.
Likewise, if we forever see love for a partner as the pinnacle of human feeling, we diminish the love within families, between friends or for a pet.
Since her tearful scene in Love Actually, Thompson has embraced projects which prod at the messy underbelly of love.
But not much has changed since Pride and Prejudice morphed into Married At First Sight, with our screens still showcasing the predictable polarities of romance. People are either falling madly, intoxicatingly in love or they’re breaking each other’s hearts.
If we were to see the boring, effortful, sometimes tense, sometimes tender bits in the middle we might be better prepared for those moments in our own lives.
My generation is slowly beginning to reveal the complexities.
In The Australian last weekend, columnist Nikki Gemmell wrote of wanting to give up sex, while journalist Kate Legge’s new book, Infidelity and Other Affairs, chronicles how she dealt with her husband’s cheating. Some time I might write about the long-term long-distance relationship I am in now.
Love is wonderful, but younger generations are still being sold a pup, particularly by social media which is Mills and Boon with pictures, and a showcase for weddings more styled than ever.
I’m dismayed that we teach kids maths, geography and woodwork but barely anything on the mechanics, strategies and communication that might support their relationships.
At home we instruct them how to tie their shoelaces and cross the road, but most pass into adulthood with no understanding of concepts such as limerence, the perils of excessive porn viewing, or Perel’s excellent work on how to reconcile the erotic with the domestic.
Equally, we have raised them to believe that happiness is their birthright and so they blindly embark on the “happy ever after” despite divorce statistics to the contrary.
If we’re to rewrite the fairytale, at the very least it needs to end with “growth ever after”.
ANGELA LOVES
TEA TOWELS: With the cost-of-living crisis so many of us cut down on eating out, but to incentivise my home cooking I’ve bought half a dozen new tea towels. Huge joy in one small change.
LANA DEL RAY: Her new single, A & W, suggests her new album, out next month, is going to be a cracker.
DOVE: Few companies are at the forefront of girls’ self-image like Dove, which this week released new research which revealed 48 per cent of girls wish they looked like someone else.
It’s a heartbreaking statistic, but parents and their daughters can get on board with their #DetoxYourFeed campaign by downloading the body confidence kit from the company’s website at www.dove.com/au/stories/campaigns/detoxify.html
Got a news tip? Email weekendtele@news.com.au
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