Love Paradox- An Exposé on 21st-Century Clichés

How easy would it be to paint a pretty picture of eternal romance that gives you wings and shoots you out to the cloud nine of fantasies and butterflies on a glossy paper? What makes it crash down from a breathtaking day dream to a traumatizing nightmare? What about those books and movies full of sappy happy endings? The idea of John Cusack standing outside your window with a boom box to voice out his love begging for forgiveness with a popular cheesy 80’s track could possibly melt anyone’s heart, including a hopeless yet cynical romantic like me. Most of us seem to want ourselves to be swept off our feet, rather than focusing on the one who works on the sweeping.

It’s always about the loved up gestures and moments, roses and teddy bears and a melancholic display of feelings after a breakup. What about the bitter truth and the bucket of tears involved in a relationship portrayed to us? According to me, we are driven towards nothing but expectations. Romantic love is widely celebrated as the pinnacle of love. It is marketed as the peak experience without which you cannot say you have lived. The signs of its allure are everywhere, not just on Valentine’s Day. Take the cost of the average wedding. It has rocketed in recent years, now easily topping £20,000 in the UK. It is as if couples make a direct link between romantic value and cash value. Currently, the Indian wedding industry is over Rs 100,000 crore and is growing at 25 to 30 percent annually. The estimated cost of a wedding with no expenses spared could be between Rs 5 lakh to Rs 5 crore, in India. Would you pick love and its euphoria, or money and it's sweet trappings?

Think of the cinema, where romantic comedies are big box office. If you get the formula right, of lovers finally falling into each others’ arms, your net hundreds of millions of dollars. One of the reasons that the summer of 2014 has been so catastrophic, with box office grosses down 18 percent, is the glut of indistinguishable product. Every movie, from “Transformers 4” to “The Amazing Spider-Man 2,” feels like a flashback and photocopy of something that came before it. But the biggest profit margins aren’t always tied to comic book stories. For proof, look no further than the weepy melodrama “The Fault in Our Stars,” which has so far grossed $263 million worldwide despite its tiny budget of $12 million. Love is blind, the proverb goes, though it might be more accurate to say we are being blinded by a hyper version of romantic love, and are losing out on life as a result. To cut to the chase, I think that the romantic myth is one of the most pernicious of our times. The myth is that there is someone out there with whom your life will be complete, and conversely, without whom your life would be a half-life. A major task of modern life is, therefore, to find this person and, falling in love, to cease to be two and become one. It is hard to prove, though I wonder whether such a view of romance has become so monstrous in the pressure it puts on couples to find fulfillment in each other, that it actually undermines more relationships than supports them. It is socially corrosive because it idealizes love, rather than understanding that love is made, not found. Love is made up of gritty ups and downs of being with someone who is as flawed as you.

It’s just the latest installment of pop culture messages that teach girls and young women that truly sensual and irresistible love includes some element of violence and danger. These messages start when you’re little with Beauty and the Beast. As a girl, you learn to be nice and patient with an abusive partner, and as long as you remain so, he will change his behavior and transform into a Prince. It doesn’t matter that he’s throwing things at you, locking you up in a room, not letting you eat without him, as he will change and you just need to tame him. But Beauty and the Beast isn’t real. When you get a little older, these messages continue with the Twilight series. You see Bella fall for a vampire with a basic instinct to kill her. You learn to put up with stalking and harassing as you try to prevent him from killing you. Let’s get real. Bella displays three classic traits of a victim in an abusive relationship: She has intense low self-esteem; She loves the bad-boy, and she’s thrilled by the violent and dangerous acts of Edward. Edward displays four hallmark traits of an abuser: He warns her away from him, only to increase her desire; He is possessive and tries to isolate her from her family and friends, he even incapacitates her car so she can’t get away; He stalks her constantly and when he can’t, he uses his vampire superpower to stalk her through others’ thoughts; and he has an intense temper but it’s not his fault because he’s a vampire. But Twilight isn’t real. Now that you’re an adult, the messages are solidified with Fifty Shades Of Grey.

No, some more stalking and threats instead, get tied up for a day and be a slave who hasn’t consented to it, but loves it! Christian Grey also happens to show classic abuser signs: he warns Ana away by telling her he’s not good for her, he stalks her by deliberately tracing her mobile phone to find out where she is, and he attempts to control and isolate her by having her sign a non-disclosure agreement. Fifty Shades is less of an erotic love story and more of a stalker’s handbook. If these stories aren’t real and have no influence on our cultural representation of romance, why are they the same? Cultivation Theory tells us we construct our ideas of reality through the images and messages around us, whether we are conscious of it or not. The popularity of these stories alone displays how much validity girls have given to these characters as representations of true love and it really makes it clear how the problems with sexual and romantic violence in our get culture covered up in ways that we don’t even notice.

The power of the myth is demonstrated in the fact that most people would say that they don’t believe it. They would protest that such a story shapes the plots of romantic novels and movies, and the advertising blurb of online dating sites, but is not real life. And yet, is it not precisely this dream that drives so many to glossy magazines, to cinemas and online? It is telling that the top question asked of Google last year was: What is love? Malign myths are at their most powerful when we presume we are not in their grip. If romance first draws the eye, relationships have a chance to thrive. More darkly, have you ever wondered why romance is so closely associated with death? Think of Romeo and Juliet. It appears to teach that it is better to marry in haste, without thought, because that is what it means to be star-crossed, to be passionate, to be authentic. Although note that when Shakespeare told the story he called it a tragedy. He saw a deeper truth in what happened, namely that a tragedy arises when the pernicious action of romance seizes young lovers’ hearts. There are signs that individuals are rejecting the romantic myth. The number of people living on their own has risen since the mid-1990s. Many reports that singleness means they enjoy more freedom and have time for other relationships, like friendship. Romance, on the whole, is not just a dream, it can make you fall, hurt yourself deeply and get back up all by thyself. In this process, you may make mistakes, or be someone’s grave mistake but you end up learning lessons and discovering yourself. To be good enough for someone, be good enough for you. Be your own hero rather than depending on others, by paving the path to own happy ending, full of self-discovery.