The Awful Lie of Romance
My friend Isabel Yap posted this very beautiful essay on Interfictions: Life is not a shoujo manga.
"Why is this resonating so strongly with me?" I asked myself. "I never read romance. The closest I ever came to shoujo manga was the few pages of 'Rose of Versailles' printed in Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics'"
But the beats Isabel describes are all familiar. The perfect heroine. The perfect boy. The stumble and rescue. From fairy tales to saturday morning cartoons to 'teen' television - we are inundated with these artificial tales of young romance. The cultural myth is so strong it seeps into a few seconds of an ad for pimple cream or the arrangement of teddy bears in a shop window.
It's the story that made me want to die because I graduated high school without ever having a boyfriend. Because isn't high school where this happened? You met your first boyfriend in High School. TV told me so.
Be cute. Be perfect. Be good at sports and studying but not better than the boys. Eventually, HE will come to you. Your eyes will meet across a crowded room and you'll KNOW. He'll be bashful or he'll just grab you, but all you have to do is stand there so passive and still and weak, and he will complete your quest. Your story ends at the wedding, which will be the Best Day of Your Life.
I was excited when I saw a display of "Further adventures of Disney Princesses" books at a bookstore. I imagined Belle solving crimes and Jasmine sailing the high seas. I flipped through one. Belle was planning her wedding. I picked up the next one. Jasmine was planning her wedding. I turned to the back page of all of them. Wedding dresses.
I remember my grandmother telling me, very near the end of her life, that her wedding was the happiest day of her life. All I could think was how horrible that was, all those years of life after the happiest? The child-rearing and the working and the house-cleaning and the family Thanksgivings and Christmases and none of it was as happy as that one day in the picture with the satin backdrop and all my great aunts in tiny veils?
I think Grandma lied, and I think she lied because the myth was so strong. The myth is so strong that we forget what real romance looks like.
In forty years, I have been transfixed by the eyes of a stranger exactly once. I was walking into the Physics building on my college campus, on my way to class, and he was walking out and he was the most perfectly beautiful man I had ever seen. Olive complexion and pale eyes. I stared and gaped and watched him disappear into the traffic of other students and I never saw him again.
I thought I would be the only virgin in college, but talking with my friends I found out - none of us dated in high school. The stories were lies.
I met my husband in the cafeteria. I sat down at a table with friends of mine and he was there and we talked about the co-ed fraternity I was trying to recruit people for. All I cared about was here was a freshman, fresh meat for my club. I also talked to him about a story I was working on. I distinctly remember the printed draft sitting on the round table between us while I told him how rewarding and fun it was to belong to Alpha Phi Omega.
He didn't make a big impression on me and we didn't seek each other out. We moved in the same friend circle, friends of friends. We dated almost accidentally. I was experimenting with NOT finding the man of my dreams - I just wanted to date casually and non-exclusively. We didn't really get to know each other until he went home for the summer and we kept each other entertained with long emails. We didn't fall in love until we'd taken a nap together the next year. I didn't really commit to the relationship until our wedding was done. Our wedding was an exhausting, hot, confusing day and we've had a thousand, thousand better days together since.
We disagreed and compromised and knit our families together and ultimately real love doesn't film well. It's slow and gradual and expressed more in moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer than bouquets of flowers.
My relationship with my husband is more rich and rewarding than I ever imagined, and so completely not what romance stories taught me to expect. Real-life love is not foisted on you; you choose it. You decide. You try. You work. You fail. You try again. You decide again. You have to take responsibility for it and build it with your own actions.
And it's worth it.
"Why is this resonating so strongly with me?" I asked myself. "I never read romance. The closest I ever came to shoujo manga was the few pages of 'Rose of Versailles' printed in Scott McCloud's 'Understanding Comics'"
But the beats Isabel describes are all familiar. The perfect heroine. The perfect boy. The stumble and rescue. From fairy tales to saturday morning cartoons to 'teen' television - we are inundated with these artificial tales of young romance. The cultural myth is so strong it seeps into a few seconds of an ad for pimple cream or the arrangement of teddy bears in a shop window.
It's the story that made me want to die because I graduated high school without ever having a boyfriend. Because isn't high school where this happened? You met your first boyfriend in High School. TV told me so.
Be cute. Be perfect. Be good at sports and studying but not better than the boys. Eventually, HE will come to you. Your eyes will meet across a crowded room and you'll KNOW. He'll be bashful or he'll just grab you, but all you have to do is stand there so passive and still and weak, and he will complete your quest. Your story ends at the wedding, which will be the Best Day of Your Life.
I was excited when I saw a display of "Further adventures of Disney Princesses" books at a bookstore. I imagined Belle solving crimes and Jasmine sailing the high seas. I flipped through one. Belle was planning her wedding. I picked up the next one. Jasmine was planning her wedding. I turned to the back page of all of them. Wedding dresses.
I remember my grandmother telling me, very near the end of her life, that her wedding was the happiest day of her life. All I could think was how horrible that was, all those years of life after the happiest? The child-rearing and the working and the house-cleaning and the family Thanksgivings and Christmases and none of it was as happy as that one day in the picture with the satin backdrop and all my great aunts in tiny veils?
I think Grandma lied, and I think she lied because the myth was so strong. The myth is so strong that we forget what real romance looks like.
In forty years, I have been transfixed by the eyes of a stranger exactly once. I was walking into the Physics building on my college campus, on my way to class, and he was walking out and he was the most perfectly beautiful man I had ever seen. Olive complexion and pale eyes. I stared and gaped and watched him disappear into the traffic of other students and I never saw him again.
I thought I would be the only virgin in college, but talking with my friends I found out - none of us dated in high school. The stories were lies.
I met my husband in the cafeteria. I sat down at a table with friends of mine and he was there and we talked about the co-ed fraternity I was trying to recruit people for. All I cared about was here was a freshman, fresh meat for my club. I also talked to him about a story I was working on. I distinctly remember the printed draft sitting on the round table between us while I told him how rewarding and fun it was to belong to Alpha Phi Omega.
He didn't make a big impression on me and we didn't seek each other out. We moved in the same friend circle, friends of friends. We dated almost accidentally. I was experimenting with NOT finding the man of my dreams - I just wanted to date casually and non-exclusively. We didn't really get to know each other until he went home for the summer and we kept each other entertained with long emails. We didn't fall in love until we'd taken a nap together the next year. I didn't really commit to the relationship until our wedding was done. Our wedding was an exhausting, hot, confusing day and we've had a thousand, thousand better days together since.
We disagreed and compromised and knit our families together and ultimately real love doesn't film well. It's slow and gradual and expressed more in moving the laundry from the washer to the dryer than bouquets of flowers.
My relationship with my husband is more rich and rewarding than I ever imagined, and so completely not what romance stories taught me to expect. Real-life love is not foisted on you; you choose it. You decide. You try. You work. You fail. You try again. You decide again. You have to take responsibility for it and build it with your own actions.
And it's worth it.