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| If you could have all the bad memories wiped from your brain, would that make everything better? |
My favourite romantic movie of all time is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I also remember being moved by Truly Madly Deeply and Benny and June.
I guess I have a soft spot for people who are slightly crazy but who, despite all the obstacles, find a way.
In The Wonder Box: Curious Histories of How to Live, Roman Krznaric sketches a history of romantic love. As he tells it, that history is one of condensation. All the different types of love have been condensed into one, all-encompassing hyper-romanticised super-love. The label for this super-love, this person on whom we have loaded the unbearable pressure of all our romantic ideals (argues Krznaric) is the word: “soulmate”. The idea of a soulmate is new, less than a few hundred years old. Like some black hole of the various types of love, the idea of the soulmate doesn’t let anything get away. The soulmate has to be everything:
- I have to have more physical and sexual chemistry with her than with anyone else I have ever met (and I have to be that for her) - Eros.
- She has to be my best friend - Philia.
- She has to be the playmate who make me laugh, think, dance, squeal and do things I hadn’t dreamed I would do (and enjoy) - Ludus.
- She has to be my partner in the practical grind of building a life, who will go through the highs and lows with me, have the hard conversations, keep me on track, and still be there afterwards - Pragma.
- And she has to be the person who makes me weak, who I surrender to and fall for, who I would take a bullet for - Agape.
- And I have to be and to like myself (In this case she has to be the person who helps me to be strong and confident, who shows me how and grants me the freedom to be and to like myself) - Philautia
- She also has to be a rich, famous, mysterious, unreachable (by anyone but me) rock-god-spy-vampire-pirate-ninja-superhero-bikini-model-sports-star-novelist-human-rights-advocate.
Okay, maybe that last bit isn’t part of the history Krznaric traces, but you get the point.
In reality I sit here on an empty couch in a silent house. I look around. How I got here seems to be a mystery. I wonder if I’m in the right place, doing the right thing, with the right person.
(All this stuff about the soulmate really only deals with whether I’m with the right person. It doesn’t address the other complex questions of whether I’m in the right place or doing the right thing - questions which surely have their own histories of a confusing rise in mobility, insecurity and the desire to live ethically.)
I know she thinks the same things about me. I know she lies on her yoga mat or in bed in the middle of the night thinking: What am I doing? (This isn’t mind reading; this is based on the fact that I heard her mumbling: “What am I doing?” to herself and when I asked what was going on she said that she was thinking about our relationship and wondering: What am I doing?.)
Persuaded by book titles like Design Your Life and Live the Life You Were Born to Live (books I’ve never read) I wonder if we have enough of anything. Do we have enough eros, philia, ludus, pragma or agape? And do I have enough philautia? (I do worry that philautia is actually some kind of gum disease or harmful dietary deficiency but - god damn it - I still want to know if I have enough of it!) This morning, in an effort to be constructive while still whimsical and ‘fun-to-be-around’, I decided it was time to wonder something else.
Is it possible to put all the parts of all the kinds of love stories that have shaped me into one super-love story? If (even after limiting myself to just movies) this is a confusing and horrendously difficult task, then living my own super-love story in the messy day-to-day reality of the 21st century may just be impossible. If I face that then maybe I can break the magical hold it has had over me since I became a teenager (some time in my late twenties).
So I have created a brief list of the movies whose essential arcs I would need to combine in order to create a satisfactory romantic love story. The movie of that love story would be called Superlove Soulmates: A rock-god-spy-vampire-pirate-ninja-bikini-model-sports-love story. (It would be based in the jungle courtrooms and hospitals the we had helped set up while interviewing displaced children for my first and her third book and training for the ultra-marathon world championships. It would feature scenes of her practicing yoga under the nearby waterfalls and doing salsa in a bikini as well as teaching orphans to read while recovering from a tricky knife fight with the local guerrillas.)
This is a fantasy, according to Krznaric, for which I can blame Arabian storytellers, medieval troubadours and Dutch husbands and wives in the Renaissance, as well as modern cinema, TV, advertising, greeting card and jewellery producers. History itself has created this confusion. In other words, it’s no one’s fault, but it’s my problem: of course, when a pervasive fantasy meets lukewarm reality there is bound to be some dissonance, some cognitive and emotional confusion.
So the list below is, in some ways, a map of my confusion.
Eros - sexual love or desire
Weird Science
Philia - fondness, mateship
Gallipoli
Stand By Me
Toy Story 3
Ludus - playful love
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead
Out of Sight
Pragma - committed, realistic, pragmatic, hard-working love
The parents in the TV series Family Ties, The Brady Bunch and Roseanne
Agape - selfless love
Hotel Rwanda
The March of the Penguins
Philautia - self-love
Jerry McGuire
Wall Street
Yours,
Tim
ps. Sometimes being confused seems to be a teenage way of being.
If I was an adult I wouldn't be writing about being confused, I'd be writing about how I've worked out the answers, how I've come to some sort of calm and comfortable space. At least, that's the story I hear in my head.
In the piece above I've gone into that teenage angst-filled, fantasy-riddled space to explore an idea in a way that I hope is easy to share. A much harder way to play this game was to try to recall and describe the relationships that have defined for me - in a much more personal way - the different types or elements of love. Just remembering is easy. Just recreating the stories and reasserting my old feeling and judgments was relatively easy, as being judgmental and defensive usually is. It took a bigger effort to approach those tales and all the people in them with metta - or honest, clear-sighted loving kindness. Those stories didn't need to be shared, but it was a challenge in writing and thinking that I'd recommend.
Much love,
Tim
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