A DISCUSSION OF THE DEGENERATION OF ROMANCE IN MODERN LITERATURE

Kaela: I’ve always dreamed of a fairy tale ending, you know? That one day, I’d meet that perfect man who’d come riding in on a white horse, our eyes would meet and the world would turn upside down. Tales of happy ever after and true love’s kiss are fed to us from a very young age, and while it can be a good thing to have that hopeful dreamer inside of you somewhere, it is important to have a healthy understanding of romance. This balance is severely lacking in modern society and I believe we have our modern fictional portrayals of love to blame. Let’s take a quick look at the Hallmark Channel. It’s so sweet! Isn’t it? They meet under the most adorable little circumstance in a lovely snowy small town, or their first interaction with each other is a fight (so cute!); they slowly and surely fall for each other, and if one of them had a current significant other, well, don’t even give them a second thought! And then there’s that moment we all can’t help but want, where they draw close together, they aren’t interrupted like they were the last five or six attempts, they finally kiss, the music swells, the fireworks explode and you just know they will be able to do just about anything so long as the other is at their side! The screen fades to black and the story is over. You just know they lived out the rest of their lives without so much as a moment of irritation or conflict! Oh, and that entire movie took, what, a week? News flash: life is messy. Even worse are the cliche young adult adventures. I’m sure we’ve all read one of them. The fifteen-year-old boy and girl meet in some life-or-death situation and by the end of their quest, they’re in love! Wait, when did that happen? They hated each other a minute ago but then I guess the enemy of my enemy is my lover? See? It’s a problem. As a young woman who has been to high school, I’ve seen many pairs come together and fall apart with alarming frequency and from my observations, I have come to notice a trend. One of them ended it because of such reasons as ‘I fell out of love,’ ‘(s)he was moving too fast,’ ‘(s)he hurt my feelings,’ ‘(s)he fell for someone else,’ and other such petty squabbles. Such disastrous relationships are the result of the toxic idea that there is one perfect person and when you meet them, everything will just fall into place. It’s an easy trap to fall into. It’s so easy to hope and dream for everything to work out nicely. But the harsh reality is that life isn’t perfect. Frequently, you’ll find phrases like ‘I can’t help what I feel,’ ‘I have never felt this way about anyone before,’ ‘You make me feel *insert cheesy adjective*,’ etc. used in regard to love. This seems innocent enough, but it’s one of the most detrimental ideas to infect modern society. Love is not a feeling. Emotions such as fondness or attraction are frequently falsely equated with love. But this isn’t true. Love is a choice. It is a choice you make every minute of every day to dedicate oneself to the good of another. To love someone is to want what is best for them. The perception that we frequently have in fiction, and unfortunately in real life, is based on the utter fallacy that attraction or affection for someone will be enough to last forever. That is not true. Love is a choice; and love is therefore an effort to continue to make that choice despite the hardships life throws at you, and in order truly to make any relationship, romantic or friendly or even between siblings, one has to put in work. You have to choose despite how much the person might be angering you at the moment, to want the best for them. Despite the inconveniences, you have to fight to make it work. This is why ‘falling out of love with someone’ is ridiculous. If you ‘fall out of love,’ you never really loved that person because you obviously couldn’t be bothered to commit to your choice. Marriage is frequently defined as a commitment, because that is what love is. I recently had the privilege of attending a wedding ceremony between two dear friends of many years. It was quite entertaining, to be completely honest, to see a priest completely ‘fanboying’ over the sacrament of matrimony. Though some of the exact wording escapes me at this time, the priest said many absolutely beautiful things that I hope to impart correctly here:14 How beautiful it was, he expressed, to see two souls coming before their Creator to become one. He warned them that they would be tried and tested but that they would be able to make it through with the grace of God and their commitment to this contract. To be truly ‘in love’ is to constantly make the effort to bring the other closer to God. And, in the principles of basic geometry, the closer the two of you get to God, the closer you get to each other. But fiction doesn’t recognize this. Fiction tries to sell us on the ideology that since they’re attracted to each other, they always will be and that’s why they get their happy ever after. And it’s becoming more and more apparent that this belief is becoming too widely accepted by the average consumer. As mentioned earlier, I’ve seen several young impressionable young people try to form a life around this fallacy. History shows us that the popular literature in a given place and time affects the society. Just look at Communist propaganda! Now as the notion of love shatters in our society, all sorts of problematic ideals slip through the cracks. If one cannot distinguish true love (and I don’t mean the concept of ‘true love’ idiomatically. I mean love that is true.) from vapid affection, the next thing you know, one cannot tell the difference between different types of love. One might confuse the friendship between two members of the same sex for affection of the romantic variety. One might think that since he loves this friend more dearly than his others, he must be ‘in love.’ He may not realize that this deeper love could fit into many other categories. The Greeks had different words for different types of love. One of the great failings of the English language is the lack of distinction in such things. Given the current socioeconomic situation of our country, what with the Equality Act and other such acts of persecution against those who still try to hold onto the ideal of Love as it is meant to be, we are seeing just how pivotal God’s Love is in any endeavor whatsoever. Once we lose our grasp on that which is true and beautiful, it’s all a downward spiral. Society heads towards self-destruction. So to all you writers out there, I ask you to consider, in any story of yours, taking some time to think carefully about the love your characters have for each other. Obviously, not just the romantic pairings, but the loves between siblings, good friends, parents and children, and everything in between. As is our mission statement here, let us try to restore fictional portrayals of love in Christ.

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Rachel: Paul tells us that “Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8, RSV). This love that he speaks of is not easy to have, it is not something that arises in a moment, fully formed. It is something which takes a lifetime to cultivate. To me, the love is when you see an old couple walking down the aisle together at Mass. They can both barely stand and yet are leaning on one another. You can see in them a lifetime of love which has stood the test of time. Their love has not been easy, it has been tested and yet it has been made stronger for that testing. This is what love is and what modern romance does not reflect. Modern romance does not acknowledge that love takes a lifetime to build, rather it wants love to come in a moment and be easy, leaving when it is no longer. The other problem is that modernity has confused the very meaning of the word love. This word can mean many different things, describing anywhere from love of ice cream to love of God. Rather than properly distinguishing the different types of love, modern romance has confused things further by wanting to throw characters together for a proper ending, not caring that they are mixing definitions of the different kinds of love and leaving others out entirely. Traditionally the different types of love are ἀγάπη (Christian charity), ἔρως (romantic love), φιλία (love of friends), στοργή (love of family), φιλαυτία (self-love), ξενία (hospitality). In modernity, these have been so distorted that love between friends is being confused with romantic love. C.S. Lewis speaks of this in his book The Fours Loves when he says: “This blending and overlapping of the loves is well kept before us by the fact that at most times and places all three of them had in common, as their expression, the kiss. In modern England friendship no longer uses it, but Affection and Eros do. It belongs so fully to both that we cannot now tell which borrowed it from the other or whether there were borrowing at all. To be sure, you may say that the kiss of Affection differs from the kiss of Eros. Yes; but not all kisses between lovers are lovers’ kisses. Again, both these loves tend—and it embarrasses many moderns—to use a ‘little language’ or ‘baby talk’” (58). As Lewis rightly points out, there is something wrong with the modern notion of love and unfortunately this extends to friendship as well: “To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. We admit of course that besides a wife and 15 family a man needs a few ‘friends.’ But the very tone of the admission, and the sort of acquaintanceships which those who make it would describe as ‘friendships,’ show clearly that what they are talking about has very little to do with that Philia which Aristotle classified among the virtues or that Amicitia on which Cicero wrote a book” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 87-88). Lewis continues pointing out misconceptions about love when he says: “The homosexual theory therefore seems to me not even plausible … Kisses, tears and embraces are not in themselves evidence of homosexuality. The implications would be, if nothing else, too comic. Hrothgar embracing Beowulf, Johnson embracing Boswell (a pretty flagrantly heterosexual couple) and all those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the legion was broken up... all pansies? If you can believe that you can believe anything. On a broad historical view it is, of course, not the demonstrative gestures of Friendship among our ancestors but the absence of such gestures in our own society that calls for some special explanation” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 93). Modernity’s misconceptions about love are truly a problem that runs deep. They lead to people misunderstanding the way that they relate to one another on every level. Modernity has reached a point that every action can all too easily be misconstrued, “There is indeed a peculiar charm, both in friendship and in Eros, about those moments when Appreciative Love lies, as it were, curled up asleep, and the mere ease and ordinariness of the relationship (free as solitude, yet neither is alone) wraps us round. No need to talk. No need to make love. No needs at all except perhaps to stir the fire” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 57). We have lost the easy comfortability with each other due to a loss of a true understanding of love. Modernity has become all the lesser for this lacking. In all of its confusions about love, modernity most confuses the love between husband and wife. To see proof of this one but has to turn on a sitcom where the father is displayed as a bumbling fool and the wife as supermom who is doing everything. They have corrupted the view of marriage and the partnership between the husband and wife. Marriage is no longer viewed with the perspective of the love of Christ and the Church: “He is to love her as Christ loved the Church— read on—and gave his life for her (Eph. V, 25). This headship, then, is most fully embodied not in the husband we should all wish to be but in him whose marriage is most like a crucifixion; whose wife receives most and gives least, is most unworthy of him, is—in her own mere nature—least lovable. For the Church has no beauty but what the Bridegroom gives her; he does not find, but makes her, lovely” (C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves, 148). This sacrificial and humble view of love is quite different than the view of love shown by modern romance but in in its own respect far more beautiful than the ‘happily ever after’ ending.