Romance Is Emotional Fast Food

Once upon a time, in high school, I was befriended by a new girl who lived in a big, modern house. Her single mother had married a wealthy older man, so my friend had already enjoyed a couple years of getting everything she wanted, including great clothes, a car and a horse – things she had no prayer of having before the marriage. I was envious, of course. I still had no prayer of having those things, and never would.

I remember seeing, taped up in her locker one day, a quote cut out of a magazine that said, paraphrased, “Wanting is often far more satisfying than having.” I was disgusted. It smacked of ingratitude and flew in the face of my certainty that money would buy me happiness, even if she was failing to buy it.

I knew the quote was untrue, but I was wrong about why. It took me a long while to figure it out, and it has to do with the fallacy of romance.

Romance is one of our culture’s favorite dynamics. Romance is the experience of longing for something while also feeling the possibility - nay, the promise - of fulfillment.

Actual fulfillment is not really part of romance. Actual fulfillment, when it arrives, is only satisfying for a brief shining moment before returns start diminishing. Once actual fulfillment arrives, romance fades fast.

This is true with objects. The longing experienced upon seeing that gadget or those shoes in the store window is delicious, but as we all know, it does not necessarily predict satisfaction later. Sometimes, you get it home and wonder what you were thinking. My high school friend, I now believe, was validating this experience by clipping that quote and hanging it in her locker.

And, it’s true with relationships. People wonder why romance doesn’t stay alive in marriages. Simple: it’s pretty tough to long for someone you wake up with every day. They can be awesome and you can love them, clearly, but romance? Not so much.

Television writers have become very skilled at holding characters, precariously wobbling, at the fulcrum point of longing and fulfillment. It’s delicate. If the circumstances keeping the characters apart are too discouraging, the promise of fulfillment wanes, and we lose interest. And if they get together and the union is too secure or satisfying, the longing wanes, and we lose interest. But being on the verge – we love that!

It’s emotional fast food. Just as sure as that Big Mac or Whopper is chemically engineered to taste good but also leave a deeper need unsatisfied so you'll come back for more... so it is with romance. Romance does not nourish us emotionally. But it's delicious!

When it comes to love and partnership, romance is the early, immature stage of the relationship. When a relationship matures, the romance goes. This is not a bad thing, unless we have other expectations. Which we normal people often do, because we're immersed in a culture that tells us to.

Current American culture is dependent on immaturity.

Having what you want when you want it is an appropriate and natural drive – if you’re a toddler. Operating from this principle as adults is what makes capitalism wildly, explosively successful at achieving its goal of growth and affluence, and so most of our consumer-centered industries (manufacturing, advertising, etc.) are geared to encourage and reward toddler-age thinking & behaving in grown-ups. After all, you have to long for something if the market is to fulfill it.

So, we get to be immature, the market (or our date for Friday night) meets & fulfills our longing, and everyone gets rich (or laid). What's the problem?

Other than the obvious lack of depth, there is a deeply troubling emotional by-product to all this: We've developed an affection for emptiness.

Emptiness is a necessary condition for romance. You can only long for something if some part of you feels an absence. And since we love romance, emptiness becomes our comfort zone – our dearly held comfort zone. Even as we complain about our emptiness and long for relief, we subconsciously resist change. The romantic in us needs the emptiness to survive.

Toddlers, by going through that particular stage of emotional development, learn to delay gratification and to cooperate with the outer world. They mature. They realize that the longing & fulfillment cycle is only a first step in engaging fully with the world and with others. (At least, we hope they do.)

The point of romance, evolutionarily, is to get past it. To let it lead us to create deeper, richer relationships that, while not based on longing, are still fulfilling - more fulfilling, profoundly and sweetly fulfilling, in the long run. The point is to leave romance behind.

But we haven’t. We can’t. We’re stuck in our comfort zone of emptiness, relishing anticipation of the next romantic adventure. For the most part, I think we know we're stuck – it’s just really tough to break out when we live in a world where billboards and commercials and the living examples around us every day poke and prod at our feelings of emptiness.

If you don’t relate to this, if you were raised in a different culture or have otherwise escaped the insidious broken-promise cycle of American consumerism, and your expectations of gadgets, shoes and people are never unrealistic or disappointing, congratulations. Good for you. You’re not normal.

The rest of us are faced with a challenge: to stop being seduced by romance and to let go of emptiness as a necessary condition for fulfillment.

How will you do this? You, as an individual, get to problem-solve it for yourself. A therapist (or friend, or random stranger) may be able to help with thinking outside the box, but the act of figuring it out for yourself, uniquely, taking into account who you are and what you want, is part of the maturing process and therefore part of the escape route.

Ten years ago, a boyfriend of mine made an anti-romantic statement that I sharply resented and still find pretty cynical, but it has stuck with me, and it helps keep my inner romantic in check.

He said that Shakespeare knew the real nature of romance: all his comedies end with a marriage, and all his tragedies start with one.

I haven’t actually checked, but I know it’s true with many of the major plays, and in any case, it’s a potent reminder that romance is an illusion, and has limits, and that stories that start with “once upon a time” don’t end with “happily ever after.”

So thanks. Ya bastard.