The Death Of Romance

Romance is dead.
Or persistently vegetative.

Either way, its time has past. And that's fine.

It's cute to pretend that sweeping gestures, breathless vows, and hearts, flowers, and passionate self-sacrifice are not only relevant, but appropriate and effective methods of conducting sexual business contemporarily.

It's also cute to pretend that a pretzel is a cigar, and your finger is a gun, but try developing a sourdough carcinoma, studded with kosher salt, or defend yourself from a mugger with a fresh French manicure.

Not gonna happen.

Romance is an adaptive response to sexual inequity. Despite what the fine departed Ms. Dworkin made a career whinging about, American society is currently suffering from a dearth of sexual inequity. While it may be true that women bear more costs of childbearing and rearing, hit glass ceilings now and again, are finding it harder to get into college, and are beginning to lose control over their own bodies, the experience of an American woman is more similar to that of an American man than that of an American man of today to an American man of good ole' Scotty Fitzgerald glittering 1920's.

Similarity of experience results in common ground between the sexes. Common ground between the sexes and the contraceptive revolution (which granted the possibility of shared interests in heterosexual relationships by distributing more evenly the consequences of recreational coitus), has drawn creaking romance down into obsolescence.

In English-
Romance is what there was before men and women had things in common.

Picture Tristan and Isolde. Romeo and Juliet. Desdemona and Othello. Portia and Bassiano. Dante and his Beatrice. Petrarch and Laura.

Did they linger over coffee, sharing stories, hopes, memories of childhood, and fall deeply in love upon finally finding someone who, like themselves, is deeply moved by iams, trochees, spondees, and gets off on dying young? Did they share a single common interest or ability? Even in the one example, above, where the female of the couple had both a character trait and an ability, the guy didn't. (Portia and Bassiano- she's a brilliant princess, whipsmart with a talent for law and oration, he's a pretty social climber with credit problems and a venetian sugar daddy). There's a story in the Decameron about the most desireable woman in the world- men kill, die, and go to war over her- and she's entirely mute and passive.

Lest you think I'm a feminist, about to go on about the male gaze for two hundred words and finish up with a chorus of recriminations on the publishers of hustler and barely legal...I remind you...I hates the womens. But I go on.

At the time our modern/premodern/postmodern/zblarb idea of romance was born, women's worlds were entirely separate from men's, at least among the aristocracy and high bourgoisie, where there was the cleanliness and leisure time to engage in the practice. Secular men were becoming educated, becoming consumers of media and literature. Women were still having babies and running households. There were two solutions to the intellectually mobile man searching for the sexual companionship of someone to have a conversation with: concubine or catamite.

But buttfucking and paying for it aren't systemically sustainable. Energies, money, and genetic material spent on boys and unmarriageable women are time, spoo, and ducats lost to the family.

So romance was invented. Romance is the interest men have in women when they have nothing in common, and the actions and gestures that interest manifests as. (Genders did reverse occasionally, by the way. There's some lovely romantic poetry written by women during the early rennaissance period, and Eleanor of Aquitaine made an honest effort to codify romantic interactions during her time in France.) Romatic love is what you do when you love someone you can't have a real conversation with. Flowers, candy, dancing, even standing underneath a window with a tape player- our contemporary gestures that reference old cadaveric romance all share one thing in common: in general, they suit one individual as well as another. Romance dresses up in ribbons and meter a completely irrational obsession with someone you don't know very well.

But now, there's no excuse.

Men and women have as many things in common as men used to have with their catamites. Plans and freedoms, responsibilities, concerns and toils are gender non-specific. Instead of writing a sonnet about the sweet breath and silky hair of a beloved, there's an opportunity to find out if that cute waitress likes Star Wars, nougat and titfucking as much as you do.

You can suck it up and say "Hey, how 'bout I buy you a snickers and slip my wookie between your death stars and see if I can make it a milky way?" And if she doesn't hit you, you've found some common ground.

Conversations must happen. Entertainment. Recreation. Consent. Love can grow out of familiarity and shared goals. Just like between a greek man and a willing young boy.

So romance is dead. That's why trashy magazines redefine it every month, in between a hardhitting piece on hemlines and some thoughtless fluff on date rape. If romance was a necessary componant of interaction between sexual partners, we'd know what it was. Instead, we try to redefine it, in a post-modern, new-age, consumerist sensibility that turns it inside out: romance is now finding something the person you're fucking has said would be significant to them, remembering it a month later, and buying a present based on that.

Of course, with all of this, you have to keep in mind, that I'm entirely full of shit.