Is Love Tired? (a Q&A without any A’s)
Don’t you wish your boyfriend was a freak of nature? What if Ethan wasn’t Ethan at all, but an ancient spirit haunted by his tragic childhood? What if you were the only one who could fix him? What if, instead of a sit-down dinner at Olive Garden, he whisked you away to an abandoned fortress?
Why is the macabre so romantic? The romantic so macabre? Is there a medium that can illustrate the devious underbelly of desire better than literature? Then why, oh why, is it so painstakingly difficult to write a love story, and why might it feel so contrived and boring in the so-called modern age?
Let’s say you’re writing a work of fiction (in this scenario, your name is Mai and you’ve got a story due in about a week, which is about three weeks too few); two of your characters are going to fall in love and this affair will be at the core of the story — are you still with me? Have you fallen asleep yet? Now, wouldn’t you find yourself bereft of a single idea? Would you, too, have more questions than answers? Wouldn’t you begin to wonder if the underlying issue here is that women have grown fatigued from falling in love with men? At least in the conventional sense of a meet-cute followed by a wedding, a home, three blonde children, and a comfortable retirement sipping root beer on the front porch? Is it justified to say that women’s liberation might have indirectly led to a peculiar, almost contrary movement in the literary world? One in the name of restraint, repression, and taboo? Are these arguably the sexiest things a love affair can be in the twenty-first century?
Alright, then while you’re at it, why not embrace the taboo and make one of your characters part human (see: Rachel Ingalls’s Mrs. Caliban, Melissa Broder’s The Pisces) super-human (too many to name in the post-Twilight era), or not human at all (Marian Engel’s Bear)? Think back to the films that raised you — how many were about animals, romance, animal romancing? How many of them depicted haggard creatures that transformed into vaguely handsome white men through the power of love? Did you, like I, feel a rush of disappointment every time? Didn’t Jia Tolentino open her New Yorker essay “Beauty and the Beastiality” with the (legitimate) grievance: “The half-buried truth about Disney’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is that, in the end, the [human] prince is a letdown”? Wasn’t it in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946) that the beast, upon turning human, says to his princess, “It’s as though you missed my ugliness”? Oh god, doesn’t that just hit the nail on the head? Isn’t desire all about ugliness? Must devotion and disgust always be antithetical to one another? Can they not coexist, as lust and rage do? Aren’t we all just fantastically, wonderfully, irresistibly hideous in the eyes of those who love us?
Is the inherent power dynamic of a run-of-the-mill heterosexual couple just tired now? Is love tired now? Could this be why Ryan Gosling’s typecast evolved from The Heartthrob to The Eccentric (see also: Hugh Grant)? Does no one want to read about a boy falling in love with the girl next door anymore? How can a contemporary love story still catch audiences off-guard? Well, what if instead of your standard, factory-setting couple, they were both alien cannibal cousins trapped on a planet that doesn’t understand them (Sayaka Murata’s Earthlings)? An elderly professor with short-term memory loss and his caregiver (Yoko Ogawa’s The Housekeeper and the Professor)? A gay photographer and the injured troll he nurses back to health (Johanna Sinisalo’s Not Before Sundown)? A pair of Viking siblings (hello, Maria Hesselager!)? Are such novels total outliers, or could it be argued that romantic love itself is simply surreal? Is it not the most alien, animalistic emotion in that it makes us pet, preen, paw, and scream at one another? Wouldn’t it be completely natural, then, for it to call attention to the most ridiculous, concealed parts of our psyche?
Ferdinand Keller, Scheherazade und Sultan Schariar (1880)
Offbeat novels by female authors cannot possibly be reduced to some ephemeral trend, can they? Haven’t women been writing mystifying love stories since the haunted moors of the Brontë sisters? Or, for that matter, the Tale of Genji? What about fictional storytellers — Scheherezade and her One Thousand and One Nights? How eerie — how erotic — were those tales?! If you wrote one, would you be continuing an unsung legacy? Is it far-fetched to wonder if you might be contributing to some literary canon? A reluctant hero, perhaps? Are you and Mary Shelley one and the same?
Yet — and here’s a frightening thought — what if repression comes back into fashion? And we all start wearing our religious guilt like a shiny new belt (again)? Could it be that when a society is repressed, its literature becomes deviant? And vice versa? Is sex, like just about everything else, cyclical?
Well, in the meantime, would it be too weird for your character to fall in love with the Chupacabra?
