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Weary critic Roger Ebert, enduring the oh-so-contrived romantic movie On The Line, sums up the standard storyline of romantic comedies and makes an important observation:
A boy and a girl Meet Cute and instantly realize they are destined for each other, and then they plunge into a series of absurd contrivances designed to keep them apart. Just once, could they meet and fall in love, and then the movie would be about their young lives together?
(Read the full review here.)
This is a crucial point. How much better would the quality of popular culture—and the quality of our country's marriages—be if more of it were devoted to the dramas, tensions, subtleties, and changes we experience in long-term loving relationships rather than just the initial tease? These are arguably more interesting and certainly more relevant to how we experience love in real life. For example, for all its gloss, "The Cosby Show" at least provided a genuine and complex picture of the second and third decades of marriage—and all of the random frustrations, adaptations, weeping and joy that go with them—as we watched Clair and Cliff spar and snuggle with each other. (Some would say the family portrait of the comparatively depressing "Everybody Loves Raymond" is even more rooted in real life). And at least My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which came from nowhere to become the number-one romantic comedy of all time, spent a good chunk of the movie showing the lovers' struggle to converge their two cultural backgrounds. (Now will the new TV show continue this useful storyline?)
I heard once that although we don't approve of arranged marriages, we have to appreciate that in cultures where they do exist, the focus is on learning to love and building toward a peak that may come 25 years into a committed relationship. America is the antithesis to such a learning love; the peaks in the relationships we celebrate in our culture all come right off the bat, and then it's all downhill from there. The Cinderella magic is dazzling and then it's a memory. Is our country's staggering divorce rate beginning to make a little more sense?
• In the relatively short history of dating, one of the most illuminating elements of the custom is its location. In formal Victorian culture, courtship always occurred within the female's home, usually in close supervision of the female's parents (the dream setup, presumably, of John Ritter's character from "8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter.") This was for the same reason that women remained in the home in Victorian culture while men represented the family in working and civic life: in the moral view of the day, staying at home was a way of preserving a woman's "purity" (in a general, not just sexual sense).
Dating happened on what was clearly defined as the woman's turf, and the man was clearly defined as a guest.
Historians identify a significant shift in the dynamics of dating when it was transferred from this private haven to the public realm. As society started to shrug off its stiff Victorian formality, the importance of dating on the woman's turf started to wane. Meanwhile, America was developing a new fascination with the entertainment of its burgeoning urban centers, where a clash of cultures skewed Victorian structures of social interaction. The automobile provided the means to connect with this new world. Now dating was on the man's turf—he initiated dates and made the decisions and payments related to the evening's entertainment (and began to see his money as a down payment on the ultimate conclusion to the evening). Some say the most important social shift that shaped dating was a revolution in home architecture around the same time; as American homes began to have fewer and less-separated rooms, couples no longer had a designated place to court; family authority roles began to blur even as the barriers between rooms physically decreased. So couples started going out. That's why some say the bungalow caused an early 20th-century sexual revolution.
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