Lovey-Dovey

“Who being loved is poor?” — Oscar Wilde

While it might appear to be contrary to every single word within every single post: I am a romantic. However, I am an intelligent romantic. There is more than emotion alone involved in romance, this is what makes a love story. To fall in love; to love; to fall out of love. That alone is an insufficient narrative. The values which we possess, the lives we lead, those sophisticated points of our character, these things at once augmenting, conflicting and coloring our love build the true essence of the experience.

Love for love’s sake alone is vapid.

To concoct a good love story requires quite a bit of talent, craft and patience. You need characters that mesh well together. Who not only have personalities, but personalities that put them at odds, values that make loving someone else a risky business. Making love a life or death situation isn’t romantic, it’s a literary copout. It’s easy. It’s especially easy when one character could live no matter what and the other is so disposed to accidents that she’d sooner trip up a flight of stairs, summersault, and break her neck rather than get an inconvenient paper cut.

My generation has fallen prey to love for love’s sake. Phrases like “love conquers all,” “love is all you need,” “love is blind,” “love is a battlefield” uniquely all predate my generation. In fact, many love phrases do. My theory is, the farther into the future you’re born, the more pop music, trashy novels and poor examples will exist to caseate your notions of love.

The English language as prodigious in expression as it is (from anile to zob) there is really only one expression of fondness. At that, the expression accounts for varying ranges of fondness. That being said, it is easy to choke what love means to the exultant, romantic sense. If it is overused or poorly used in a sentence, its value depreciates. Lofty love becomes as commonplace as other kinds of love. My generation inherits an empty obsession of a sentiment it’s a little too young to fathom.

Thus, I think books like Twilight are a threat to understanding love. They’re books which conjure all the stockroom emotions we’re reminded of over and over again. It feeds a hunger for romantic love, but without being realistic it cannot begin to satisfy or inform. Instead, Twilight it gives a hollow narrative affecting the peak of the human experience but with all the energy, nobility and power of a daytime talk show.

Is it too much to ask for some decent prose?

Is it too much to ask for a writer to break the mold when describing that rare, olympian zenith of the heart?

Has anyone really loved enough to write about it successfully?