The real marriage plot
The real marriage plot
Love Language, part 2: On "falling" in love
Welcome to part two of Love Language, a week-long series that looks at the cliches of modern love via the language of reality TV dating. If you missed day one you can find it here. You can read the introduction to the series here. I’m also posting related memes and things on Instagram this week, so come find me.
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Last night, on the Fantasy Suites episode of The Bachelorette, one of three final male suitors, Marcus, admitted he hadn’t had that “epiphany” or “that feeling” yet with Jenn, even though he was “doing everything” he could to “get there.” He wasn’t in love yet, he said, even though she was in love with him. But she let him stick around, because he wanted to be in love with her and thought maybe it was possible to get there, even though he couldn’t yet say the words “in love.” Then, another final guy, Devin, implied that he was leaving the show (to be continued), because he said he was in love with Jenn, but she wouldn’t say it back— she could only say “I see a future with us.”
Ummm…. what are we even talking about?
Somewhere along the way it seems many have accepted the idea that one “falls” in love, and that it happens in a series of recognizable, linear, and progressive steps. First, you decide you have “a spark” or a “strong connection.” Then you can "see” it— whatever it is. You can see yourself falling, or you can “picture a future.” I think this means you are fantasizing about marriage and children, maybe a house? The middle-class dream comes into view, I guess, and maybe this person likes the same movies you like and enjoys staying in on weekends or also wants to be an influencer who travels the world—it’s all coming together!
Then, it gets serious, you actually start falling (before, remember, you could only picture the future but there were no pretenses about L-O-V-E). As you fall, it’s scary, because you might get hurt. But don’t worry, it’s not like physically falling! It’s more like….??
I have never quite understood all these stages, tbh. I am hoping you all can illuminate!
I think this “falling” stage is something like, you decide you like this person a lot, so much that you really want to get to know them even more. You wouldn’t quite say you’re in love, but you think you can “get there.” But then again, you were already picturing your future family with them, right?
What am I even saying?
When I fell in love long ago, about three or four times in earnest, it was fast and immediate. There would be a guy I either wanted so badly it hurt—probably this was a sustained infatuation, because often these guys mistreated me, but either way, I would crave him night and day, want to eat him alive. Or he was someone so solid and good looking, so nice, so caring, which was unusual for a guy. He fit the role I needed him for, and so I developed a more logical infatuation, an attraction accompanied by the sense that I had a reasonable business partnership on my hands—as in, maybe we could “build a life together.”
Roland Barthes writes in A Lover’s Discourse of the moment of engulfment in early love when two people, who at first see each other as others, fuse. They can no longer tell themselves apart, and they don’t want to. Perhaps this is what we mean when we say we are in the final step of love: We say, so officially, we are IN love now.
Barthes writes about how love is constructed by language and by chance. I wrote last week and in Touched Out about “choice” and how it’s weaponized against women. How we accuse women who critique institutions in which they are entangled using victim-blaming language like, you chose this. But love, Barthes writes, is actually not about choice at all. It’s a product of the accidents of one’s life, images and memories and selves converging, all crystallized with the language we have on hand to articulate the feelings we experience. All the more strange that we expect it to last forever, and that we are so consumed by the “future” as we “fall”?
Chance, though, can at times produce order and meaning— or what Barthes calls monsters.
In love, we find perfection, or at least the illusion of it. We glorify ourselves for having chosen right. We imagine ourselves as whole now— where once we were merely half a person, now we are “complete.” It’s fantastical, feverish. We’ve found it, the one, whatever that means, and who cares. Early love feels so impossibly good, all we can think about is that person.
Language, though, is the real drug. We intoxicate ourselves with words and stories, get drunk. Because desire is ineffable, we say all these funny words. We say, it’s “love,” both confirming and creating.
And so it’s no wonder that when we talk about love, dating, marriage, romance, and sexuality— we are so intractable. This is how love is, or must be. This is how you make it work, how you survive. I have love, you do not. You don’t know what love is. The story we have for love often holds our world together.
Today, some people like to say that love, especially marriage, is work and a choice. But actually, it’s a narrative act. And we know that work, that daily resolve to choose to stay, to continue to tell the story that made sense at the beginning, has historically been carried by women.
Lest you say this series is down on love, for all the faults of the language we see on these reality dating shows, there is something very human and beautiful about reaching for language to do the impossible: to explain, articulate and perform our interiority, our innermost, inexpressible feelings, and our unsayable connection to other people.
Why, though, must we break love into steps, into scenes? Part of what is annoying about the many discrete steps of love as they are presented on today’s reality dating shows is that they feel like such a transparent effort to make a TV plot out of love. They feel unreal. More like an obvious effort to keep our attention as viewers, to hook us, to get us to tune in next week for the most dramatic episode yet.
Love and the story of marriage, though, are inherently plot-driven on and off screen. In fact, many literary critics have argued that the development of the novel established our modern-day belief that marriage is a container for lifelong, true love. That idea—of marrying for love—we often forget, is only about a century old.
And when the engulfment fades, the fever-dream, it is women who have, historically, kept up the heterosexual marriage plot—tending to it, retelling it, both to themselves and their families. It is no wonder that women love love stories. We are studying our genre.
Okay, let’s discuss “falling” in love, the “seeing the future” of it all, and marriage plots. Feel free to talk us through anything you are reading or watching that connects here.
And of course, be kind. Some of us love love. Others have been hurt gravely by it. Most of us probably both?
Tomorrow, we discuss the notion of “broken families” and the “I only want to do this once” mentality. Subscribe to get it in your inbox.
I don't know quite how this pertains, but here's what it made me think of: I think, at the root of our obsession with romantic love is a very human craving for ecstatic experience and the feeling of dissolution and divine unity that can come from it. Particularly in the West, and especially in mainline Protestantism and Puritanism, there is no space for that craving. It is sinful, base, feral. But, like the Catholic Church, who've historically co-opted Indigenous religion the world over, you can't completely stomp out people's desire for it so you have to create a "proper" container for it. You can let people have it, but only within this box and in this way because even within the box that direct experience of communion is threatening to power structures. You can't have queerness or kink or polyamory or women's desire and autonomy and choice operating freely in that box because then it might be too intoxicating and leak outside the box and we can't have that, can we? Also, you have to put women in charge of minding the box (or obsessing about it, as the case may be) to distract them from functioning inside it in a way that is expansive because then, again, that dreaded, threatening leaking of some sense of real, deep, maybe even Divine connection between everybody might happen.
There's nothing that undermines hierarchical power structures and systems of human value faster than a visceral sense that everything and everyone is connected.
“It’s a narrative act” I’m dead. This makes me want to ask everyone “how’s your act going?” But then I’d also have to ask myself that and (even though I AM a Taurus) all I can see is a bull in a china shop with that intro! Lol.
But seriously wouldn’t it be great if one of these shows actually approached the production with this in mind? I picture it as creative writing class in college. Everyone writes and shares their current romantic ideals as if they are works of fiction. You get questioned and critiqued, it’s embarrassing and vulnerable, everyone heals. Maybe a therapist comes in as a guest speaker! Oh wait, maybe I’m just describing group therapy!? Dates are made after you get a good look at each other’s inner worlds and everyone agrees that ok, we are just making this all up. I’d watch that show🤣