I have this recurring fantasy (relax; it’s PG-rated) in which the girl I’m currently in love with has some sort of accident (non-fatal, though I don’t know that in my fantasy until I get to the hospital where she’s being treated), and I rush to the hospital and get to her room. She (whoever it is; the girl changes, but the fantasy stays the same) is happy to see me, or she’s asleep and won’t wake up for hours (it depends). So if she’s sleeping, I pull up a chair and camp out in her room, staying by her side until she wakes so that she knows…what? One of the things that the fantasy seems to confirm for me is that I tend to expect the worst, especially when it comes to interpersonal relationships. If she has to have a near-fatal accident for me to show that I care, why would she put up with that?
Not to get too personal than I need to be, but I’m at a loss to think of “happy couples” in my immediate social circle, especially in terms of family members. I know of a few relationships that I would consider healthy, non-needy on one or another partner’s part, and in general strong enough to take what the world throws at them. Everybody else lives in resentment and plotting to do away with one another. I exaggerate, but it would be safe to say that, when I’ve tried to have a relationship in the past, I’ve had to rely more on pop-culture than real-life experience to make it happen. And the fact that I’ve never really had a relationship with a woman (close, but no cigar) seems to confirm the inherent fallacy in trusting John Cusack to teach me anything I could use in my own life.
If you take a minute to look at some of the more celebrated couples in pop-culture or literary history, you’ll see what I mean. Romeo and Juliet killed each other; Mr. Rochester got Jane Eyre but not before losing his sight and one or more of his limbs; Catherine and Heathcliff had to die in order to be together; Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck couldn’t make it work. For a romantic story to be successful, it seems, it has to end right at the moment when a relationship begins. The music swells, the end credits roll, and we leave the theater glad that the couple ended up together (though we probably knew they would anyway). When they move in together and have their first fight over chores or the naming of their children, we’re long gone.
Illusions and fantasies; no matter I find myself unable to “make it happen” with a girl, I’m basing it all on stuff that never actually happened. I think that’s the real message of “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the Joy Division song that always comes up as “typical Joy Division” (though it’s actually an atypical JD song, in my mind; “Transmission” might be more representative, or “Digital.” Basically, if it’s a one-word title, you can’t go wrong when it comes to Ian Curtis and the boys). Granted, the song references a situation that Curtis, in his early twenties, found himself in: a marriage that wasn’t working because the couple had married young (though Ian’s fooling around with a Belgian female journalist didn’t help), and the dying embers of the relationship were leaving a sour taste in his mouth. But as the man says, you bring your own meaning to anything you read, and once the work of art leaves the hands of the creator it becomes all things to all people. Hell, “Born in the USA
Love doesn’t have to be stressful or doomed, of course, but my experience has been of the “nerdy sidekick who gets an axe to the head via the serial killer in the woods” type. I’m a cynic because I’ve had my heart broken one time too many, but I’m a sentimentalist at heart. I’ve used mix CDs to say things I couldn’t say in person, and I’ve realized too late that I should’ve just said what I needed to say (how the hell I worked John Mayer, Jimmy Buffett, Ronald Reagan, and Bruce Springsteen into a post about a Joy Division song is beyond me, but it just happened). Such is life.
Ian Curtis’ widow Deborah wrote a memoir of her time with the Joy Division front man, which was turned into the movie “Control.” She says that Ian in essence never grew and never wanted to, saying that he wanted to die before he was twenty-five (when he killed himself, he was a couple of months shy of twenty-four). He bought into the romantic myth of living fast, dying young, and leaving a good-looking corpse (though his idol, David Bowie, only did the living fast part, and is an esteemed rock icon past the age of sixty). Real life, with an early marriage and epilepsy, intruded on that, and he couldn’t handle the life of the rock star while also working nine-to-five and leaving a wife and daughter behind when he went on the road. I think it’s not quite as cut-and-dry as that, whether you call that “cut-and-dry” or not. But if he couldn’t handle grown-up life with all its complications and compromises, I can’t say I blame him. It’s scary being grown-up, even if you don’t have the added pressure of a mortgage, a wife, and a young daughter as well as a thriving career as the lead singer of the most important post-punk band ever.
Maybe we need the fantasies to get us through, then, when the real-life alternative is either so bleak or so dull that we wonder why we bothered. The movies almost always end before a relationship really begins (or after it’s over, like “(500) Days of Summer,” which then went back to what went wrong). Granted, it can be crushing when the person we end up with doesn’t live up to the ideal. But as one of the characters in that movie says, why wait for a fantasy girl when there might be someone in real life who’s better, because she’s real?
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