Relationships - you can't build a car without an engine

I apologise for not updating for a while. I've just returned to Australia and it's been hectic. I'm reposting two articles that I wrote last year, both for Woroni, on relationships. A third one discussing the concept of intimacy is in the works. You can find them below ('Love Your Ego' is the first one).

Last year I had a brief liaison with a very pretty Slovakian colleague. Like many twilight fans, she was a little delusional and seemed to confuse fiction with reality. Within 3 days of our ‘going official’ she asked me what my attitude towards our relationship was – whether it was ‘just for fun’.

I told her that I had every intention of taking it seriously (which probably wasn’t true, but it was true enough), but that I thought depth and meaning were things that develop over time. For now, I was interested in her and wanted to get to know her better.

We broke up less than a month later after she accused me of adultery, cried at me for neglecting to call her for three days while interstate, and declared that I wasn’t taking our ‘relationship’ seriously. At the time I was a bit confused as to what relationship she was talking about – hadn’t we just met?

To me, my partner’s behavior often seemed irrational, but I quickly came to realize that she was under the impression that ‘love’ and ‘romance’ were things you could engineer. You just had to say the right things, buy the right gifts, and follow the right protocols. The external symptoms of a relationship were the relationship.

I’ve since noticed that many people seem to have a similarly shallow view of feelings, to the point where their ‘love radar’ is based on a few clichéd words and conventional gestures. Random flowers here, a phone call daily, and he/she must love me. Twilight isn’t helping. There’s a scene in the first movie where after a half-date or two, Bella notes that she is “irrevocably in love” with Edward. Excuse me? When did this happen? Surely you have to go through the lust bit, and the fond bit, and the ‘really like’ bit, and so on and so forth, before you get to the ‘irrevocably’ in love part.

Saying that you love someone doesn’t make it true. Wanting to be in love doesn’t make it happen any quicker, or happen at all.

It concerns me that some people are actually more interested in the conventions of romance and ‘manufactured love’ than they are in the real thing. I’m reminded of a conversation I overhead while riding the trains in Melbourne. An attractive young girl was bitching to her friend about the birthday present her boyfriend had recently bought her. She’d just moved house, and he’d given her an expensive cordless phone. I thought this guy must be a true gentleman – what a thoughtful gift! But she was upset because he hadn’t bought her jewelry. The girl’s friend managed to talk some sense into her, but the conversation concluded on “I guess I just wish it was more like in the movies.”

I was surprised by her remarks, because to my mind, most romantic movies present a very superficial kind of love that’s pleasant enough, but I wouldn’t want to dedicate my life to achieving it. Let’s reflect on twilight for a moment. What does Edward like in Bella – she smells good, and he can’t read her thoughts. Wow, that’s deep. (As if she had any thoughts to read). And what does Bridget Jones like in Mark Darcy? That he’s an emotional cripple?

But I’m being too negative, what about a positive example. Well I happen to quite like both the relationships in Julie and Julia. Why? Because in that movie, the emphasis is on how sensitive the parties are to the deeper yearnings, insecurities and traits of their significant other. A good relationship, in my opinion, is built on intimacy, on trust, on shared experiences and a mutual emotional space. None of these things manifest in call quotas, gift quotas, or whether or not he gets along well with your mum. You can’t engineer a relationship.

P.S. IMO, the L word is being thrown around a bit too readily, and it’s being cheapened as a result. But that’s a topic for another article.