Alain de Botton - How fiction ruined love
To fall in love feels
like such a personal and spontaneous process, it is strange — and a bit
insulting — to suggest that we’re only copying what the novels and the movies
tell us to do. However, the differences in how people have loved throughout
history suggest that our style of loving is to a significant extent determined
by what the prevailing environment dictates. In certain eras, we’ll swoon at
the sight of the beloved’s ankle; in others, we’ll coldly put romanticism aside
for the sake of dynastic or practical concerns. We learn how to love by copying
a range of more or less subtle cues emitted by our culture. Or, as that
brilliant observer of human foibles, François de La Rochefoucauld, wickedly put
it: “There are some people who would never have fallen in love if they had not
heard there was such a thing.”
Crucially, over the
centuries, the most important factor to have shaped how we love is art. It is
through novels, poems, songs and, latterly, films that we have acquired our
ideas about what aspects of our feelings we should value and where our
emotional emphases should fall.
This is unfortunate.
It’s not that the art has been bad; indeed a lot of it has reached the highest
aesthetic pitch. It’s simply that representations of love in culture have
frequently been profoundly misleading at the psychological level. That we are
quite so bad at loving — and the statistics on relationship breakdowns suggest
we really are — is a problem that can at least in part be laid at the door of
culture. The primary impediment to having better relationships may be the
quality of our art.
To call for “better”
art doesn’t mean art that is more moving or colourful or impassioned. The art
that deals with love is already all those things and more. What it is lacking
are crucial elements of wisdom, realism and maturity. Our love stories excite
us to expect things of love that are neither very possible nor very practical.
The narrative arts of the romantic tradition — everything from the poetry of
Keats to films such as Before Sunrise (1995) and Lost
in Translation (2003) — have unwittingly constructed a devilish
template of expectations of what relationships are supposed to be like, in the
light of which our own love lives often look grievously unsatisfying. We may
break up with our partners or feel romantically cursed because we have been
systematically exposed to the wrong sorts of love stories.
In western literary
culture, the book that has most generously and deeply explored the issue of how
love stories affect our relationships is Gustave Flaubert’s Madame
Bovary (1856). Early on in the novel, we learn that Emma Bovary spent
her childhood in a convent immersed in heady Romantic fiction. As a result,
she’s expecting that her husband will be a transcendent being, someone who
understands her soul perfectly, a constantly thrilling intellectual and sexual
presence… read more:
https://next.ft.com/content/905bf850-0588-11e6-a70d-4e39ac32c284
