Daily Mail, August 15, 2014
Whatever happened to romance? You remember romance, don’t you? It was the time in your life when you fancied someone so hopelessly that the mundane became magical when shared with her or him; the day when going to the launderette in Liverpool with the special one could be as romantic as a gondola ride in Venice.
And if it was a holiday romance, in some August fortnight years ago, the sun was probably shining, too.
Romance, it seemed, was always in the air, on the radio, in the books and at the pictures, magnifying and glamourising emotions that everyone seemed to share.
Possibly a few curmudgeons might have suggested that such feelings were just repressed sexual desire, lust in a flattering light and tied up with a pretty bow.
But, think only of The Hunchback Of Notre Dame, La Bohême, Romeo and Juliet, Wuthering Heights and Ella Fitzgerald or Simply Red singing Every Time We Say Goodbye and you’ll know it doesn’t matter what miseries think.
Because, whatever it is, romance has been celebrated for hundreds of years in great novels, plays, poems, operas, songs and films. It’s even been used to help sell instant coffee.
But, maybe not now as much as it was. Because, it seems to me, you don’t see romance around much anymore. Not in movies, not in music and not so much in books either. In fact we are now living in a very non-romantic world.
Instead of romance we get sex, lots and lots of sex, everywhere we look or listen. It’s on our computer screens, in our magazines and in the lyrics of our pop songs. It’s all over YouTube, where very young girl singers feel compelled to dress up like tarts (presumably for people who listen with their eyes), and in all those television commercials for shiny, smooth skinned cars and suggestively creamy looking chocolates.
And where once romantic fiction sold millions of books a year, the pages are getting a lot steamier on the pink counter in your local bookshop, with erotic fiction for women never having been so popular – and downloaded now, too, to be bought and read in anonymity as an eBook.
But sex isn’t romance. And since it hi-jacked romance we’re all being short-changed. Sex is nothing if not physical, romance is about the soul and the imagination, about hope and devotion.
Consider all those young soldiers a century ago, who, when packed off to Flanders to fight in the mud of World War 1, left behind sweethearts – as their girlfriends and fiancées were then called.
Their surviving letters describe eternal patience as the young men looked forward to coming home and the girlfriends promised to wait. And while the music halls swayed to If You Were The Only Girl In The World, many young women did wait… and wait. And when there was nothing left to believe in or wait for, they believed in the romance they’d had that would last them a spinster’s lifetime.
More happily, and more recently, think about romantic comedies at the movies, and picture Jack Lemmon finally getting together with Shirley Maclaine in The Apartment, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in Sleepless in Seattle, and Hugh Grant with Julia Roberts in Notting Hill and you’ll get my drift. Those films were about romance not sex, and all the better for it.
But they, of course, were way back in the last century – even Notting Hill. We now live in a time of instant demand, when we expect every whim to be quickly gratified. Perhaps all those idealised notions of romance don’t seem so relevant to busy, savvy people of today.
Movies and music may not be the most perfect barometers for measuring the way we live, but they’re not bad. So, when was the last really big hit romantic film you enjoyed? I doubt that it will have been in the last few years. And you can’t count Twilight because the male lead in that is a vampire, so not really the sort of ordinary guy with whom you can easily identify.
Hollywood keeps making rom-coms, of course, because when they work they explode money, but somehow they aren’t catching fire with the public these days. Take Begin Again, which is showing now and is about a songwriter in the shape and voice of Keira Knightley who finds herself dumped in New York.
It’s pleasant enough, and what’s not to like about Keira Knightley?
But although it’s billed as as a rom-com, it isn’t really very romantic at all. In fact it almost feels as though Irish writer/director John Carney (who was also responsible for the wonderful Once) was reluctant to get too emotional in case today’s hardened, super-cool audiences winced and laughed when they should have been tearful. At least he didn’t insert the now almost inevitable sex scene to spice up his story. (Or did Keira just say ‘no’?)
If it’s tough for romance in movies, it’s even worse in music. So, let’s try again. How many really big recent romantic hit songs can you name?
Every generation has had its favourites, from the wartime I’ll Be Seeing You to Elton John’s Your Song in the Seventies’, and Bryan Adams’ Everything I Do…I Do It For You in the Nineties. And there were lots more in between that everyone knows.
But recently? Adele’s biggest hits are tinged with bitterness, while some of Jay Z’s rapping and Beyonce’s raunching on the monster hit Crazy For Love would make a bonobo blush. It isn’t love that those two sound crazy for. You can see why they are using Crazy For Love in the Fifty Shades of Grey movie.
Lots of couples have what they call ‘our song’, usually a particular record that was playing on the night they met. Music, by some strange alchemy, had, they believe, either brought them together or consecrated their growing attraction to each other.
So when Shakespeare wrote in Twelfth Night, which, by the way, was the nearest he got to a rom-com, ‘if music be the food of love, play on’, he was on to something. Because music can indeed induce a romantic ambience.
Music can, however, provoke other behaviour, too. And what he didn’t write was: ‘You’re a fit looking chick, babe. Twerk your booty next to mine and let’s get it on tonight. Oh yeah!’ Which would have been about a quite different situation, but which is far more likely to be the lyric of a hit song of today.
So, what’s going on? Is the helter-skelter pace of the modern urban world responsible for killing romance in our lives and especially the lives of the young? Is the technological revolution that has armed us to the teeth with its social networking sites, texts, sexts and selfies taking the mystery out of love?
Is romance as we’ve always known it doomed?
Looking around at our world hard wired for living for the moment, the evidence might suggest that it is. But the heart would disagree, and it’s the heart we’re talking about here.
Fashions come and go, and soon the marvels of instant communication which now consume us, will no longer seem so novel. But boys and girls will always fall in love, glance shyly at each other across the classroom, and pretend not to be waiting for each other at the bus stop.
There’ll be the same misunderstandings and fears and tears in their romance, and they’ll have their favourite songs and hopes and dreams, just as kids did in Shakespeare’s time.
And hopefully, too, the marketing world will begin to realise that effective as images of under-dressed youn women might now be for selling stuff, a surfeit of bare flesh will, ultimately, become, like all fads, boring.
Everyone likes sex. We’re human, we’re supposed to like it. But it’s never as good without romance – not even close.
