By K. A. Laity
On the way back from a matineé of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing, a guy sat behind me on the bus chatting on his mobile phone about the rough weekend he'd had. Not, he said, because he had drunk far too much—which he had—but because he knew the real source was her and if she were to come back, he thought he might know the right thing to say now. Everything, of course, would be different this time.
It was like that wonderful moment in The Simpsons, where Bart narrates the footage capturing the moment when Lisa breaks Ralph Wiggum's heart, frozen in slow motion. Like Henry in Stoppard's play, who imagines the scenes of betrayal as if they were a play he were writing (we never know for certain if what we're seeing actually happened), we try all kinds of different ploys from sincerity to indifference to abject surrender. Unfortunately, none of them comes with a guarantee.
So we have heartbreak, divorce, domestic violence, pop music, throwing oneself under trains and—at the far end of the scale—gunmen on rampages (yes, we could include the Trojan War in the latter although I'm well aware they didn't have guns).
Everyone seems to be grappling with the pain and joy of love; after millennia we're no closer to any kind of certainty. Personally I blame the courtly love fad of the Middle Ages for making things infinitely worse, but there's no proof people were any happier in love before that. What did change was the confounding of marriage with love. While these medieval romances made clear that love was most often not between a husband and wife, the idea of love being more important than legal bonds, king and country. Shakespeare took the concept and ran with it and that's why we have Hallmark Cards today.
In a patriarchal and capitalist culture, women are the primary target of this marketing. While men are responsible for ridiculous requirements on special occasions (birthdays, Valentine's Day, anniversaries [in extreme cases including not only weddings but first date, first kiss, first sex, first Doctor Who episode watched together, etc.), women are responsible for those shoes, that hair, dresses, exciting underwear, lineless faces, pert bottoms and perky breasts every day of the year.
The anxious pursuit of love fuels a system that preys upon our desire for the 'real thing' and holds out the lure of achieving it with the next purchase. We've become aware of advertising effects on us, but instead of becoming immune, we seem ever more sensitized. Worse, the effects seem to be spreading: men's anxieties levels are rising as they too consider extra gym time, Botox and plastic surgery.
Stoppard's play is as much about the love of words as it is of human love. A smart choice by the playwright: words are much more reliable. Humpty Dumpty aside, words tend to change only very slowly and usually with lots of warning. The real thing turns out to happen when you're not looking, when there is no way to capture the experience except in banalities: I love you. I love you, too. What to do for those moments without words? Maybe we do need Hallmark after all.
Image via Everything's Okae