I’ll be very clear about this: Love confuses me. Sure, it’s a wonderful, stupendous thing (see: The Princess Bride, Never Been Kissed and 10 Things I Hate About You as my favorite examples of that whole romance idea), but at the end of the day, love isn’t always happy. Love isn’t Romeo and Juliet skipping around Verona, joyously bringing the Montague and Capulet families together in matrimony; love is Romeo and Juliet pale, clammy and dead, with nothing to show for their relationship but an empty bottle of poison and a bloody dagger. So when Western civilization’s greatest love story ends with two lifeless teenagers and some crucial woe, what exactly are we – college students yearning for suicidal lovers of our own – supposed to think?
I’ll give you an idea: We judge the relationships of those around us. Our friends, our roommates, our co-workers – everyone is fair game. We track break-ups on our Facebook newsfeeds, laugh at other people’s drunken hook-ups and mock girls who engage in walks of shame (it’s just so easy). Most of us aren’t succeeding at love, so we resent those who are: those lucky bastards who are marrying their college sweethearts, planning their lives together in suburbia and already naming their annoying, bratty kids-to-be. They’re the walking illusions of happiness and stability, so it’s good to know one day, most of their relationships will tragically fall apart.
Doubt me? Take a look at the wonderful world of celebrities, so I can prove my point. After all, there’s a reason the phrase “Hollywood marriage” means an extremely short union that usually ends in high-profile separation and divorce. Urban Dictionary even defines the phrase as “a measure of time equal to approximately one month,” complete with Tom Green and Drew Barrymore’s marriage as an example.
But Green and Barrymore aren’t alone; there are tons of people with endless amounts of money and power, yet even they can’t hold down satisfying relationships of any kind. Happy-seeming couples such as Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, Sheryl Crow and Lance Armstrong, Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson – they all seemed to work well together, at least for a little while. But then came Witherspoon’s allegations that Phillippe cheated on her, Mills’ efforts to wrangle more than $100 million from McCartney in a divorce settlement, Armstrong’s abandonment of Crow despite her breast-cancer scare and Wilson’s suicide attempt after Hudson dumped him.
Plus, the Hollywood couple everyone seemed to be rooting for – Canadians Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, who pretended to fall in love in The Notebook and then amused everyone when they did so in real life, too – is finally, totally over, after a very public kiss at the 2005 MTV Movie Awards and several subsequent engagement rumors. Gosling, who confirmed in November’s issue of GQ that he and McAdams split months ago, said of the break-up, “The only thing I remember is we both went down swingin’ and we called it a draw.”
And how many times by now in our young, emotion-saturated lives have we bared our hearts and struggled to make a relationship work, only to have our hopes trampled all over by the one person we wanted to fulfill them instead? How many of us have been the Ducky to Andie; the Gunther to Rachel; the Milhouse to Lisa; the Smithers to Mr. Burns; the Screech to Lisa Turtle; the Gatsby to Daisy; the Snape to Lily?
As Jeff Buckley sang (before he mysteriously drowned, fueling suicide speculations) in a cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” “Love is not a victory march/ It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah.” How fitting that the producers of The O.C. would choose to play Buckley’s version of Cohen’s masterpiece during a scene in which Ryan tells Marissa he’s leaving Orange County – and her.
No, not all of us will get dumped while dancing with our too-pretty-to-fight boyfriend at our insane, slutty mother’s wedding to the father of the adopted mother of the too-pretty-to-fight boyfriend. More likely, we’ll just go the Canadian way and call failed relationships “a draw” – but at least, thanks to the Hollywood marriage, we’re not alone. And hey, I hear Ryan Gosling is single.
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