Baby Don't Hurt Me
Text: Paul M H Buvarp
Photography: Roman Koblov and Caroline Hargreaves
Someone catches your eye. It’s not only their stunning beauty, but also something deeper. Connecting you, pulling you in. This moment was planned from your conception. No. Long before then. This plan extends farther back than Cupid, than Venus and Aphrodite. Your paths would always cross here.
As she or he passes, your eyes lock, and you both hold each other’s gaze, turning as you go by. A near-invisible smile tickles his or her face and is mirrored by an elegant arch of your eyebrows. The next second you’re exchanging numbers and living happily ever after.
But that’s just a dream.
In the alternate universe that is The Screen, these things happen, and they happen frequently. Star actor and star actress meet under a streetlamp in the snow, and the music (the soaring symphony), and the lighting (the spot on the two) seems to wish they were together. It was meant to be, and this much is true in The Screen. They’re stars after all.
So what does this mean? Helen Fisher is an anthropology professor at Rutgers University and is known for her extensive research into romantic love. In her TED Talk from 2006, she says “television is the global campfire, we sit around it and it shapes our minds.”
Our generation, nursed on romantic plot-lines that blow Romeo and Juliet out of the water, brought up on lyrics that promise “I will always love you” (in the words of Whitney Houston), has begun to expect what they see on the screen, what they hear behind the piano.
A popular and faulty statistic is that in the United States, one in two marriages fail, but the New York Times report that “the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent”. While this could be seen as good news, it is still a fairly large percentage.
Sure, some of it is because of the Civil Liberties movement, granting women equal rights. I believe some of it is because of the information age; we have opinions on so many things now, so it’s harder to get a good match. And I believe a lot of it has to do with the fact that we’ve been conditioned to understand love as perfection. When it just ain’t so.
Fisher says that studies show “people want to be ‘in love’ when they marry.” This is not a bad thing, obviously, but if ‘in love’ is to be described as two lovers watching the sunset every night and knowing they were meant to be, then that creates a worry.
We have to remember two things. First of all, movies and songs are movies and songs. Second, and this is both important and obvious: movies and songs are concerned with extraordinary events. Most people don’t have a life so interesting that it will be portrayed on the big-screen. If you doubt me, you’re not on Twitter.
Have we become brittle? Do we leave each other over trivialities? Do we get down on our knees and beg “what is love? Baby don’t hurt me”? Don’t we want to be happy? “I don’t think honestly we are an animal that was built to be happy, we are an animal that was built to reproduce,” says Fisher. We confuse ourselves with conflicts of sex, love and attachment.
But there’s an upshot to all of this, a reactionary trend if you will. What if I told you that our expectations are turning less and less into disappointment and more and more into determination? Fisher says “Marriages might become more stable” in the 21st Century. In fact, the divorce rate “is beginning to decline.” And this has been true since around the 1980s as the NY Times article reveals.
Fisher argues that this has to do with a “real extension of middle age” due to medicine combined with the fact that “the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce”. But that can’t explain it all. We still have to get to the ‘extended middle age’ with our marriages intact. After all “About 60 percent of all marriages that eventually end in divorce do so within the first 10 years” the NY Times says. But the divorce rate is still declining.
Perhaps a parallel: Fisher expects “a rise in romantic love” in the 21st Century. Are we being rewired to look for and to emulate highly romanticised love? Are we starting to work towards the romantic ideal? Wouldn’t that be lovely?
I like this prognosis. Maybe we have watched our parents in this system of fictional romantic expectation, watched them search for the perfect match only to find a romantic comedy released straight to DVD. Maybe now, having learned by observation, we have come to the conclusion that we should work for love, and not expect a scripted ending. I certainly hope so.
In the end, what can we know about this emotion of emotions? There are so many definitions. I still believe, in years to come, I’ll be on my knees, begging her: “What is love? Baby don’t hurt me.”
Paul M H Buvarp is the Chief Editor of the Magazine. He is Norwegian and is studying International Relations at the University of St Andrews.