There are few scenes that epitomize all we love and hate about love stories than the iconic reconciliation between the two leads in Jerry Maguire. The male lead, Jerry, comes back to his love interest, Dorothy, and tells her, with tears in his eyes, “You complete me,” to which she replies, “You had me at hello.” I’ve lost track of the number of people who tell me about how much they love love stories like Jerry Maguire, but then disparage their regard, not just for love stories, but for romantic love itself. To a degree, I can relate to the sentiment that love stories have sold us an unfulfillable fantasy. However, love stories have a spectrum of quality with some being sentimental trash, and others providing valuable insight into the bonds two people can form. Jerry Maguire falls somewhere in the middle, with some surprisingly sincere moments interspersed with schmaltz like the iconic scene mentioned above. Naturally, people who approach a relationship hoping that the other person will complete them usually walk away feeling embittered and disappointed. No person can actually bear the weight of being another person’s sole reason for living. However, the sensation, that a fully-formed person feels when falling in love with a partner does resemble the feelings Jerry shamelessly displays, albeit with some realistic preconditions. When it comes to the more well-written love stories, there’s often something more powerful at work than mere wish fulfilment. If we take a closer look at how these bonds form in real life, and how stories distill that real phenomenon into its most dramatic representation, we can actually delineate between what is toxic illusion and what is genuine insight into the nature of romance.
One of the best commentaries I’ve heard on the hard
facts of romantic love—or pair-bonding for the scientifically inclined—is a
video posted by evolutionary biologist, Bret Weinstein, called “Marriage as an Evolutionary Phenomenon.” In it, Weinstein likens the feeling of falling into
true and lasting love as a broadening of the sense of self, first to include a
partner, and often, to eventually include children. Of course, one of the first
milestones that one has to pass before broadening one’s identity in this way is
to come fully to grips with one’s own, individual sense of self. It is the
failure to meet this first step that so often stymies people who want to bring
love into their life. This is also the step that is missing from lower-quality
love stories. More sophisticated love stories, on the other hand, often handle
this part of human development as well. In order, to show how love stories
actually reveal the truth about love, we first have to say a few words about
how stories in general reveal the truth.
The foremost point to bear in mind when thinking about
stories—and their distinction from everyday life—is that stories are heightened
forms of reality. On the one hand, they are dangerous to confuse with everyday
life, but they are equally dangerous to dismiss as simply untrue. They are
meta-realities in which everything is supercharged with meaning, in a way that
the often dreary details of everyday life are not. For one thing, every story’s
hero must have a desire. This desire has to be clear-cut, so that we know
whether or not the hero has reached it by the end of the story. In real life,
people often strenuously avoid chasing their desires, but that doesn’t mean
they don’t have them. Even if they do pursue their desires, the pursuit is full
of dull, repetitive work. If one were to take up boxing, for example, you’d
have to put in lots of long hours at the gym, working a heavy bag, learning
combinations, and sparring with a comparably skilled partner. If one were to
film every single day spent learning to box, there would be several days’ worth
of material of someone making barely perceptible, incremental progress at the
same exact thing, over and over again. When you watch a movie like Rocky,
on the other hand, you watch Sylvester Stallone do all of these things with
noticeable progress each time, with stirring music in the background. Then, within
two minutes the montage is over, and he’s ready to step into the ring with
Apollo Creed. This isn’t because the movie is lying to us. It’s only because it
shows just enough of the struggle involved in a rigorous training regimen to
get the point across to a general audience. In the same way that a map does not
include every blade of grass or crack in the pavement in a landscape, a story
cuts out the superfluous details of life, and focuses on those events that have
the most impact on pursuing a valiant goal.
After desire, the next important element that art
distills from life is opposition, not only from without, but from within. Well-written
characters have some serious flaw that they must uncover and then change in
order to reach their desire. To use the previous example of Rocky,
Rocky’s flaw is that he has let his talent as a boxer go to waste, making a
living as a loan-shark’s collector. Over the course of the film, we see Rocky
not only go through grueling physical training, but wrestle with his
self-doubt, until he finally faces Apollo Creed in the ring and gives his
opponent the fight of his life. While real life is full of people who
successfully avoid thinking about their weaknesses, there are others who, when
confronted with a lofty ambition, do take stock of the personal weaknesses
holding them back from fulfilling that ambition. Stories are virtually always
about the second sort of people. Stories are elitist in this sense, and, in
order for a story to hold our attention, and stick with us after we’ve finished
watching it or reading it, the hero has to pursue a goal that is difficult, and
they have to do some painful soul-searching in order to reach it.
Now, how do these artistic principles play out in a
love story? Some of the best insights I’ve gained on what goes into a
high-quality love-story have come from one of the genre audio classes taught by
John Truby, a screenwriting instructor, whose seminars have gained him
international recognition. Truby points out several requirements for a love
story that complicate the already intense battle between weakness and desire in
other, simpler stories. For one thing, good love stories have, not one, but two
heroes: the two lovers. In less developed love stories, this dynamic is often
left out and it focuses exclusively on the arc of one lover—often a man—at the
expense of the beloved—often a woman. However, the most discerning audiences
want to see a love story between two well-drawn characters. This means that
both characters have to have clearly defined weaknesses—such as cynicism,
bitterness, low self-esteem, or superficiality—that stand in the way of their
desire, which is to love and be loved by the other.
Next, we come up against the problem that we mentioned
earlier that so often stands in the way of love, which is some insufficiency,
not in our relationship to others, but in our relationship to ourselves. In
order to truly love and be loved by another person, we have to love ourself. In
story terms, this throws another complication into the mix. To track the
progress of each lover’s journey to self-discovery in addition to their journey
to mutual love, we have to create a subplot. Truby refers to this as the
success subplot: each lover yearns for success in some sphere of their life
that has nothing to do with the other lover. In Jerry Maguire, Jerry
wants to get his client a better contract. In Sideways, Miles wants to
publish his novel. In Emma, Emma wants to find a suitable match for her
protégé, Harriet.
We have already spoken about how art distills all the
superfluous details out of everyday life when showing how a character overcomes
some deep weakness in order to achieve a difficult desire. We have now doubled,
not just the number of heroes, but the number of desires for each of those
heroes! Consequently, we double the amount of meaningful details that, on the
one hand, delivers us the most relevant details of life, but also the
superfluous details of life that we cut out. In life, a person can go for
years, coming to grips with their own sense of self without once thinking of
love, and then suddenly find themselves bringing another person into an already
fulfilling life. Other people meet someone when they are young and untested,
and coexist blissfully for several years before encountering some undeveloped
part of themselves that they need to address. Despite the distance that can
separate the journey to self-realization and the journey to a loving
relationship, the two are still interdependent. Learning to realize one’s full
potential beforehand is great training for realizing the full potential of a
relationship, and having a valuable relationship can serve as heady motivation
for reaching that full potential. A love story’s purpose is not to remain true
to pedantic details of how far apart these things seem, but to dramatize how
intimately interwoven they truly are, and to do so in the most dramatic way
possible. So, we meet two lovers, who are struggling in life in some way. They
meet, and then have to grapple with the weaknesses that keep them from both
their personal ambitions and from each other all at the same time in an intense
counterpoint.
While we are right to beware of pandering, simplistic
cliches, we would do ourselves incredible harm to give up the truth that these
cliches often strain to capture. By all means deride a poorly-told love story,
but never throw away a true love story, and certainly never stoop to
disparaging love full stop. If we can do that, then we can take the lessons
from great pieces of narrative art and learn to live life not just
realistically, but with love as well. No person can ever “complete” us in the
sense that they can be a substitute for coming to grips with our true selves,
but they can startlingly expand that same sense of self—once attained—in such a
way that often makes us feel as if even that grueling work of self-realization
was only the halfway point to something greater. If we make the first step of
separating the hyper-meaningful world of art from the more prosaic one of life,
we can actually have our cake and eat it to. There is much that occurs in life
and love that stories simply cannot show us, but that doesn’t mean that they’re
not still worthwhile maps to take along the journey.
