June 12, 2009
I just had kind of an interesting moment when, after an excruciating morning, I decided to take a little time before my lunch break to do one of my favorite “at work but not exactly working” activities: cruise the NYT website, especially the “most popular” section. I noticed there’s not only a “most frequently emailed” section, but a “most searched” section. Up there with China, Obama, Cancer, Air France, and Swine Flu, is Modern Love. That kind of brought me up short.
So is the appearance of “modern love” on the most searched list encouraging or depressing? Or is it both?
I had my first Match.com date last night, and was much encouraged. We had emailed for a little while, and in the perfect conversational arc, he asked me out to dinner. I consider the breakthrough of the night to be, when I asked him what his favorite books were, he began a standard list of non-fiction and generally modernist stuff, then added as an afterthought something about how he didn’t want to freak me out with all of his sci-fi favorites. In reply, I pulled out my very worn copy of “Belgarath the Sorcerer” from my bag and said, “NOW we can have a conversation.”
Our date ended on a lukewarm note, although my sister pointed out that physical contact on a match first date might have been a little weird. It’s hard to adjust my expectations in this new world of dating in which I find myself: the greater Boston area, circa now.
I am now one year out from my ex (ptuh ptuh). Our first date went a little differently for any number of reasons: we lived in a small college town; we met in person and had instant chemistry; we saw a lot of our own outgoingness and charisma in the other, and therefore weren’t as cautious about showing too much too soon. What seemed in large part to be a relationship taking its cues from a romantic comedy ended badly, when he left me for New York in (in my opinion) an unnecessarily cruel way. (New York, incidentally, has taken to absorbing the men I could potentially be or am in love with—a disturbing phenomenon.) And so, after having moved to Boston and not being a club or bar person by any stretch of the imagination, I joined the website and entered a strange world of looking for modern love.
Where is the line between lowering your expectations and simply being realistic? Is there even a line? Sometimes it’s a little easier to tell. Walking to my bus in the morning once, I lost a shoe in the T trolley tracks. Part of my brain hesitated for a nearly imperceptible moment—cue Prince Charming. Telling, perhaps, that would I have stood there waiting for him, I would have inevitably been road kill. So I picked up my shoe and walked to my bus. Maybe there’s a difference between modern love and modern romance. They’ve had to split, in some circumstances, where we believe in the past they were joined. You can absolutely have romance without love, and perhaps a different kind of love without romance. Will we know what it looks like, though, if it isn’t decorated with romance? On the flipside, all that glitters isn’t gold, and all that is romantic is not love.
Moving from the cowardly we to the more truthful I, I believe one thing and know another, though for the life of me I cannot pin down the sources of these beliefs and knowledge. It is a hazy bibliography: too many romantic movies and neat endings, my parents’ happy marriage, my parents’ compromises, my own heart ache, my own experience of romance. Qualifying “love” with the adjective “modern” seems in some way to downgrade it, as if from “modern love” we expect less than we do from the perhaps elliptical “classic love.” Should we expect less because of the time that we live in? Or rather, should we expect something different? Who is to say that the original would have been so much better?
I will email my date tomorrow and hope that we will go out again. I will try not to become instantly smitten and simultaneously cripplingly suspicious should a man send me flowers. I will try to find love on acceptable terms, because maybe it’s unconditional surrender that is the sticking point.
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