Romeo and Julie Just Elope

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All fiction is the same:

1. Goal
2. Obstacle
3. Resolution

When it comes to love stories of the past, the goal is true love, the obstacles are many, and the resolution some sort of miracle that, in its way, mirrors the miraculousness of love itself.

But now things are difficult---or, rather, easy. The traditional obstacles are all but gone:

Family feud
Class differences
Money problems
Marriage status
Previous promises
Terrible misunderstandings that a lack of open discourse in traditional societies keeps from being resolved

Even the most intractable of these---one of the protagonists being married---is no longer an issue.

Some have said that the love story is dead, but this is crazy. In the eternal ingeniousness of human creativity we've come up with a solution: vampires. Or shapeshifters. Or werewolves. Or even wizards. In the absence of societal barriers we're erected supernatural ones, and this has turned out quite well. Just looking at one of these stories (Twilight), we have not one barrier but a plethora:

1. Edward has to stay away from Bella because her smell is so alluring to him
2. Edward can no longer stay away from her, but has to hide his nature, which becomes increasingly difficult as he shows up to save her from thugs and careening SUVs
3. Edward confesses his nature but tries to talk her out of associating with him
4.Bella continues to associate with him but he won't let their relationship progress physically
4. Their physical relationship slowly becomes more comfortable but his nature becomes a magnet for outside threats to her
5. The outside threats are defeated, but their relationship may be doomed because Bella will age and Edward will not

Each of these obstacles are logical and progressive, and most of all real, given the imaginative universe in which they take place.

A book published a few ago was called The End of the Story of Love, and its author proposed that the love story has lost its effectiveness as a potent cultural narrative. Her reasoning was that major authors no longer write love stories and that her coterie of fifty-something divorcees in New York no longer look to romantic love for transcendence. My reaction to this was that her divorced, middle-aged friends are perhaps not the best test sample for this theory but also that serious literature is not the only or best indicator of cultural relevance (there's also popular literature, movies, and so on).

More important, though, are two other things: (1) As noted above, realistic love stories now lack a cultural context with requisite obstacles. And (2) writing a love story directly, rather than symbolically, requires a rare talent. What I mean by that is that the obstacles in love stories, at least in part, are analogies for the real, persistent psychological obstacles to love. We may not know what it feels like to be married to a rich but cruel count while pining for the young, handsome gardener in 18th-century England. But we do know what it feels like to be a 25-year-old college grad in an entry-level job, going on blind dates, cruising bars, feeling hopeless, and battling despair over ever finding a soul mate. And if we are lucky enough to find that soul mate, it feels as miraculous as if that gardener had gathered us up on a borrowed steed, spirited us away to a country cottage, and then found out he was a duke separated from his aristocratic parents at birth.

But to write directly about the obstacles of love requires a patience and talent that few seem to have. It's not about gossiping society, strategic fortune-seeking, or secret rendezvous. It's about what goes on in the mind, and that's hard to write about. Two of the best writers in this vein are Marilynne Robinson and Ian McEwan. McEwan's On Chesil Beach is about the best novel I can imagine on the interior shifts of mind that constitute our progression, or frustrated attempts, toward love. The fact that the bulk of the novella takes place during one evening makes it even more remarkable. It's a play-by-play of human emotions, thoughts, defenses, cultural assumptions, stupidity, and desires---a real tour-de-force in a hundred-page package.
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