ainomica

so I got into kind of a debate/discussion with a friend about the often used trope of a person reminiscing about their first love after getting married to someone else or loving someone else post marriage. the topic came up while discussing rhae/gar - el/ia- lya/nna, moved on to bajirao mastani and rose from titanic.

they believe that once you are married, it does not matter whether you had loved someone before. you must love your spouse or else it is emotional abuse. and if you love someone, then it must end in marriage or else it isn't a romance. apparently if they had shown rose's husband as a person in titanic it would have taken away all focus from Jack and rose's love story just like how kashibai stole the show from bajirao and mastani. and if Robert's rebellion is ever adapted, elia will grab all attention.

I did agree with them that cheating is bad but made the point of fiction ≠ reality but they don't agree with it. they have a problem with calling such stories 'romance' because it ignores the third party: the spouse.

okay, I get that cheating is a sensitive topic and obviously everyone's preferences in fiction differ. but, again, not all stories are the same and neither are the characters and their circumstances. also, human feelings are complicated and fiction also happens to be the best medium to explore these complexities bcs no real person is getting harmed.

I brought up the point that what if in a hypothetical Robert's rebellion show they depict that elia is aware of R+L and she, too, is having her own affair with arthur dayne or anyone else? afterall, r and e had an arranged marriage. secondly, all of them are minor characters whom we have little information on so it won't be out of character to show elia in love with someone else and finding happiness before the inevitable tragedy took them all.

but they didn't have an answer for that and diverted the topic by saying that a wife simply cannot be shown as happy if her husband has feelings for someone else. she has to be shown an sad bcs the second her sadness is shown, everyone will sympathize with her and the husband and his lover will be forgotten.

hain??? so you would rather have a fictional woman be miserable to prove a point instead of having her finding her happiness separate from the man she is married to? why? just so you can project all your rage on the man and blame him? and the woman can't be anything more than a victim?

no wonder so many folks were eating up ninnicent's misery porn on flopD where her sole identity was that of the poor woman stuck with an unloving husband when she could have been shown to form a genuine and meaningful connection with larys or crispy cole (yes they did go there in s2 but even that was ruined for rhae*nicent which is a different topic)

then they ask why don't we have three dimensional complicated female characters? you all can't handle them😭

P.S. one of the major reasons why kashibai got so much praise was priyanka chopra. she is way superior to deepika as an actor (no offense to dp but facts are facts) and at par with ranveer. ofcs kashi would have been the talk of the town.

It is indeed facts that the reason Kashibai was such a scene stealer character because Priyanka is SOOOO talented. No next generation actress has come close. She is the last talented superstar heroine of the industry. In fact this topic kind of made me laugh a little because the overall meat of the discussion has lots of Sanjay Leela Bhansali movies in it...you know...that guy who keeps making movies about love triangles and people have simultaneously and complicated feelings for MULTIPLE people at once- Devdas, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam, Black ( no love triangle but kissing your fatherly teacher is.....yeah..no comments) Bajirao Mastani, even Heeramandi , its about courtesans in ye olde INDIAN Lahore, the perpetual "Other" women. Gangubai Kathiawali also features love triangle when Gangu lets go of her lover and gets him married some other girl. Did that man's feeling switched off just because he married someone else??

SLB LOVES suffering women- especially women and men suffering in marriage and how love is beyond the institution of marriage itself. Trust me, tell your friend, That film-maker is NOT HER FRIEND, his stories devalues the institution of marriage like nothing else!

SLB's father LEFT his mother and him to be with some other woman and that clearly left a wound in his heart. So he never shows the jilted wife as someone who is unsympathetic. But its also clear he is very much aware and cannot help but be drawn to women who become accessory in these jiltings and even men, like Devdas and Prem who were the "other man" in the equation. In both Devdas and HDDCS, marriage is not done by people because they wanted to, but because the society and the patriarchal parents forced them into. Paro's mother, a woman from a "lower" caste family who herself married for love in higher caste, wanted her daughter to marry who she wanted, but even she was forced to yield to the society's backwardness eventually because dignity can only be trampled so many times for sake of love which is spiritual.

Bajirao Mastani is same story- we see how Bajirao and Kashi are in a happy marriage. But its also mentioned that they were betrothed and married when they were both teenagers aka HALF FORMED ADULTS. They basically knew no one else but each other. Kashi got lucky she grew up and loves her husband but her husband is out their campaigning, in wars, in courts, out there in the world, loyal to her, but not blind. He is meeting other people and it was bound to happen he would meet someone who matches his temperament better than his childhood bestfriend. In a better world they wouldn't have married in the first place!

THAT IS THE POINT

Most of these love triangle/cheating style romances usually comes up in old time setting stories and go on to become classics. This is precisely why. Its because the time period makes sense as to why people who are forced to marry too young would ofc stray when they meet people who suit them better as they get older. The first literary tradition in English language canon of such romance is known as Courtly Love culture. Which started in France's provinces and reached all over Europe. It basically involved venerating higher form of love and romance between two people of UNEQUAL status but its beautiful precisely because it can never be "fulfilled". If it is, it comes with "consequences" like death and estrangement. Like the most famous example of Lancelot and Guinevere. You can see why it emerged among NOBLES precisely because , as we know, nobles were forced to marry each other and get betrothed waaaaay to young on average compared to poor peasant class. There has to be some way to cope when you realize at age of 25, married to someone you might have been just friends with or didn't like, with a parcel of kids, that...you don't want this.....and you cannot get out. EVER.

This is why cheating trope doesn't work as a "classic" in strictly modern setting ( or it can depending on what is being said. Sometimes it is indeed the point that the person involved are bad and horrendous but as we all know ROMANCE never says the people have to be good people in order to be romantic and Romantic. This is why Wuthering Heights exist. There Emily Bronte is saying that Heathcliff and Cathy cannot be together because Heathcliff is a Romani and Cathy is English and White, separated by past trauma of abuse borne of racism that made the misunderstanding possible. The racial prejudice alone would turn Cathy into a pariah if she defied and married Heathcliff when he was poor . But also that they are TERRIBLE people who mucked up life of everyone else and each other's because they couldn't be together. Its Romantic that they can be in after life and insisting Emily didn't write Gothic romance just makes you an illiterate dunce not smart). The last classic was The Notebook and it was set in 1950s Southern America, another setting which had period accurate overbearing parents setting up and controlling class appropriate matches. In modern setting people are not forced to marry anyone they don't want to and things aren't so bad that being gossiped and whispered about will bring social ruin. Even if you do make a mistake, you can always divorce. This is why Sex and the City's Big and Carrie romance is AGING LIKE MILK because no one forced Big to marry Natasha, and no one put Gun in Carrie's head to cheat on her boyfriend with Big and ruin Adrian and Natasha's life ( esp Natasha, girl got her tooth chipped!) . There were elements in their story which makes sense aka pressure to marry before certain age, pressure to socialize with certain class of people and who perform it well. But that is all that...pressure. Not actual social ruin.

Now coming to Rhaegar and Elia...its the same thing. Regardless of what Elia feels, its a fact that Rhaegar was married young to a woman of not his choosing. He married because that is what is expected of him ( have people noticed how the language surrounding Rhaegar is so similar to women ? doing things because people expect him to as a Prince and scion of a dynasty burdened with prophecy of saving the world?) not because he might have wanted to. This was all result of his father, his mother and Elia's mother political and personal machinations. Nobody bothered to ask him anything. So teenager Rhaegar gets married to Elia and for sake of argument lets assume Elia truly loves him, she is older( 6 years, already a mature adult now) and wiser and is more steady about her choices in life...

Rhaegar is not the same. He is younger, just 20, not wiser, his true interests are just playing emotional romantic music and reading. He isn't out there sowing his wild oats and having his temperament its clear he doesn't even want to . Everything else is something he does to please someone else or something else. Also dealing with traumatic family . His mother and he have lost so many siblings, his father nearly died in a kidnapping and was never the same since he was a kid. His father is literally losing his marbles as time passes and is taking it out on his mother ( and even him for all we know) and already about to be father to two kids before he hits before he is 21. He clearly is depressed about the fact he survived and his entire bloodline died for his sake as far as he understands. His dad is already a lost cause by then as well.

Ofc he falls in love with Lyanna, the romantic, grand and mythical manic pixie straight out of some seven Kingdom's folktale of valor. Like Danny Flint, who is hiding among men to save someone in the most chivalric manner imaginable. Except as Prince he can help her avoid death or some gruesome punishment from his father unlike Danny. She is EXACTLY HIS TYPE.

That is exactly the point GRRM is trying to make- men and women when depressed and old enough would never stay in a marriage which they didn't chose. It doesn't matter if the marriage somehow turn out to be decent...its not their choice. Even Catelyn and Ned have some underlying tension over the fact that Catelyn was meant to marry Brandon....( and also that Ned slept with someone else the same time he married Catelyn as far as she knows)

The question is how far they can assert that will in a society which punishes them for asserting that individuality , disproportionately gender wise but punishes all the same ( Robb's fate is horrendous. He didn't even betray a marriage and look what happened)

I don't think GRRM is saying that its all rose and flowers as well, Its very likely Rhaegar just erupted like a pressure cooker after years of depression on finding a girl he likes and decided he should do what he wants for once and elope and Lyanna herself was young and immature to run away like she did. But in the end its clear their feelings were real and mutual however dubious everyone finds it . The fact we know Lyanna disliked Robert being a philanderer but herself didn't mind being other woman shows she is immature but she is real, she is 14-16!

So yeah I think your friend is being sensitive about the fears of being married to someone who won't love or commit as much as she does. Its a valid fear. But fiction is another thing. In that setting regardless , people usually do not care about the jilted person even if we know or like them. Its not about them in the story entirely just like its not about some random cabbage seller in the plot. People can appreciate what it feels like to fall for someone else when you are punished for leaving marriages while also feeling sorry for other party who didn't want to rebel against their lot in life. We are all grown up we can process multiple contradicting feelings at once. The contradiction being that your feelings don't turn off just because someone is out of reach. This topic was also handled in Eternity too...I WONDER what your friend will say here because technically..no one is cheating. She is married to both and was loyal and this is heaven...so...