“Is it enough to love? Is it enough to breathe? Somebody rip my heart out and leave me here to bleed.” - Avril Lavigne Kroeger

         Think of the happiest couple you know. Picture the joy in their eyes when they look at one another. Consider how they launch into a detailed recounting of their first date at the merest mention of the subject. Maybe they hated each other at first (how funny!) or maybe he saw her face for the first time in a boardroom conference and immediately looked up company policy on dating coworkers, only to eventually forfeit the rules in favor of fucking on the baby-changing table in the new gender-neutral single stall bathroom that your company constructed to avoid a lawsuit. 

              And then admit to yourself, if you haven’t already, that you aren’t interested in their love at all.  

              I'm not saying that you’re not interested in rumors about how Caroline had a nervous breakdown on Saturday night and punched through a mirror while Michael looked on helplessly. I’m not saying you don’t enjoy the meaningful look from your best friend when Michael makes a passive aggressive comment to Caroline under his breath and she emits a hysterical giggle in an attempt to distract you from the fissure in their happiness.  And I'm definitely not saying that you won't be there with a glass of wine in hand when the story of their relationship finally reaches its dramatic end – even more dramatic than the most dramatic season of “The Bachelor” yet.

               Appreciating these aspects of a love story doesn’t make you a bad person. It's not horrible people alone who are fascinated by tumult (although they probably enjoy it more and better). Storytelling has been an important part of all cultures since the beginning of time and everyone knows that what makes a story good is conflict, conflict, conflict. No one writes a book or screenplay about two people in a loving, healthy relationship who go on vacation to Europe and put locks on all the goddamn bridges, although I’m sure this is a popular trend amongst basic moneyed couples in our population. There’s a reason that movies spend very little time establishing the reasons for which their protagonists love each other – she’s beautiful, he’s sincere, she’s kind, he’s a successful Jewish film director whose quirk manifests itself in high socks and a tendency to refer to himself in the third person. Boom, they’re in love. Now, let’s tear them apart.

                Love is boring. It’s boring. A healthy love between two people who aren’t you is like the child that might one day belong to them – possibly cute and definitely necessary to the continuation of our species but ultimately uninteresting and incapable of functioning on the same intellectual level as your demons. Now, more than ever, people are choosing independence over relationships. This isn’t due to Tinder ruining men – men were already ruined, Nancy Jo Sales – as much as the fact that there is less of a stigma surrounding women who choose not to marry. Society’s slow move away from regarding women only as vessels for (crossing my fingers!) future hedge fund managers has made the option of permanent bachelorette-hood more of a choice and less of a prison sentence. When the societal cons of being a single lady begin to dissipate, the emotional pros of lying spread-eagle in your bed eating Cheez-Its and watching the entire first season of Homeland become a lot more potent.

               A vast number of millennials are choosing to live by what I like to call the “Avril Lavigne” doctrine. She sings “I don’t care if you love me, if you hate me, you can’t save me, baby, baby”, preaching rugged independence, singular apathy, and putting your relationship with the girl in the mirror above all others.  To drive home the importance of crafting an independent identity, she later married the front-man of Nickelback as a joke.

              This doesn’t mean that all young people are choosing high-carb snacks in bed over an intimate connection with another human being. The plains of Iowa and suburbs of Ohio are teeming with young love.  Somewhere in Wisconsin, a single tear rolls down a mother’s cheek as she watches her beautiful daughter exchange vows with the man who once made sure to get her home from prom by midnight. Cities, however, and particularly the one from which I write this, attract starry-eyed young people with dreams that extend far beyond two kids and a white picket fence. They are comforted by the notion that there is no one out there for them, that while others may find contentment with a life spent as someone’s better half, they themselves are whole.

                The myth that sexually liberated women are ruining romance for everyone is a tired one. Love is boring and that is why fewer people are choosing to engage in it. We are bored by other people’s healthy relationships and we are also, eventually, bored by our own. The market for Ashley Madison’s notorious cheating site is vast, horny, and dissatisfied. Like the music videos I choreograph in my head to Taylor Swift songs, nobody wants to hear the intimate details about your incredible relationship except your parents and that’s only because your parents sacrificed their identity for yours when you were born – yet another reason not to have children.

                  Love is boring and that’s okay. It’s beautiful, at least for a while, to those who practice it. What’s not okay, however, is that Hollywood presents it as the only viable happy ending. Is it too hard to imagine a film that doesn’t end in romance or a hand job or a romantic hand job? Will our future contain films that aren’t afraid to let the protagonists continue to hate each other well into the third act and beyond? What if there was a movie where they hated each other and then had sex and then still hated each other?  Stay tuned for the answers to these complicated questions in the continuation of my Love is Boring series.

YEAH it's like this "secret menu item" bullshit it's just vanilla bean frappuccino with raspberry syrup in it