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When people are anti-romance
I was eating dinner with my friend 'Katie' the other day when the conversation turned to Doctor Who. I told her how awesome Rory was, mentioning how he waited for two thousand years, protecting Amy while she was frozen in the Pandorica.
"That's creepy," she said.
"What? How?"
"Waiting for someone for two thousand years is creepy as hell."
"He was protecting her," I explained. "It's romantic."
She then told me that no normal person would wait for so long for a single person unless they were creepily obsessed with them. I told her that Rory was in love, and that people do that sort of thing for love. I explained that over two thousand years, Rory had to protect Amy from barbarian hordes, invasions, natural disasters, the Blitz and many other things. If I woke up and found out that the person I loved had protected me from those sorts of dangers for so long, I'd be really touched.
"It's still creepy," she insisted. "It would be like if you woke up and saw that your boyfriend had been watching you sleep because he wanted to 'protect' you."
Then, today, I was reading an essay about Petrach - he was a High Middle Ages poet who was famous for his love poetry - and the writer declared that Petrarchian feelings were sexist and should be placed in the same category as pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia.
What the fuck happened to romance? Why do people hate it so much?
Comments
It's like the knightly concept of courtly love. A knight champions a noblewoman he barely speaks to, has seen a handful of times and isn't going to marry. That kind of devotion is Nice Guy (capital letters for clarity) levels of yuck. In fact, it's so obviously stupid and creepy that even the Arthurian tales deconstruct it via Lancelot, wherein he fucks Arthur's wife, destroying a marriage, a friendship and sending Arthur spiraling into depression. And then the kingdom kind of crumbles until the last bit.
See also - reactions to Twilight, which also divided people on the issue of romance v. creepiness. My view would be that if you've created a world where people can live that long, there's nothing that weird about waiting for their loved one for two thousand years.
Your friend was reacting in terms of real life, where it is pretty weird to do that. Although you do get cases of people whose fiancee went off to war, got declared missing and who then never married because they were waiting for the missing guy, there are a lot more examples of people who grieved for a while then ended up marrying someone else.
Fictional love can be more perfect than the real stuff. That's the point, for me.
EDIT: ^ Twilight was creepy because the guy was controlling the woman, cut her off from everyone in her life and kept threatening to murder her. Oh, and he wanted to eat her. That's the difference, I think, between romantic love and obsession - obsession is when you value your own happiness over the happiness and comfort of the object of your affection, while with romantic love you just want to make the other person happy.
Dante and Beatrice in The Divine Comedy are also an example. In real life, Dante hardly spoke to Beatrice; in the poem, she becomes a kind of symbol of The Virgin Mary, God and Christ all rolled in to one. It's impressively romantic, but also kind of strange, especially post-Freud, when we tend to assume that love to be "healthy" has to be sexual. If it's not, we assume it really is underneath, but in a twisted and unhealthy way.
I don't think that bit applies to Rory and Amy.
- Spend more time and effort on a woman he's actually going to be able to marry
- Develop spiritually, or
- Both
Like I said above, even the Arthurian legends mock courtly love via Lancelot.
As a side note, the Arthurian legends are deceptively clever. We consider them cliche, but they contain remarkably good commentary about life in the times they were written.