From first love to unfollowing – culture that sums up romance in 2020
From Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis to Shaughna making a play for Luke on tonight’s Love Island, human relationships have preoccupied us for millennia. So which are the books, films, songs and games that express romance in 2020?
Marriage The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson
One of my aunts, hearing I was planning on going to a register office to tie the knot, said she didn’t get why people are “still doing marriage”. Well, the marriage rate is declining (as, apparently, is divorce), but it’s true that for the last 10 summers of my life, weddings have appeared like heat rash.
Why people are “still doing marriage” is a question I find myself asking and being asked a lot. And not just by married persons like my aunt, though they tend to be its harshest critics. Also the unmarried in their late 20s and early 30s, surprised to find themselves increasingly outnumbered by peers who’ve decided to make things official – and not because of the legal incentives. I’m not moved to defend the institution in these moments. I’ve watched Marriage Story. I’d probably have opted for a civil partnership if one had been available, but it’s basically the same contract with less baggage.
Most of my family, if they did marry (always after having children), did so on the advice of an accountant. But the idea of involving the state in matters of love came less from my family than from my own peer group. It’s a pressure people from my parents’ generation tell me they never felt. But it’s not as simple as a social media-driven concern for status, which is what my aunt implied. Like flat whites, extravagant weddings have become the go-to boomer explanation for why no one my age can afford a deposit.
In her essay I Thee Dread, Jia Tolentino discusses the wedding-on-steroids phenomenon in terms of patriarchy, capitalism and delusion. She argues women are duped into it. That by spending crazy money on being the centre of attention for one day, only occasionally looking beyond the smokescreen of a wedding to the blue and distant horizon of “ever after”, a woman is distracted from the real sacrifice she is making when it comes to her (already limited) autonomy.
Yes, some weddings increasingly involve obscene displays of wealth, where drones hover as couples speak their personalised vows, but just as many that I’ve been to are BYOB in someone’s back garden. I think there’s more to it than the self-optimisation motive Tolentino identifies. Witnessing the unions I’ve been to – queer and straight, traditional and subversive, family-only and the kind where no one seems to know why they’re there – one of the shared, if less romantic sounding or unspoken desires that seems to underpin each is a desire for stability. For solidity, even. To cement unions, take part in rituals and mark milestones into adulthood.
Even as this desire focuses on the future, there’s a kind of nostalgia to it, perhaps not so different from
