In Defense of Reality Television Romance

or:

Heather Averey and Dustin Johnny Forever A While

I used to watch reality television for the romance. I understand this may sound absurd since much of it is alcohol-fueled pairing of convenience, but to a fifteen-year-old idealist, there seemed no greater aspiration than to share a crucible with a fellow traveler and fall in love. Six vagabonds in a Winnebago, seven strangers in a house and wouldn’t you know that two of them are soulmates? Bunim/Murray Productions defies the odds again. Play the lottery, producers, because you can pick ‘em.

But that’s bullshit, obviously. Even the young idealist knew that the concept of soulmates was Don Draper’s greatest and easiest sell. We were waiting for a man in a well-cut suit to convince us our omnipresent myth was true, and he came to us as Kate Hudson, bless her bright-eyed optimism. We put our faith in fairytales of perfect matches, paragons to keep us believing, but the truth is far more romantic than perfection, more perfect than fate. The truth is if you put seven strangers in a house, two of them will likely fall in love for a while.

What could be a more flattering representation of humanity than the capacity to love so freely? Attraction becoming the desire to know and be known, to possess and protect. In these moments, it doesn’t feel convenient or arbitrary. It feels like it always feels: lassos ensnaring, draining our tender hearts temporarily of indifference and cynicism. Consistent as clockwork, yet somehow we never expect for these interlopers to transform our manic or staid lives into manic then staid lives: keystones rolling in and out of archways.

And it goes wrong, of course, reliably. Consistent as counter-clockwork, it becomes insular or toxic or desperate, or maybe it never made sense to begin with. Maybe in hindsight our one and only was one of four who resembled our favorite Barbie. Maybe two proximate people liked each other’s smiles and ached for their upturned/open lips, but he doesn’t read books and she can’t stand Coldplay. Our incongruities outpace us, but that doesn’t eliminate good intentions, the truth of our predisposition that anyone can love practically anyone for a while and mean the hell out of it. Later our friends can reflexively utter “no wonder” and argue who is least surprised about the collapse, but that won’t diminish the intensity of our unlikely connections. If we accept facts instead of well-dressed myth, we can understand that everything fails, and this should not leave us jaded. We are mercurial people seeking volatile refuge in mercurial people – perhaps it was a mistake to entrust love to Venus: right neighborhood, wrong Goddess. Anyway, from a distance, it’s difficult to personify barely-distinguishable rocks and flares, until we find ourselves in low orbit, slow spirals through atmosphere, then plunging to the surface, inescapably near, now nearer, now nearer, now…