ABSTRACT
Nearly every behavior in relationships, from love to abuse, from getting together to breaking up, follows clear patterns. As we discussed earlier, a sociologist studied how couples talk about love. She found two basic ways that people talked about love. 1 First is romantic love, including the belief that love happens “at fi rst sight,” there is “one true love,” love can “conquer anything,” and love lets people “live happily ever after.” Most people are very familiar with this idea of love. And, as we discussed, it is closely tied to the belief in fi nding a “soul mate” to marry. However, there is also a second way to talk about love, particularly after being married a few years. Th is is a practical way to talk about love. From this perspective, love is not sudden but grows over time. Love is not based on passion but rather on practical traits and a good fi t between life partners. Love is about staying together through hard times. It is about working on the relationship and compromising. It is about hard work and sticking it out. 2
Both of these types of love are portrayed and reinforced through popular culture. Romantic love is probably most well known in Hollywood. In a book called I Do and I Don’t , a professor examined patterns in how marriage is portrayed in movies. She concluded that very few movies are about the day-to-day life of marriage. Th is is because actual marriage is not a very exciting story. Everyone knows the story so well and day-to-day marriage is quite boring. So instead, romantic movies end with the wedding, two people just getting married. Th is way, romantic love-passionate, sure, “happily ever after” love for one person-is the takeaway story. 3
A fi lm critic for Th e New York Times had a diff erent take. He argued that practical love is becoming more common than romantic love in movies and on
TV. He concluded that marriage is now portrayed as hard work, even in the most romantic fi lms. He wrote, “In fi lm and television, work and wedded bliss are now synonymous: the harder marriage is, the more romantic it seems.” But he agreed that marriage, without challenges, is not an interesting story: “Wedded bliss is a nice idea, but it does not usually produce a satisfying narrative.” 4
Th us, both types of love that couples talk about are also the love we watch in the movies. And, like the movies, how we talk about love in our relationships follows a script. It is not individual and unique. Instead, there are clear patterns in how people talk about love at diff erent points in their relationships. People talk about love the way that other people talk about love.
