Unhappy ever after

perspective

When my TV was taken away for repair, I hit rock bottom. Watching drops of condensation fall down the window before coming to rest on the decaying wooden sill could keep me occupied for hours.

I merely sat there, alone, in my paint peeling apartment, pondering about the temporary nature of happiness and the permanency of disillusionment. Thankfully, before resorting to taking up wrist slitting to pass the time, the TV returned. Now the TV is back, I can get on with letting it destroy my life.

The trouble with TV is that it far too often subjects us to idyllic notions of love. Many programmes and commercials sell us the notion that there is someone out there just for you, the ‘special one’. Out of nearly seven billion people, strangely there is only ‘one’. Why not ten, or a thousand? No, just the one. Just think of all those love songs and watch all those movies that tell us this.

You see it all the time on TV. Good-looking boy meets good-looking girl. It’s either love at first sight, or one has to win the other’s heart and go through a series of humiliating, soul-destroying setbacks before two hearts become one and they end up together, living happily ever after.

Now, the odds that you could ever possibly stumble across this person are too astronomical to contemplate. The notion that there is just one person out there waiting for you is almost as ludicrous as the notion that you will ever be able to find them in a world containing billions of people.

Nevertheless, so many buy into this guff and spend their whole lives looking for this mythical person. I kind of gave up looking after numerous futile, self-defeating quests.

You meet someone. They are attractive and, if lucky, they will find you attractive too. It’s is all very exciting. It’s all brand new as you discover your potential lifelong soulmate. This could be ‘the one’. The voice, the mannerisms, the looks. How wonderful. The air crackles with magic, and nights watching paint dry in a dark, dingy room are a thing of the past.

A few months or years down the line, however, that voice, the one you once found so soothing, has developed into an irritating, grating noise that drones on and on. The cute mannerisms are now merely annoying. And those facial features that were once so appealing...well, the eyebrows are too thick, the nose too long, and were those ears always that big?

Maybe this person isn’t ‘the one’ after all. Perhaps it’s all been a massive mistake and they have been on a course of ugly pills since we first met.

Of course, the person is just the same as when you first met them. It’s just that the perfectionists, the overly critical, the easily bored and the constant fault finders among us could never be satisfied, even if god’s gift to humanity were to suddenly fall into our laps.
Replace ‘happily ever after’ with ‘aching disillusionment’.

Replace the notion of ‘the special one’ with someone who will ‘make do’. For Cinderella and her glass slipper, read ugly sister and old, worn out moccasin. All the movies and songs that held up the notion of true love, endless passion, beautiful people. Two hearts becoming one — it was a big, fat lie!

But, it just wouldn’t do to portray romantic love as some kind of wrinkly old slipper that’s not very appealing. It wouldn’t work having Valentine cards celebrating the crushing realisation that there is no unique ‘special one’ out there waiting for you and for you alone. It wouldn’t do to have the myth of romantic love shattered by the notion that all there is to look forward to in life is a big-eared, thick-eyebrowed annoyance with whom you could sit watching TV for decades to come in some damp, peeling apartment.

Just imagine, the only glimmer of relief from such a desperate relationship might well entail bursting into tears while watching the condensation roll down the window pane before coming to rest on some decaying sill.