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10 Modern Romance Two Versions of Love in Reality/“Reality” Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says. —Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, 1978 Victorian magazines often featured manufactured anecdotes and stories that were presented (if only with tongue in cheek) as true. Our modern culture, in ironic reversal, presents filmed stories of actual people in a simulacrum of reality. Similarly, the relatively recent explosion in memoir presents its own challenge to the idea of truth: “my” truth is real enough if it’s a good story. I hope to show that romance, too—fictional or not—is a version of reality, and for lovers, or just lovers of love stories, it becomes a fictional but necessary truth. There has been much scholarly commentary on the relationship of these multiple realities to lived experience, blurring the line of the true and untrue in all sorts of bewildering postmodern ways.1 But, you might object, the dividing line itself, however queasily wavering, is still there; even a postmodernist uses an umbrella when it rains. Romance in texts and in life, after all, seems pretty clearly apples and oranges: romance fiction is deliberately removed from actual life, often labeled mere entertainment or “escape,” whereas when a living woman appears on a sort-of-unscripted TV show or writes about herself on an Internet dating site, it’s presumably real (or at least real to her). Even where romance specifically stands for another world, the world of wondrous fables or (in the modern American sense) fabulousness, that unreality is still one of our realities. Given all this, it seems futile to ask what love is in the real world; a better question might be, How do we understand “real” romance—one that is lived out in actual time, by oneself or others? I would argue that there is no getting 182 Modern Romance 183 away from story entirely when it comes to romance. Traditional narratives are threaded into our experience; fictions become real to us as we try to live with and through them, while “reality” becomes fictionalized. Just as our culture’s fictions are often the undercurrent of our reality, so we view those fictions through the lens of our experiences and the choices they present. In this chapter we will look at two versions of “real” love: a dating reality show and women’s Internet dating profiles. These romantic forms, while obviously diverse , stand as connected examples that defy the widely understood sense of the “real” in romance, the notion of what “real” love is. They also rebuke the idea of the “self” as a unitary form. The patterns of our love stories are organized according to the demands of representing the multiple, often contradictory possible selves that we fear, or seek, or imagine. As a multifaceted and ambiguous idea, love is peculiarly suited to this kind of representation, a fluid mold into which to pour the fluctuations and layers of selfhood. This may in fact be so whether the stories are “true” (narratives of lived experience) or named as fiction. The visions of romance in the two genres of reality TV and the explosively popular phenomenon of Internet dating reproduce forms and scripts we recognize in our lives, while providing us with a “meaning,” a way of understanding our feelings and relations that appears natural and universal. In both these genres, one finds people becoming characters, or using characters based on actual identities . Professional and nonprofessional become one, the body gives way to the avatar, and we invest these others with our dreams, if not laugh at foolishness, following Friedrich Nietzsche’s dictum that we discover both “the hero and the fool” in our art. Now, Nietzsche might not have recognized either reality TV or Internet dating profiles as art, you will point out, but my view is that they are, in fact, as carefully constructed as any artistic form. Reality/“Reality”TV It’s not difficult to see why reality TV has had such unprecedented appeal to the public; for one, it has the same appeal as gossip, and really, how can anyone be above good gossip? You have to have the imagination of a termite not to enjoy the capricious (and naughty) ways people behave when it appears that others are not looking. Of course, they do know we are looking, which makes it even more delicious that they can’t seem to help making utter fools of...

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