Confessions of a Hopeless Romantic: The Bachelorette and Online Dating

by Ben Howard

I don't watch the Bachelor or the Bachelorette with any regularity, but that doesn't stop me from enjoying the show when I do. In my defense, I love sports and the sport of competitive dating is no different. But I also love fairy tales and the Bachelor/ette is, at its core, a fairy tale. It's a fictional story of people who fall in love in a magical land and live happily ever after. The show ends happily ever after; pay no attention to the broken engagement behind the curtain.

I've always been a hopeless romantic at heart, so I often give myself over to fairy tale daydreams of love. I don't just want love and a wife, I want a story, and a good one at that. I want one of those stories that you tell your kids for like eight years and becomes the basis for a hit sitcom on CBS. Simple enough, right?

But there's another side to me that's deeply rational and a bit cynical. This is the side that is over fairy tales and the artistic machinations of love. This is the side that talks me into signing up for dating websites.

Everybody has a dating website. JDate if you're Jewish. Christian Mingle if you're a Christian. OKCupid if you're poor and/or bored with normal humans. Personally, after a fair amount of internet dating experimentation, I've settled on eHarmony. It's like dating, but with more math and less of that messy personal interaction.

Seriously, it's fantastic. You can work through a list of potential matches to see which one's short answer writing style sets your heart aflutter. Personally, I weed out all matches that set off personal pet peeve alarms. This includes anyone who says they read Captivating or Twilight unironically as well as anyone who refers to God with capitalized pronouns (unless they were feminine pronouns, then I might be intrigued).

I've even re-worked my own profile multiple times. I've written it serious and straight-forward, manic and ridiculous, gentle and sweet, and, most recently, semi-honestly. I use the best picture I've ever taken as my profile picture, even though it's more than two years old and it only shows half my face. I just really want people to see the best version of me, which coincidentally, is only tangentially related to who I really am.

This is insane. This is ridiculous. This is real life.
Sometimes I'll joke that I really want to start a relationship six months in, or better yet, like six years in. I want to be comfortable and vulnerable with the other person now. I want to trust them now. I want them to understand my weird quirks and my occasionally bizarre anti-social behavior now. I want to be known, but I don't want to go through that messy, awkward process of letting someone get to know me.

I'm caught in this trap, really we all are, between who I am and who I'd like you to think I am. The first is comfortable for me, but I'm scared you won't like it. The second one causes me deep anxiety, but I enjoy the affirmation.

Though this seems disingenuous, I'm not certain that it is. Maybe we have to let people get to know our somewhat artificial, definitely superficial selves before they can get to know the beautiful/frightening person on the inside.

I've had friendships that were birthed out of emotional difficulty. They are wonderful and I love these friends very much, but there is a problem. It's hard to be normal friends with them, it's hard to just hang out. We can talk about life and death and pain and suffering and I know things about them and they know things about me that I wouldn't share with another soul, but a normal conversation sometimes eludes us.

I don't think we earn the really valuable, long-lasting relationships we crave unless we go through the mess and anxiety of learning about each other slowly, over time. I think we need the often frustrating path towards trust and friendship and love. We don't need a fairy tale, because they aren't real, but I don't know if we need formulas either, because they aren't true.

Love is insane. Love is ridiculous. Love is real life.

Peace,
Ben

Ben Howard is an accidental iconoclast and generally curious individual living in Nashville, Tennessee. He is also the editor-in-chief of On Pop Theology and an avid fan of waving at strangers for no reason. You can follow him on Twitter @BenHoward87. 

 

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Why I Love Happily Ever After and Why I Need Something Else

by Ben Howard

Recently, as both a massive surprise to myself and with great loss of personal dignity, I developed a love of the TV show The Bachelorette. Granted, I only watched two episodes, but those two episodes, like crack, were more than enough to guarantee addiction.

In my defense, a significant amount of my enjoyment is ironic. I mean what other show can support so many cliche story lines that it spawns both a drinking game and a fantasy league. At the same time, I actually felt a little emotional when quasi-Mormon Jeff With One F proposed to Emily the Blonde. Against my own expectations I had actually invested emotionally in their relationship. I like them. I hope they end up living happily ever after.

It's easy to mock a show like the Bachelor or the Bachelorette. It's easy to point out the insanity of trying to find your “soul mate” on a nationally televised game show. It's easy to be cynical, but I'm not convinced that the cynicism is warranted. At least not all of it.

At its core, the show provides a proxy for both our deepest desire and our deepest fear. We want to be loved, but we're afraid that we'll end up alone. It's the same core that spurs the success of paint-by-numbers romantic comedies. We want to hear the story again because we want the story to be real. We want the story to part of us. A show like this serves a purpose.

I've always been a hopeless romantic. I love the Bachelorette for the same reason that I love When Harry Met Sally or Definitely, Maybe. They're aspirational how-to guides about finding profound happiness. They're fairy tales.

We need fairy tales. We need escape and we need dreams. Sometimes they even come true.

But we need other stories too or else we run the risk of fairy tales dominating our reality to the extent that we think of them as the rule and not the exception. We need stories that tell us that happily ever after is just the beginning. We need stories that show us that being single isn't synonymous with failure. We need stories that remind us that we don't have to be rich or successful to be valuable.

Churches need to learn how to tell these stories. Please note that I did not say anecdotes or illustrations. These are not points we need to prop up, but stories we need to embody. In order to lead healthy, fulfilling lives we need big, beautiful dreams, but we also need a deeply realized and beautiful reality.

I try my best to be honest here. I've told some of my friends that writing this blog is my form of therapy and this post is no less than that. I love the fairytale, but my pursuit of that fairytale has often left me feeling bitter and lonely.

There are two possible reasons for this. First, to quote from the movie High Fidelity, “Only people of a certain disposition are frightened of being alone for the rest of their lives at the age of 26.” I am certainly of that disposition.

Secondly, and I think more profoundly, I have no idea what it looks like to be healthy, happy and single. It's not a story I'm familiar with, yet when I look at the Bible or Christian history it's quite apparent that this is a perfectly viable option.

I don't have a pithy point to wrap all this up. I love the stories we tell ourselves in popular culture, it's why I like writing about it, but at the same time I think we've gone too far. We know how to chase the dream, but it's become increasingly harder to live the reality. Here's to figuring it out.

Peace,

Ben

You can follow me on Twitter @BenHoward87 or leave a comment if you'd like to contact me.