Love Really
Love, Really
Thursday, 14 July 2005
By Dr Frigmund Pseud (pictured, with ANZAPT.org admin staff)
The British romantic comedy "Love, Actually" rips off a lot of old stories, but one of them is not so old. I'm thinking of that painful not-quite-sex scene where the heroine keeps answering her mobile because her mentally ill brother keeps ringing her, until all the romance built over previous scenes is long gone - It's a replay of an early scene from As Good As It Gets, a movie only a couple of years older.
In both films the heroine, on the verge of scoring some long-awaited nooky, is distracted by the only other thing in her life, the brother/son she's carer for. So Helen Hunt gets viral kid spew on her boob, and Laura Linney's phone won't shut up. In both cases the spunky suitor persists for a bit, but then realises the game's up, the moment's gone, and now it's just two strangers in a room. One kind of love trumps another. Splat.
The plots move on, because you can't have carer love at the centre of a movie if you want to shift serious volumes of popcorn. But to their credit, both films make that unromantic love as much of a theme as they can get away with commercially. I'm not fussed about the ripping off element - it was worth doing again.
Before I go on, let me declare my interests, conflicts thereof or otherwise: I am a card-carrying romantic. Sucker for rom-coms. Buyer of flowers. That sort. So the forthcoming attack on Romance is despite my tendencies.
What event marks the pinnacle of romantic achievement, even today, thousands of years after its conception? The wedding. Celebrating what? Real love, the sort you get married for. Right. So what's the worst thing that can happen on a wedding day (natural disasters and cold feet notwithstanding)? It rains. Someone throws up on the bride. A Funniest Home Video Moment involving the bouquet and several hefty single ladies. The prawn cocktail has everyone pooing red white and blue for days. In short, reality gatecrashes. Who invited him?
For a day, you want everything to be perfect, a fairytale. If you're lucky, you'll keep the real world at bay. While I was planning my wedding, I went to a friend's, at which in one night there was a choking, a spewing, and a fainting. But in spite of these ugly incidents, the night was a success. Love overcame. In my recollection, the wobbles are sideshows there was never a challenge to the main act. I took heart from this when considering my own big day. 'Whatever happens, if we're still married the next day, then it's OK', I said. Of course, we still took every possible precaution with the weather and frail guests and anything else that might remind us of life's grittier side.
The biggest surprise for me about getting married was how insignificant the wedding was compared to the marriage. I'm a lucky bloke, married now for several years to a woman who tells me she thinks she's the lucky one. (Don't you just want to throw up?) I know it's real love, because I felt the same on our wedding day as I did when my fiancee was pale and drawn from assembling orders of service in the wee hours and her breath smelled like she'd been digesting nothing but stress for days. I could deal with spew on the boob, or mobiles going off (and the latter, being a doctor on-call, is a common problem), it wouldn't break the spell for me. Or her, I hope.
What might break the spell? I've read about couples whose marriages fell apart after they had an intellectually disabled child, or one of them became disabled. It was going along fine beforehand, but bowels and behaviours and doctors and bills wore them down, revealed irremediable faults. Scary stuff. Luck is a big factor in finding your partner; so too it governs your ongoing relationship to some extent.
But only to some extent. Because, in one of the films (and Love Actually couldn't follow Laura Linney for long enough, but I reckon the same thing would apply) Helen Hunt finds love through the care she gives her son reflecting onto others, who are drawn to it. Roses and chocolates aside, you're looking for someone you can trust to look after you. If you can make her care for you anywhere near as much as she does for her son, you'll be set.
Valentine's day doesn't do much for me. But then, I don't need reminding about love. Having the fortune to be healthy in my heart means I can look around in my daily work and see love where I might have missed it before. As a doctor, I meet a skewed population, the minority unlucky enough to have to meet me in my professional capacity. Shit happened, and it keeps happening, or I'd be out of a job. Cupid is well out of arrows when a husband brings his intermittently sane wife in with her fourth relapse of mania, or when a wife has to be schooled regarding her spouse's catheter bag. But the ageless cherub gets to work with needle and thread, and sometimes the stitches hold. Where blood relatives are involved, especially mothers, I'm frequently in awe of the depth of love. People, ordinary people, crawl through flame and flood for their beloved son, or sister, or aunt. I see it every day.
The Hollywood line seems to be: Love makes the world go round. Especially Hot Sexy Love between Hot Sexy People who say beautiful things to beautiful music. Well I've heard things said over the sound of ventilators that no movie can go near. I've seen love that's forged in the fires of a living hell, and it eats mobile phones and spew for breakfast. Of course I also see things fall apart, people give up on each other, let each other down, fail one another and worse. But that's not as often I'd expected. I started Medicine expecting bad news from day one. Don't expect to see cures, I was told. And rightly so as there are no quick fixes. Fixing of some kind does go on, however, and more often than not it's not us medics doing the lion's share of the fixing. It's someone drawn into the story by virtue of relationship to the patient, and held there by love.
Oh sure, there's obligation, and guilt, and other ulterior motives like inheritance and carer's pensions - all that fodder for the devil's advocate. Any fool can spot that. If you go looking for lies, you'll find them. I go looking for love, and perhaps because I want to find it, I do, every day, in truckloads. Hairy love. Smelly love. Sweaty, silly, awkward love. Where romance fights to keep reality at bay to shelter a sapling hope of love, Real love kicks down the hospital doors and runs down every corridor in the place.
That's why, after ten years of studying and practising medicine, I'm still a romantic, a believer. Some people believe in God; I believe in people. Both beliefs require a whole lot of faith. Maybe I'm deluded, or worse, cliched. Maybe I don't care. I'll happily hear the case for the darkness in Man's heart and the meaninglessness of life in an absurdly enormous universe. But if I look distracted when you're telling me I've got it all wrong, it's probably because over your shoulder I've just spotted another little bit of love - making its little bit of the world go 'round. That's how bad I've got it.
(You could try and make a movie about all this, but it would probably suck.)
-Dr Frigmund Pseud.