“Great love is God’s doorway.”
Perhaps it’s a generational complaint, or I simply expect too much. But I wonder what happened to great romances – real love – in our public culture, literature, and entertainment?
This is hardly a unique question that has come only to your humble observer of the culture. But on a recent road trip, my wife dug out some old CDs, and we were playing a couple of hours of old country music by the likes of Strait and Jackson and others, and the romance and love of a man and woman in song struck me anew, even in the song’s that you’d heard many times over the years.
They caught me with surprised delight because they don’t exist in the “new country” genre.
Many of the ballads are simple and even a little corny, but they’re rich in conveying the unique love that a man and woman share – or should share. And even the songs about “love lost” are laments of a good thing ruined or missed – a rich piece of life uprooted. They tell us that the consequences of ignoring reality always cost more than we want to pay.
The romance and love of a union between a couple is such a profound mystery and seemingly so absent in our public culture, which mocks anything decent, worthy, or that can’t be illustrated on TikTok, slathered with f-bombs and bizarre vocal inflections.
Perhaps it’s no more complicated than great love is God’s doorway, and as such, it enrages our modern culture.
To be clear, I think that great romances, love affairs, and marriages still very much exist in the general population. I know my wife, and I share a romance and love affair that has spanned decades and three children, bad times and good. We refuse to let it slip away. In public, I see other couples with the little touch, the whispered word, and the kind of love that expresses itself without needing expression. I see and hear about love that won’t let go, even on the eve of death.
But look at how love is expressed in the modern culture of the twenty-first century. And I’m not picking on country music – it’s pervasive in all categories. In the movies for heaven’s sake – and look at what now passes for comedy. And books. And, oh my, look at the television. Now “love” is ripping off clothes for a sex scene in a one-and-done situation. Or a married couple is constantly bickering and dropping f-bombs like a B-52 bomber carpet-bombing a target. Comedy now is about how to belittle or trick your spouse, not love and sacrifice for your mate.
In country music, at least, love is now expressed in primarily physical terms. Shaking “booty” and such, or slobbering over a girl while pie-eyed drunk. Not too much romance. In rock and rap, it’s a function without a purpose, evidently, without even shock value on the broader culture.
In books, again, there’s a lot of sex but not much romance. In my own books, I’ve tried to express the miracle of committed love. I’ve gone out of my way to try to examine what real love is – all without a bedroom scene. This doesn’t make me noble or holier-than-thou, but I just note that people often have commented how refreshing it was to read a novel without it.
Back to the culture. The language has a lot to do with minimizing romance. It eats away at its essence.
When and how did we decide in our culture that every other word had to be the f-bomb, even in the Starbucks line? Men and women are babbling on, and I guess women think they are not keeping up with the boys if they don’t use it. What a pity.
Just look at the Oscars and the pronouncements from Hollywood from both sexes. Grown men and women in public – clothed in gowns of vulgarness. Several years ago, when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock, it didn’t shock us as much as his public language afterward. And Rock’s. And the audience’s reactions. It reveals and stains them. It stains us.
Social media is an open sewer where seemingly no famous man or woman can post without a prominent f-torch thrown on the bone-dry landscape of what passes for cogent thought in our modern media.
(If you want to be counter-culture today, you carefully limit cursing for occasions when it amplifies and informs. It makes you a radical!)
But language is only one disintegrating value of love. How did sex get completely disconnected from affection, love, and emotion? Now men and women talk about getting (insert a variety of words here) as though it’s a thing to do, like brushing your teeth. It wasn’t really all that long ago that there were boundaries for language and the discussion of sex in public. And men generally didn’t use four-letter words in front of women, or at least tried to mitigate the use. And discussions of sex were more naughty than profane.
But that day is gone like a freight train. Now sex – such a marvelous and wonderful thing! – is degraded and paraded around as though it were a valueless trinket, not a precious aspect of love – itself a profound mystery and beauty.
I think I know the answers to my questions, of course. But I pity our younger generations. I think of how hard life can be when the bloom of youth wanes and how much love, romance, and devotion of one to another bridges the raging waters of life.
