The Jane Austen Guide to Happily Ever After (11 page)

Do we still act like this today? Yes, and often with even sadder results. An awful lot of our very first experiences of love in our teens are driven by Marianne’s exact same mindset. Here’s pediatrician Meg Meeker, writing about a teenage patient of hers:

Angela and Tack had oral sex, and she caught a painful case of herpes. “But even more painful to Angela was what Tack did. He not only told his friends that she had contracted herpes, he dubbed her ‘Miss Herpes,’ and she quickly became the girl no boy wanted. She was humiliated and became very depressed.” Angela took a more direct route than Marianne toward “self-destruction,” swallowing two bottles of Tylenol. Angela’s is an extreme case, but no more extreme for our day than Marianne’s is for hers.

And looking for “The One” isn’t something we all grow out of after a first disastrous experiment in Romantic love—assuming we survive it.
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A lot of grownup women are still waiting to be struck by love, like being struck by lightning.

But what’s even more destructive to Marianne’s happiness than her laser-like focus on finding Romantic love is her Romantic expectation of heartbreak. In a bizarre way, Marianne has been looking forward to having her heart broken just as much as she’s been looking forward to being made deliriously happy by love in the first place. It’s not that she ever suspects Willoughby is deceiving her—though he is. She’s not afraid that he’s going
to desert her—though he will. Caught up in Romantic intensity, she never sees any of the danger signals that she ought to be able to pick up on in Willoughby’s behavior.

When Willoughby unexpectedly tells Marianne he’s leaving, gives no believable account of his reasons for going, and fails to commit himself to her before he leaves, none of this raises her suspicions. She never doubts his love. She simply turns on a dime into the
other
mode of Romantic love—self-dramatizing heartbreak. And odd as it may seem, the whole elaborate Romantic script for a broken heart
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actually keeps her from noticing the real heartbreak she’s now headed for. The Romantic ideal of a broken-hearted woman that she’s living inside somehow insulates and distracts her from asking what Willoughby is really up to, why he left, and whether he really loves her the way she assumes he does.
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We do this, too. From that first issue of
Seventeen
magazine that prepares us to look forward to our “first kiss” and our “first time,” we’ve trained ourselves to allow love a very different role in our lives from the one it plays in Elizabeth Bennet’s life, or Anne Elliot’s. We look forward to love as an experience, an intense but fleeting episode that will make us deliriously happy but then inevitably disappoint us. If we can tell ourselves that it’s a rite of passage to have our hearts broken, then it won’t be so bad. If it’s normal, if it’s what everybody lives through—or else they’re hardly living—to be intoxicated by love’s intensity and then crash to the ground, then it’s all just part of the rich tapestry of human experience, and we’re the better for our adventures. The more love hurts, the more we’re sure we’re really alive. So too many of us end up addicted to drama; we practically pursue ugliness and pain in our relationships.

Here’s an example from my own days back in high school—a high water mark for Romanticism and drama for a lot of us. In the spring semester of my senior year, I was dating a guy who was then a college sophomore. I should have figured out he was seeing somebody else, but I never guessed.
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Anyway, he eventually told me. He had broken up with the other girl and was all ready with an “it wasn’t like kissing
you
” line when I, shocked and hurt, asked about what he’d done with her.

After my initial astonishment, I could feel the nature of our relationship changing, kaleidoscope-style, in the little space of time as I let him talk me
around. Before he’d confessed, and despite the significant amount of drama there’d been between us (most of it my fault, I now think), I was still seeing our relationship as the kind of love story that has a happy ending. After he told me, I could have chosen to acknowledge that he’d spoiled it, and walk away—at least for the time being, long enough to see my way clear to a decision that didn’t mean accepting a relationship that was diminished. But I didn’t. When I let him kiss me again then, I could feel myself letting go of the happy-ending kind of story and embarking on a different kind of adventure—all about drama and intensity, and being worldly wise about getting hurt. I saw pretty clearly what I was doing, but I went ahead.

“Love” approached that way—conceptualized as an intense experience with two opposite sides, intoxicating enchantment inevitably followed by devastating pain—is just another distraction from Jane Austen’s kind of happy love.