The Importance of Example

 The Importance of Example

What is a good relationship? It’s a big question and the answer will differ from person to person. Some folks will draw on examples, good and bad, from within their own family to decide what it is in a partner that matters to them. Some will take an answer from their culture, their religion, their society. But some, poor souls, may decide to take their answer from the example of film and television and that is the point, I fear, where things may start to go wrong. Because using something designed to be dramatic (often melodramatic) created for the purposes of entertainment as one’s example, consciously or not, is not the way to a happy and fulfilling future.

Take the British soap opera EastEnders. When it started, forty years ago now, it was known for its gritty realism and tackling social issues. It addressed matters like alcoholism, domestic abuse, HIV, gay relationships, PTSD, racism and drug abuse. I used to watch it regularly, long ago, but abandoned ship when, quite frankly, the storylines got unutterably ridiculous. Just to put this into context, I decided to watch the recent 40^th anniversary week episodes out of nostalgia and it can be summarised thus:

A woman who was recently hit with a spade and left for dead by unknown persons decides her ex husband is responsible. She steals a gun from a profoundly depressed man intending to use it to kill himself (he is eventually stopped and taken to hospital) and goes after said ex, shooting him in the arm but learning in the process that the person who actually hit her was his mother. After a confrontation with the both of them, she pushes said ex in front of an oncoming car. The car then swerves and crashes into the side of the pub where the (fourth) wedding of a pair of longstanding characters is underway, hitting gas cannisters and blowing the building to bits and trapping a chunk of the cast inside. The driver of the car is the fiancé of a heavily pregnant woman who let her take the fall for him killing his ex wife and then locked up her sister and forced her to confess in his place when he found out the truth. Said pregnant woman gives birth in the ruins of the crumbling pub while said evil fiancé is crushed in front of her and her sister by a bathtub falling through the ceiling. Meanwhile in another part of the pub, another woman and her ex husband (now with another woman) have a heart to heart and confess their undying love – and then he is crushed by a falling beam and dies.

So as you can see, these days gritty realism it ain’t…

That is an extreme example. But the point I’m making is this is the context from which people may draw their ideas about how life is lived. A place where people regularly have passionate sex with people they can’t stand by the light of day. A place where, quite genuinely, I cannot think of a single relationship ever having lasted without either a major bust up or one or both parties having an affair. A place where the exciting, dangerous, passionate relationship is always preferably to a steady, gentle, loving one. Back in the early days of soaps like EastEnders, storylines about rape and murder were rare and big news – now murders happen regularly and I can think of half a dozen current characters who’ve been raped off the top of my head. The ex who was shot and the man who tried to shoot himself have both taken bullets before, both from former lovers. And there’s a way of behaving that comes across too – when life goes wrong, you smash up a room and scream. When someone is in hospital, you shout at the poor staff who are just trying to save them. It’s melodrama all the way and it is infecting the world.

It's not just EastEnders that are responsible for this though – the majority of TV dramas, films and a lot of recent books fall into this mould as well because it is somehow becoming normalised as the way to be. And the trouble is, I feel like people of the recent television watching generations are learning subliminally that this is the way to behave. Be splashy, be passionate, sleep with the exciting lover over the steady one, shout the odds and smash things up. Because at a subconscious level, that’s how they see the people on TV behaving, so isn’t that just the way they should be?

I deliberately made the romantic male in my novel an awkward, kind, clever and unattractive man whose better qualities shone through and made him wonderful to the woman who discovered them. Because at the end of the day, I feel like the world needs less real life drama. It needs less shouting the odds, less passion, less melodrama. It needs people to pick their life partners by their personal qualities and not by their physical attributes – which after all, rarely last. When the attractiveness fades, there has to be something left other than a person you don’t like or things are never going to end well. Everyone just needs to calm down and think.

And I do have a tiny bit of hope. EastEnders held a vote as to which partner in a romantic triangle a woman should pick – her ex-husband who made her feel safe or the dangerous younger criminal with great abs. And the viewers chose the ex-husband. So at least, perhaps, I’m not entirely alone…