Society
Romance is dead; it was just a brief 20th-century sentiment
Published 23 October 2000
About ten years ago, when I was living in Washington DC, I flew up to Manhattan to meet a friend who was in the Big Apple on business. She was staying at a pal's apartment. We had a perfect day, which turned into a perfect evening, and suddenly I had missed the last train home. "Don't panic, you can come and stay with me and Nick."
Nick turned out to be Count Nikolai Sokolow. He had not yet married Bienvenida Buck, and was a charming, camp little man, who welcomed me into his shoebox apartment with the OTT effusiveness of a Muscovite Liberace. Nick locked himself in the bathroom for ages to get ready for bed. When he emerged, he was wearing a hair net and a bold-coloured silk kimono; but what completely floored me were the toenails that peeped out from the kimono: they were painted the tartiest of scarlet. Despite his Cage aux Folles get-up, Nick confessed to being a true romantic: he wanted to find a nice girl, settle down, have lots of baby Sokolows.
What he got instead was the man-eating Bienvenida, who gulped him down, turned him into Sun fodder when she betrayed him with the air force chief Sir Peter Harding, and then spat him out again. Lady Buck had no time for romance - women who want emotional fulfilment, she said, should buy themselves a book of poems. When it came to marriage, pragmatism was the name of the game, and profit the motive.
More and more of us have come round to her way of thinking - indeed, m'lady claims that "seductrics.com", her new website promising tutorials in how to bag a millionaire, receives between 6,000 and 9,000 hits a day. Lady Buck explains that "we are in the 21st century and I wish for women to go into a relationship as if it were a business".
Indeed. And it's not just the women who do. Leaf through papers and magazines, and you'll see marriage, cohabitation and children discussed in terms of prenuptials (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michael Douglas), palimony (Mick Jagger and Luciana Morad) and business partnership (Liz Hurley and Hugh Grant). Flick through Hello! or OK!, and you'll find couples surrounded by their mega-galactic mansions, Moby Dick yachts or mountains of shopping bags - the lovebirds' passion is no longer enough of a selling point; it's what each will acquire with the coupling that matters. It is not the passion Posh and Becks have for one another, but the Porsches and Cartiers they exchange that star in profiles of their marriage; and when Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones celebrated their joint birthday, what made the headlines was not that, romantically, they were born on the same day, but that Michael gave his bride-to-be a ten-carat, $200,000 ring and she gave him a framed photograph of their son.
No wonder, then, that dosh, not love, is the search-engine for those seeking their perfect match. The demographics support the media in their material concerns. Now that one in three Britons gets divorced, "till death us do part" sounds like a particularly schmaltzy line from a Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber showstopper. Much better to plan for the defence of property, provision of assets and potential division of spoils than for your sunset years together, cheek to cheek in neighbouring rocking-chairs.
The new, post-postmodernist union is a merger focused on contracts and the bottom line - just as it was before the 20th century filled us with its sentimental notions. The era that gave us Edward and Mrs Simpson, Cole Porter lyrics and Hollywood love stories was a romantic exception; the rule was a mercenary tradition whereby parents consolidated their interests while their offspring bit the bullet and accepted their destiny.
And we're back there - except that now, it is up to us to arrange our own marriages. We are not gold-diggers or fortune hunters; we are merely investors who opt for a Darwinian selection of the fittest in order to prosper rather than propagate.
If only Nick Sokolow had known better, he could have stayed safe in Manhattan, painting his toenails red to his dying days. Romance is dead, Nick. Long live marriage.
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