Romances seek the ideal of lifelong married happiness. In reality, many marriages end in divorce, sometimes as many as half. The trend is not completely negative. According to a fascinating
scholarly study of marriage and divorce, divorce has been declining since 1970. So has marriage, by the way.
Why then do we imagine our romantic heroes and heroines can find true love, get married, and be happy together the rest of their lives? Are romance readers deluded?
The short answer is: probably no more than anybody else. We are no more deluded about marriage than we are about other aspects of our lives. We tend to think whatever we strive to achieve will become permanent. Yet people change careers, move from one part of the country to another, go from urban to rural or the other way around, and constantly bring new people into their lives. Our bodies change over time, from the cellular level to the visible signs such as scars fading or hair graying. Even so, wherever we are in our adult lives our basic tendency is to believe this is where we will stay. Humans like permanency, even though that is not our reality.
Many people do find true love and a happy ever after. Unfortunately, to my knowledge no one has ever studied romance readers to learn if we have a higher proportion of long-lasting marriages, and also describe them as happy, than the general populace. I would like to believe romance readers have a corner on good sense and good luck, but until scientists confirm this, it’s just a hope.
When we hope for long-term success and get failure instead, we have a choice. We either dump the failure as a regrettable instance of bad luck, and continue to hold the same ideals as before, or we revise our view of life, and look for something different. Many divorced people marry again, in what Oscar Wilde called the “triumph of hope over experience.”
Hollywood gives us constant examples of such behavior. The predictable bust-up of the Demi Moore–Ashton Kutcher marriage is just another in a long line of high-profile Hollywood relationships that have gone sour. While some people ascribe this particular failure to their May-December ages, the fact is many such marriages don’t make it past the seven-year mark.
Is this frequent churn of partners the famed seven-year itch in action? What is the problem? These people are handsome, rich, and famous, not to mention some of them are talented. Why can’t they stay married? One
web page suggests many actors marry for the wrong reasons. They do a movie together and the intimacy of the work makes them crush on each other. Then they discover they can’t sustain those feelings when they return to real life. Another problem could be they get hung up on disparities in their fame or income (the "A Star is Born" syndrome, where one partner’s fame rises as the other falls). A third reason for Hollywood marriages to fail is the work obligations that keep couples apart. Hollywood couples experience the loneliness of being without their partners while at the same time often being in a strange new place surrounded by attractive new people with whom they are required to be intimate on camera. It’s a recipe for infidelity.
Considering how often Hollywood marriages churn, it’s not surprising that few romances feature big movie stars as their protagonists, either male or female. Even in our fantasies, romance readers know some marital combinations are doomed to fail.
Those poor Hollywood people. How sad. (Really. They look so happy when they get married, but it ends so soon.) The good part is, they get to leave. The wealthy and famous have advantages over ordinary citizens when a marriage goes bad. They have enough money to take care of their children, so they don’t stay in bad marriages strictly to ensure the kids have new clothes and dental work. If they are abused, they split right away. High-profile marriages often involve prenuptial contracts, so their money is protected far better than that of ordinary citizens. They don’t automatically fall into poverty because they divorce. They don’t necessarily lose their social circle, either. Finally, because their bodies are part of their stock in trade, they always are attractive to other people. They have immediate opportunities to fall in love all over again. And they do.
Today, people are often advised to start any job with an exit strategy in mind. We know employment is unlikely to be long-term anymore, and so to protect ourselves, we need to consider the endgame. Not everybody does, of course. People who contract serial marriages, such as Demi Moore (who now is a three-time loser), may have hopes for each future relationship, but they also have business managers who advise them how to protect their assets should the marriage end. The rest of us are on our own, and we still aren’t thinking of marriage as a life stage that requires an exit strategy. Perhaps we should. Instead, just like these hapless movie stars, we look for love, we hope we have found it, and we hope it is permanent. Since we can’t look to the lives of the rich and famous for perfect outcomes, we look to romance fiction, where the ideals of happy ever after still burn bright, and there is no seven-year itch.
Why was I looking for love on the Internet? Like many people, I had a question in mind and just wandered across town, as it were. I started out looking for photos of Zerlina, the comic character in the opera Don Giovanni who almost lets the aristocratic Don seduce her on her wedding day. After that foolish action gets foiled by one of his many ex-lovers, Zerlina has to woo her new husband, Masetto, out of his angry mood. 
He of course knows exactly what Don Giovanni was after with Zerlina, but Masetto’s plebian station in life made him unable to stop his upper crust rival for his wife’s favors. So he’s mad at her. We don’t have droit de seigneur anymore, and it’s a good thing, but if a charismatic, age-appropriate movie star suddenly dropped in on your life, you, too, might forget everything and want to just go with the moment. George Clooney for the older set. Robert Pattinson for the younger. Perhaps People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive this year, Bradley Cooper? Cooper even speaks French, the language considered the language of lovers. Don Giovanni is usually sung in Italian, which can sound just as sexy, as Thomas Hampson shows in this clip. 
I saw Don Giovanni recently in a suburban movie theater as an HD simulcast, a venue which is becoming all the rage for high-class entertainments including Shakespeare and ballet. Also wrestling and pop concerts. My companion was someone who had never seen an opera up close before. He was blown away by the seductive sexuality of the Zerlina. Granted, he might have been impressed by any movie screen–sized image of any sexy young woman, but this Zerlina was charming and sexy as she confidently seduced her own husband into forgetting how mad he was at her. All was soon well, despite her moment of being distracted and lured by the glamorous Don. At the end of the opera, Don Giovanni gets dragged to hell and the young couple is happy. Score one for the good guys.
