Pornosophy: Bovarysme

Is the romantic agony all just a big mistake, even a perversion? That which doesn’t exist and is prone to imaginative fancy always trumps over the tedium of the known product. The confabulation that makes for romance derives precisely from the empty space in which the chrysalis of possibility becomes a festering wound. Put another way romance is a genre which like say horror participates in certain conventions. The artifice is made up of a series of unending obstacles that in the case of say Romeo and Juliet or Tristan and Isolde, finally result in the suitor never being able to experience the potential banality of his or her much sought after object. Hannah Arendt’s famed “banality of evil” now becomes "the banality of familiarity." Sure there are those who spend their lives enduring agonies of separation or grief at the loss of a prized and idealized individual, but the mass of men lead lives of alternately desperate or comforting routine. Romance is nice as an art form, but has nothing to do with relationships. If you’re a romantic you aren’t going to fare well greeting the same person at the dinner table or even in bed at the end of the evening. Madame Bovary is an example of a fictional character who couldn’t take everyday life. Would you want to be a Madame Bovary who spends her life disappointed with everything she has and only longs for those things that elude her? Essentially Flaubert’s character is a pain in the ass. Even if you consider yourself romantically inclined you’d probably do well to run like hell from a woman or man who displayed Emma Bovary's traits. You have to be patient if you're living with someone who's felled by romanticism and wait for the fever (or agony) to pass.