The Romantics
On growing out of ambivalence
There’s a scene towards the end of Galt Neiderhoffer’s novel-turned-film ‘The Romantics’ where Tom, the reluctant groom, walks out into the garden in the middle of the night, playing Brutal Hearts by Bedouin Soundclash from his phone. He is walking towards Laura, his bride’s maid-of-honour, his ex-girlfriend and seeming twin flame, and kisses her passionately. As the song plays, he whispers in her ear a few lines from the Keats poem, Ode To A Nightingale. His voice is breathy, the words heavy and thick with desire, and you can see Laura almost melt into him.
I watched this film in 2011, and vividly remember looking up that song then sending it to a boy I shouldn’t have been seeing, forever imprinting the sentiment – to be happily used – onto my brutalised little heart. I’ll blame naivety and not cinematic portrayals of disappointing, slightly toxic men for my romantic track record, but I think this romanticised, rose-tinted lens through which I viewed Tom-like characters in my own life was born out of this scene. Even as a 32 year old who knows better, I still find myself weak at the knees as Tom starts reciting Keats, though I know that in real life this would be an ick of meteoric proportions.
“Ambivalence is a disease, you know,” Laura shouts at Tom. “An actual mental illness.” Tom is being vague, attempting to explain his being caught between two women through a metaphor about being a lifeguard aching to get in the sea and when he was finally able to, he couldn’t. “What I mean is, I’m afraid of the ocean,” and by ocean I think we’re to take that as a commitment to someone who holds a mirror up to him - all his goodness but also all of his flaws – and the bearing of responsibility that comes with it.
The state of being lost, he seemed to imply, granted him a kind of freedom.
There was no one – nothing else in the world – that had this unbelievable effect on him: thrilling electrification. But just as soon as he acknowledged this gift, he sought to destroy it.
In my younger years, I took this admission of fear as romantic in itself: a true man who can admit when he’s scared, who doesn’t want to break what feels like a perfect, beautiful thing, sacrificing his own happiness to keep the fragility of romance from shattering. And although none of my past loves ever came close to such a level of performative romanticism, I projected this assumption onto them whenever they’d claim an inability to commit to me.
From ambivalence comes secrecy: the eroticised charge of an elicit romance, only heightened by its own forbiddenness; yet in Tom and Laura’s case, pardoned in some way by the legitimacy of their college relationship. The tension between them is intoxicating and all-consuming; what’s hotter (and more short-term) than stealing those moments in between and calling them a life together? As I soon discovered in my own (less extra-marital) version of this, it felt romantic because it was a fantasy. As soon as anyone tried to place the situation into a considered reality, the bubble was burst. And isn’t this what makes it so seductive? If there was anything I carried into my adult romantic life, it was this: the dark excitement of being secretly desired.
I began this essay simply wanting to write about The Romantics. As one of my favourite books and films, I take the opportunity to re-read or re-watch The Romantics when certain parts of the text feel either appropriate to my current life or I’ve forgotten them and need reminding of Neiderhoffer’s ability to create flawed, chaotic characters that simultaneously play into all-too pertinent tropes. Upon deeper reflection, I realised that the reason I love Neiderhoffer’s story is because I have grown with it over the past 12 years.
What I had found so intoxicating at first, I had experienced too much of in the subsequent years of my life. In one relationship or another, I had become Laura – the unchosen one, the one held on a screen and not in person – and over the years I had shifted from her role to one of a cynical observer. Arguing over why they hadn’t made it as a couple, Tom throws Laura’s ‘complicated’ nature in her face, asking if she ever thought he might need a simple woman who doesn’t need to tear down others to feel good about herself. “Oh, so your complete opposite, then?” she retorts. Maybe, he says, ever ambivalent. “Well you know what they say: opposites attract then they bore each other to death. I’d rather die of excitement.”
At 20 years old, that became my internal refrain – my mantra of love. If there was a choice between complicated and simple, I was choosing complicated. I did not want a quiet love life that followed the linear path that society expected of me. And now? A recent re-watch caused me to view Tom’s character in a different light. Less romantic, more disappointing. To be torn between two women is not a crime; to never make a choice between them is, quite simply, weak. As Neiderhoffer writes, “[Laura] was not brokenhearted because the relationship had ended suddenly; she was brokenhearted because it had never truly ended.”
Back then, the authenticity of their love was not something I questioned. It was entirely real because you couldn’t fake passion like that. But as another holy grail book constantly reminds me, it’s foolish to mistake intensity for intimacy. Neiderhoffer’s narrator clearly agrees: “love and hysteria are easily mistaken.”
The ending is, in true Tom and Laura style, vague and ambiguous. A wedding interrupted not by the revelation that Lila’s groom had been with her maid-of-honour just hours before, but by the onslaught of rain over the rocky Maine coastline. Tom and Laura remain outside, soaked and happy; but what really happens when the party is over? I’d hedge my bets and say Tom would run away from Laura just as he runs away from life. And after even just a few sessions of therapy, I’d say that isn’t a life to leap into.
