Love (Emotion)

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    When Real Life Calls for a Cheesy Rom-Com Gesture

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    The big boombox moments in Hollywood films are cliché. Yet they can also sustain love in real life.The second time I fell in love, before it began to go well, it went very badly. After only a couple of conversations over coffee, I showed up at my beloved’s apartment and confessed the depth of my feelings — to which she responded, with heartbreaking nonchalance, “Um … what do you expect me to say?” I was so devastated that, in trying to flee, I inadvertently stormed right past her front door and straight into her hallway closet. On my way home, I almost walked into the path of a moving train, then verbally abused the subway conductor for daring to warn me about it. That night I drank an entire bottle of wine, watched the 2005 film adaptation of “Pride and Prejudice” for the umpteenth time and cursed my sorry fate.Yes, I know. You don’t have to tell me what I looked like.What did I think I would accomplish, pulling some cheesy rom-com move, as if my life were “Say Anything” or “When Harry Met Sally”? Had Hollywood turned me into a tacky derivative? Relationship advice is awash with warnings to not be duped by films. We poor schlubs out in the world don’t have teams of writers scripting our happy endings, experts caution — and so taking inspiration from rom-coms’ corny gestures just sets ourselves up for disappointment.And it’s true that real life does not tolerate clichés. Falling for someone is a highly individual experience. An unassuming widow’s peak, the sound of their vowels when they’re running late — it’s small, specific details that stoke and justify desire (and that sent me marching to my beloved’s doorstep that night). When we are fervently in love, wrote the novelist Stendhal, “everything is a symbol.” If you have ever disapproved of a friend’s partner, then you were not seeing the same symbols your friend was. But so then, if nothing is more unique than a love affair, how come so many of us watch Nicholas Sparks’s films with the same generic scenes of rain-kissing and love-declaring?It’s because underneath a rom-com’s boilerplate narrative structures, there is extreme passion and ardor and desperation — and all of that is very true to what the actual nonmovie experience of falling in love feels like. Rom-coms resonate with us because we do see ourselves in them: They function as mirrors through which we can pinpoint and understand our own amorphous feelings. And their sweeping gestures also provide encouragement for us to turn our passions into concrete action.I have never seen anyone kiss a lover in the pouring rain — in real life, cold rainstorms are no aphrodisiac — but I have witnessed a grown man get down on bended knee and belt out the worst Nickelback cover. His girlfriend, who hates Nickelback, adored it. I was raised by a man who, after a decade of friendship with a woman, got drunk and flew across the country so he could tell her that he couldn’t wait a moment longer to be together. Years later, my mother’s brother was almost arrested for loudly declaiming his regret outside his wife’s window in the middle of the night. (At least he didn’t use a boombox.)As the sociologist Niklas Luhmann put it, “Showing that one could control one’s passion would be a poor way of showing passion.” I may have made a clown of myself when I showed up out of the blue to declare my love, but nothing else I could have done would have demonstrated the bigness of my feelings more clearly. And I don’t think I would have had the courage to try had I not been bred on a steady diet of finely calibrated melodrama.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Chelsea Handler at 50: Still Hustling and Dreaming of Margaritas

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      The comedian Chelsea Handler is unapologetic in her latest book, “I’ll Have What She’s Having.” Well, of course, she is. She’s Chelsea Handler, and that’s always kind of been her thing.There are many of the stories you would expect from the former host of the E! show “Chelsea Lately” in her seventh book, which came out last month, such as confronting rudeness in men, shamelessly propositioning Andrew Cuomo for sex when he was governor of New York and ruthlessly pushing out a business partner for a lemonade stand. (She was 10 at the time.)But Handler also weaves in more life advice, a healthy dose of cheerleading (both for the reader and herself) and insights gained from therapy and various breakups.The book includes chapters about her very public relationship with the comedian Jo Koy, but fans looking for the details of the breakup will be disappointed: She doesn’t say much, and mostly speaks well of Koy. A sign of growth, she says.“While I am sure that is of interest to people, I will no longer throw someone I once loved under a bus,” Handler writes. “My sharing what exactly went wrong in our relationship would negate all the work I have done on myself while also creating a headline I don’t want to create.”The main takeaways: She’s 50. She’s hustling. There’s a Netflix special coming later this month, and a residency in Las Vegas. And she’s sure of herself. That’s all she needs, and she’s finally realized it. In an interview, Handler discussed the new book and the newish Chelsea.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Broadway’s ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Asks: Can Robots Fall in Love?

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      “Maybe Happy Ending” had an initial Korean-language production in Seoul in 2016. Here are five things to know about the show.Hue Park was sitting in a Brooklyn coffee shop in the spring of 2014 when “Everyday Robots,” an indie pop ballad by Damon Albarn, floated over the speakers: “We are everyday robots on our phones / In the process of getting home.”What if, Park thought, there were a whole world filled with robots who looked just look humans?The result: a one-act Korean-language musical about a pair of abandoned robots who fall in love in Seoul in 2064. The show, which Park wrote with Will Aronson, a former New York University classmate, found success with its premiere in Seoul in 2016, and five subsequent commercial productions there.The New York Times critic Jesse Green, who saw an English-language production at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater in 2020, called it “charming” and “Broadway-ready.” Now that version will open at Broadway’s Belasco Theater on Nov. 12, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen.The story is about two outcast helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and build a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence, and Park thinks it is especially relatable after the coronavirus pandemic. “People have become so comfortable staying alone in their rooms and connecting to each other through a screen,” he said in a recent interview in Midtown Manhattan.Shortly after previews began last month, Park, 41, a former K-pop lyricist who wrote the show’s lyrics, and Aronson, 43, who wrote the music — both collaborated on the book — talked about their inspirations and the different approaches to developing the show’s Korean and English versions. In a separate video call, Criss, 37, and Shen, 24, discussed the challenges of playing robots who look like humans.Here are five things to know.Shen and Criss star alongside two other actors in the musical, which is at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      John Mulaney to Star in a Broadway Comedy About Love and Marriage

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      “All In: Comedy About Love,” a new play by Simon Rich, includes a celebrity cast taking on the roles of pirates, dogs and other zany characters.John Mulaney is coming back to Broadway.The comedian will star in a new play, “All In: Comedy About Love,” staged as vignettes about relationships, marriage and heartbreak and written by the humorist Simon Rich, Mulaney’s former “Saturday Night Live” collaborator.The production, set to feature a rotating group of actors, will be directed by Alex Timbers, who helmed Mulaney’s most recent Netflix special, “Baby J,” as well as his Broadway debut, the 2016 comedy “Oh, Hello on Broadway.”“It’s a weird fantasy camp of things I always wanted to do with my very good friends,” Mulaney said in a video interview.The comedian, who has two Emmy Awards for his stand-up specials “Kid Gorgeous” and “Baby J,” will lead an ensemble cast of four actors portraying pirates, the Elephant Man, dogs looking for love and other characters: Initially, Mulaney will be joined by Richard Kind (“Spin City,” “Mad About You”), Renée Elise Goldsberry (“Hamilton,” “Girls5eva”) and the “S.N.L.” alum Fred Armisen.“We jump around between eras and countries and species, but they’re all love stories,” said Rich, a former “S.N.L.” writer who is making his Broadway debut with the play, which is adapted largely from tales that have previously been published in his 10 short story collections and in The New Yorker.The idea for the show, which will also feature songs from the indie band the Magnetic Fields, came about when Timbers approached Rich about adapting some of his short stories for the stage. And once Mulaney, who first met Rich when they were writing partners on “S.N.L.” from 2008-11, was on board, the built-in rapport between the two proved irresistible, Timbers said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Chimp Crazy,’ ‘Childless Cat Ladies’ and the Fault Lines of Family Life

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      The charged cultural conversation about pets and children — see “Chimp Crazy,” “childless cat ladies” and more — reveals the hidden contradictions of family life.“Monkey love is totally different than the way that you have love for your child,” Tonia Haddix, an exotic animal broker, says at the beginning of “Chimp Crazy,” the documentary HBO series investigating the world of chimpanzee ownership. “If it’s your natural born child, it’s just natural because you actually gave birth to that kid. But when you adopt a monkey, the bond is much, much deeper.”“Chimp Crazy” arrives in a summer of cultural and political obsession about the place of animals in our family lives. When JD Vance became the Republican vice-presidential nominee, his 2021 comment about “childless cat ladies” resurfaced, positioning them as adversaries of the traditional family. New York magazine published a special issue questioning the ethics of pet ownership, featuring a polarizing essay from an anonymous mother who neglected her cat once her human baby arrived. In the background of these stories, you can hear the echoes of an internet-wide argument that pits companion animals against human children, pet and tot forced into a psychic battle for adult recognition.These dynamics feel supercharged since 2020, the year when American family life — that insular institution that is expected to provide for all human care needs — became positively airtight. The coronavirus pandemic exaggerated a wider trend toward domestic isolation: pet owners spending more time with their animals, parents more time with their children, everyone less time with one another — except perhaps online, where our domestic scenes collide in a theater of grievance and stress.When a cat, a dog or certainly a chimp scampers through a family story, it knocks it off-kilter, revealing its hypocrisies and its harms. In “Chimp Crazy,” Haddix emerges as the avatar for all the contradictions of the domestic ideal of private home care: She loves her chimp “babies” with such obsession that she traps them (and herself) in a miserable diorama of family life.Haddix, a 50-something woman who describes herself as the “Dolly Parton of Chimps,” believes that God chose her to be a caretaker. She was a registered nurse before she became a live-in volunteer at a ramshackle chimp breeding facility in Missouri, where she speaks of a male chimp named Tonka as if she is his mother. Haddix also has two human children; she just loves them less, and says so on television.As she appoints herself the parent to an imprisoned wild animal, she asserts an idealized form of mothering — one she describes as selfless, unending and pure. “Chimp Crazy” is the story of just how ruinous this idea of love can be, for the woman and the ape.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Loved ‘Couples Therapy’? Read These 11 Books

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      These stories of relationship dramas and evolving partnerships will fill the “Couples Therapy”-sized hole in your life with wisdom, schadenfreude and humor — and sometimes all of the above.It can be hard when shrinks go on summer vacation — especially in a summer when each news cycle seems to bring more upsetting developments to process. And it doesn’t help that the fourth season of the cult favorite Showtime docuseries “Couples Therapy” has just wrapped, so even affordable, vicarious therapy is off the table. Without our weekly fix of Dr. Orna Guralnik’s deep nods and cathartic sympathy crying — and with the good doctor’s own much-anticipated book still months off — what are we to do?The series, which started airing in 2019, did not seem to have the makings of a hit: real couples, sitting on a Brooklyn sofa, telling a therapist their problems. At worst, thought skeptics, it sounded voyeuristic and upsetting; at best, boring and contrived. Long before Annie and Mau were a twinkle in my eye, or I’d wept over Season 2, or I’d had wildly differing feelings about different strangers named Josh, I, too, was one of those people. “Watch it,” said a co-worker. “Nothing you thought will ever be the same.” Forty-five minutes in, I was hooked.There are many reasons “Couples Therapy” has broken through: the happy surprise of seeing our perceptions change, the age-old distraction of other peoples’ problems, the actual applicable advice, Dr. Guralnik’s glossy mane and teeny tiny braids (a major discussion point on message boards).But even if you aren’t a fan of the show, these shoulder-season reads will get you through August with wisdom, schadenfreude, dysfunction, pain and humor — and sometimes all of the above. It’s not a spoiler that most of these couples could use a session or 10.Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox (1970)Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a childless couple in their early 40s living in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (they’re the gentrifiers). Life seems comfortable — until Sophie is bitten by a feral cat and their carefully ordered existence begins to crumble. There’s even a kitchen renovation in this sharply observed, humane classic of New York marriage. (Read about the book’s legacy.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Mahogany L. Browne’s Love Letter to Hip-Hop

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      It was a clear black night, a clear white moon. Warren G, “Regulate” (1994)Originally appearing on the soundtrack of the Tupac Shakur film “Above the Rim,” this song is built around a sample of Michael McDonald’s “I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near).” I’m looking like a star when you see me make a wish. […] More

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      in Theater

      ‘Emilie’ Review: Defending, and Defining, a Life

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      In her new play, Lauren Gunderson explores the legacy of the 18th-century French mathematician and philosophe Emilie du Châtelet.“Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight” starts with a death adjourned. Emilie (Amy Michelle), a mathematician and philosophe, has slipped through a loophole in the space-time continuum and now lingers in an uncanny valley between life and death. She has been allotted limited time to determine whether her legacy amounts to one of “loving” or “knowing.”The words “love” and “philosophy” are inscribed on an upstage wall and throughout this play, by Lauren Gunderson, Emilie returns to that makeshift chalkboard to tally up her life’s deeds. As a dramaturgical device, it’s more prosaic than piquant, yet not entirely off brand for a woman whose mind was a perpetual motion machine.The play’s protagonist is based on the real-life du Châtelet, famed in 18th-century France for her translation of and commentary on Newton’s “Principia” and for a treatise she wrote on the nature and propagation of fire. Such an accomplished woman hardly needs defending, but defining a life is another matter. That is the real brief for “Emilie.”In her state of limbo, the marquise discovers that she can’t intervene in past events. Any kind of physical contact will immediately set off a blackout, as if someone has shaken a cosmic Etch A Sketch. As a workaround, Erika Vetter plays a younger version of the marquise, enacting a telescoped version of her life. Where Michelle’s marquise is ruled by an Apollonian temperament, Vetter puts a heavy thumb on the “love” scale. “Are you jealous that I’m sharing orbits with another man?” she teases Voltaire, du Châtelet’s lover in real life.Under Kathy Gail MacGowan’s direction, many of the actors play multiple roles, underscoring the similarities between certain characters. Bonnie Black delivers compelling performances as both the marquise’s mother, a woman of mean understanding, and the meddlesome Madam Graffigny, a not entirely welcome guest at the marquise’s family estate.Unlike those two women, bound by corsets, Emilie wears a simple nightgown, which allows her to move freely from her chaise longue to her desk on Sarah White’s handsome set. Her mind moves just as nimbly from an appraisal of Gottfried Leibniz to a discussion of “living force,” a scientific concept for kinetic energy first developed by Leibniz and later elaborated upon by Emilie.For all the talk of life forces, however, there’s a lack of kinetic energy between the elder marquise and Voltaire, who is reduced to a concupiscent kibitzer with a string of chronic ailments. The first act is also dragged down by exposition. “Did I mention I was married? We’re skipping ahead.” “Did I mention I had children? Three. Fascinating creatures,” the marquise maunders on. Such palavering is wasted time for a woman facing a literal deadline.Gunderson, whose other work includes plays about pioneering women like Marie Curie, does more than pay hagiographic tribute to her subjects. There are angles of regret in her portrait of the marquise, who ultimately feels that she failed to provide enough opportunities for her daughter. Even as the lights dim, she is preoccupied with “love and so many questions,” and it becomes impossible to tell where loving leaves off and knowing begins.Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life TonightThrough April 30 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; theflea.org. Running time: 2 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More