Running, jumping, climbing trees…

(The first bit of magazine writing that I’ve done for three months. Published in Madrid)

Five different love stories with Valentine’s Day looming

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Of all of the complicated things that we have to contend with as mature human beings – tax returns, plumbing and Méndez Alvaro bus station being examples – there is still little that troubles us quite as much as love.

Love is life’s great enigma. We can’t decide whether it is an emotion or an ideology. It is impossible to predict when it will come or when it will go. It can be boundless, dangerous, tragic, blissful, complicated or unrequited. And in an attempt to comprehend what we will probably never understand, we’ve spent much of the last few thousand years composing songs, penning sonnets, drawing pictures and writing books. All of them about love, many of them written – for some reason or other – while sat under a tree.

But what makes a good love story? What key traits are shared by those books that lie at the heart of romantic literature?

Well first of all, of course, a good love story requires an equal measure of pain and suffering. Romeo and Juliet, those ‘star-cross’d lovers’ are a perfect example of this: a couple who lived together only in their imaginations, any chance they had of blissful tranquillity dashed by the feud between their families.  Romeo and Juliet are perhaps our most celebrated lovers, and it is telling that their story ends not with them happily fastened together for evermore but with them both dead on the floor.

Pain, then, is love’s ubiquitous partner. And in many of the great works of literature the two appear together: in Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë or The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje.

It is the job of one of literature’s archetypal characters, the White Knight, to ensure that love stories are not all about suffering. Also known as a Knight in Shining Armour or a Knight Errant, such a character is another useful ingredient in a successful work of romantic literature.

I’m assuming that you know, but for any of you that don’t the White Knight is a heroic character who usually appears in the final third of a love story, before sweeping a miserable female off her feet then charging away triumphantly with her, off into the sun.

Of these White Knights, none are more famous or popular than awkward Mr. Darcy who appeared in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Stiff, awkward and obsessed with form and principles, Mr. Darcy was an odd kind of White Knight who first of all appeared cold, heartless and aloof, but later transpired to be something else entirely. His character has been an enduring success, to the extent that a century on Hugh Grant has fashioned an entire career out of reprising the role, over and over and over again.

Next, and certainly not to be forgotten, is sex and scandal. These were the two things that readers were in search of in 1960 when the queued around the block in London to buy a copy of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book that had been banned for more than 30 years for it gratuitous sexual scenes and shocking use of language. These characteristics, however, were the making of the book and nowadays Lawrence’s novel is considered one of the finest love stories ever with the sexual scenes enlivening the pages like electricity ripping along a wire. His story charted the magnetic, irresistible but dangerous attraction between Lady Chatterley and Oliver Mellors, her gamekeeper. The love between the two was so alluring to the reader because it was forbidden.

So that’s it for my brief overview. A successful love story is pain and tragedy and triumph and sex and scandal. The only thing that is missing, if you want to have a stab at writing one of your own, is an incompetent man, oblivious to what is going on around him and doing absolutely everything that he can to make the story as awkward as possible. And if you want to read a fine example of this, then I suggest that you go and read High Fidelity by Nick Hornby.

It’s staple material for women trying to understand men, and one of my favourites.

Five Love Stories with Valentine’s Day on the horizon

1. Romeo and Juliet

2. Pride and Prejudice

3. The English Patient

4. Lady Chatterley’s Lover (don’t take on the metro)

5. High Fidelity

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Image credit: Thai Jasmine