MY ONE AND ONLY LOVE

By Roger Rosenblatt

This is the progress of romance in the past 40 years: one starts out loving an idealized image of a mate (see Vertigo) and winds up loving oneself (see Seinfeld).

One can in fact see Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, since it is being rereleased in a new, clean print in eight cities. There are several scary scenes in the movie, but none as terrifying as when Kim Novak presents her remade self to Jimmy Stewart. She is dressed in a gray suit and a white blouse, and her hair is done up in a seascape of blond waves. Stewart has wholly recreated her in the image of the dead woman he loved. Only, as the plot twists, and though Stewart does not yet know it, this is the dead woman he loved. By making her over he thinks that he has bought a second chance at happiness, but he has doomed them both.

The search for the perfect mate isn't seen much these days, yet the image of the ideal wife or husband was, not that long ago, a standard and frequently resurrected cultural myth. Vertigo came out in 1956--the same time that My Fair Lady was opening on Broadway. That story too was of a man who shaped a woman to fit his notion of an ideal, or highly improved, form. But over the years the impulse to idealize lovers pretty much disappeared.

One small item of proof is the New York Times's "Vows" feature in the weddings-and-engagements section on Sundays. Once this section was a cathedral of boring probity; brides appeared to be photographed in wax, and weddings were reported as the cornerstone layings on national monuments. Now the "Vows" feature (the name itself suggests something ironic and tenuous) describes weddings that sound like the Ritz Brothers' movies, and the happy couple are sometimes photographed in such a way as to indicate that they will go directly from the altar to a mental hospital.

The one vestige of the ideal-mate image that still goes strong is the Miss America pageant. To be sure, this too adjusted to modern sensibilities last year when it took a national plebiscite on whether the bathing-suit competition should be continued. (Regis Philbin was the host and arbiter; one assumes that Justice Scalia was unavailable.) No matter; the bathing suits stayed, and the pageant remains a context for the exhibition of perfection--that is, if one's view of perfection includes a woman who, upon one's return home, is pounding the piano and belting out an aria from Carmen at the top of her wonderful lungs.

Several explanations are possible for the disappearance of the idealized mate. Divorce statistics have undoubtedly helped. The main cause is probably the women's movement, which began in modern force not long after Vertigo originally came out and which, like all politically driven events, contained both smart and stupid moves. The basic thrust for equality, however, was impeccable, and it followed as the night the night, that if women were to be the equal of men they would be seen as equally flawed.

And there are the health clubs. Many young people have StairMastered themselves into such great shape these days that physically they appear to be closer to perfection than ever. Unfortunately, the emphasis on the physical exposes the flabbiness of other faculties, and since their minds do not go for afternoon workouts, they often show themselves to be as witty as Jack LaLanne.

In any event, the ideal mate is practically no more, which may be just as well since the ideal anything is always a setup for tragedy. But what has replaced this cultural item is not much more attractive. It is, in a sense, the ideal of the unideal. The assumption behind television sitcoms contemporaneous with Vertigo was that the husbands and wives--in such shows as Father Knows Best and The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet--were perfect for each other. They had their ideal mates; that's why they were married. The assumption behind current shows like Friends and Seinfeld is that perfection is a sometime thing and that anybody may be meant for anybody else. That's why the characters are not married. One size fits all.

In short, the illusion of perfection has been exploded, along with the sentimental sweetness of it. Yet a different illusion has taken its place--that romance as perpetual quest can be as satisfying as settling down and that serial dating can go on indefinitely.

One of the final episodes of last year's Seinfeld revealed the sad consequences of this theory. Jerry Seinfeld, who is to antiromance what Don Quixote was to the real thing, is suddenly converted to the prospect of a permanent attachment when he meets Janeane Garofalo, who is, in every way but the anatomical, Seinfeld himself. She talks the way he does, thinks the way he does, reacts in exactly the same ways. Seinfeld immediately falls shallowly in love with himself, and is prepared to marry himself when the inevitable question arises: Who would marry someone like him?

In Vertigo, a man makes too much of a woman, and he loses. In Seinfeld, a man makes too much of himself, and he loses. This is the progress of romance in the past 40 years.