The Formula for Happiness

Love stories would work out if men organized themselves according to the romance novel formula.
In a grassy green park somewhere, an Alpha Male is patrolling his beat. This is a man’s man who has to pack his chest into his uniform shirt, because he does wear a uniform: he’s a worker, a type-A personality minus the alcoholic tendencies. He devotes his life to something so noble, it’s sexy- because the fact is, if a woman sees a man dive in front of a car to catch a stray, waddling tot, part of her is horrified over the near-death, but most of her just needs a snow cone to halt the spontaneous ovulation. So, the buff boy making his way through the park on this spring mid-morning is an off-duty fireman walking the Dalmatian he rescued from the pound, or a finish carpenter harboring latent dreams of being architect of the church for orphans he wants to build. Of course he has a name, and of course that name alludes to so much testosterone you can taste the hair on his chest when you say it (Although, he does groom himself to have a remarkable close shave- all the better for cuddling with you, my dear.). His name is Dwayne, or Nick, or Chad. This is Brent, and his Dalmatian is a huge, friendly Shepherd-mix called Daisy, after his soft spot for a fine summer field. He has this April Saturday off from his job as junior captain of the Coast Guard, and that promotion will come quickly after he saves the Girl Scout troupe who will unwittingly canoe into a freak storm.
Early in Brent’s story, we will learn of other women’s interest in him; maybe there will be a short scene with the sophisticate from the Harbor Conservation Committee who strolls cat-like into his office, filleting herself on his desk yet again to no avail. Everybody wants this man, a fact he is charmingly (trust-worthingly) oblivious to. In the park, pairs of women jog by him, breasts at play on the trampoline of their hot pink sports bras, yet he doesn’t notice. Which is not to say he isn’t experienced: in his younger days- about one to four years before today- he was quite the tomcat, which was in no way symptomatic of emotional problems, a sexual addiction, or his nonchalance about being unhygienic (men with haircuts as clean-of-line as his do not have Chlamydia). His well-notched bedpost simply serves him as a degree: Brent is well-educated for the pleasuring. Lately, though, he has been in poor spirits- responsibility weighs heavy on this strong-but-kind man, and in his new maturity, only the exact, right kind of woman could attract his attention, because next time he falls in love, it is going to be for life. Good thing the right kind of woman has just had her purse stolen not a hundred feet ahead.
Her name is Dana, but it could have been Calista or Eva or another name that suggests a classy femininity. Her purse has been snatched by a man of no particular race but ne’er do well, and he has taken off into the abyss of the park and left Dana blanching in a classy, feminine way that is somehow completely sexually irresistible to Brent as he and Daisy jog up to assist the damsel in distress. The love story has to have a meeting like this, one that immediately shows off Brent’s Hot Jesus-like capacity for helping out and Dana’s quickness to be offended by patronization. She is, after all, a modern woman, which makes her insistent on asserting her independence by refusing to notice how dashing Brent’s butt looks in his well-fitting jeans. They proceed to have tension-building encounters as our hero meets with her time and again in the days that follow, bringing updates on the law’s search for her purse, until finally they have sex on Dana’s kitchen floor. This is the perfect place for them to have the sex, because it is demonstrative of the way the characters are changing each other for the better: despite being a modern woman, Dana is also just a woman, and this makes her fragile, and since she has been hurt in the past she is a little- to use an unkind term- mousy. Having sex on the floor shows spirit. And Brent, being perfect, would have never dreamed of taking a woman, heaving bosom and all, on anything less than a finely made bed, much less linoleum; the fact that he disregarded manners (tenderly, with a slow hand) in this fashion means Dana has conquered him, in that she has driven him to a loss of his rampart-like self control. The match is made. They will get married, have a baby, and be irreversibly in love forever.
The story could make more sense if their meeting were to take place on the beach, where Brent works and would be more likely to take Daisy for a run. But women don’t take their purses to the beach, and this is a love story. In romance, wedding-planning, and other realities, love revolves around the woman, so the scene is set around Dana’s effects.
This love story will work out because Brent the Alpha Male character chooses the partner he was supposed to according to the formula. Dana is helpless and pliable enough to indulge his lumberjack masculinity, yet she puts up a good enough show of indignant self-sufficiency to tame his tendency of being over-bearing. He makes her feel like a woman; she makes him feel like a man, and perfect chemistry is just that. If Brent’s name were Tobias, however, things would be different. Because then he would be a research botanist, so involved in trying to locate the germ of that South American weed the cancer hospital needs that he forgets to change his clothes sometimes. This doesn’t make him smell bad, of course; it simply means he has an appealingly disheveled appearance to go with that killer sense of humor. Or maybe his name is Vincent, beloved grade school teacher by day, dusky piano bar musician by night, whose sensitivity is topped only by that crooked smile and those wire-rimmed glasses. In this story, he’ll be Jonathan, journalist-turned-investigative nonfiction author, who is currently finishing that book on Ancient Egypt to fulfill the deathbed wish of his dear archaeologist grandmother. His dedication to the project drives him to pull many a late night; consequently, he forgets to eat, which lends a bookishly attractive hollowness to his carelessly unshaven jaw line (which is never like sandpaper on the soft skin of your neck. No- his five o’clock shadow has the texture of a perfumed French tickler, prompting any woman to a sudden polymorphous perversity.). Jonathan is a Beta Male character, so he knows better than to fall for a woman like Dana- they wouldn’t work out. Dana would think Beta Male’s art frivolous; she would mistake his keen intelligence for wussiness; she wouldn’t get his jokes.
Jonathan is, above all, sensitive, and a little under all, quirky. That is why he has chosen to spend the day writing at the city’s Museum of Natural History. He has been struck with the notion that being surrounded by old things will make him think of his dear Nana, which will infuse him with the proper passion to get that chapter on curse mythology completed. He strikes an authorly pose on a bench in the air conditioning, and settles in with his notebook. Of course he chews on his pen sexily while he works.
He has a tattoo of a Claddagh on his left shoulder blade, the only sign that he was ever in love before. Being a little shy, and too distracted with his writing, he didn’t have many girlfriends through high school or his extensive college career. He did, however, have that long, deeply-felt affair with a fellow student when he was researching his thesis in Ireland; there should be a description of her early in the story, when Jonathan’s character is being craftily intro’d- a tidy little recollection-flashback on his part that shows how dear she was to him, how she rented his heart in two even after he submitted himself to highly symbolic body art as an expression of their love. This is part of why he is so sensitive. Jonathan has since thrown himself into his work, and hardly notices other women, until this early autumn Tuesday, when a feisty curator marches up to him in the mummified oddities room. She is a spirited tomboy who nonetheless manages to dodge every characteristic that would allude to her not being heterosexual; she is, in fact, very erotically alluring to all men, even to the hibernating hormones of Jonathan. He perks up and defends his right to this spot on this bench, a thing she has chosen to fight over for the simple fact that being a tomboy makes her tough, and being a tough woman means being a little bit of bitch. (But erotically so.) Her name is slightly androgynous, the kind of name you would hear punks calling out on a London street corner. Jo. Bailey. For now, she is Sydney.
Sydney’s breasts will be described during the sex scene as small but firm, an assurance that their completely pleasant texture somehow makes up for their (unpleasant) size. A tomboy couldn’t have large breasts- how would she fit under a car to fix it all by herself? The sex will happen after the head of the Museum finds out Jonathan is the grandson of the famous late archeologist Betsy Wilcomb (Jonathan’s last name is Wilcomb, by the way, though it wouldn’t have been if his first name were Tobias- different grandmother.). He will be elated and throw Jonathan and Sydney together on putting up an Egyptian exhibit, which will force them to have many a heated encounter in the workplace until so much tension builds they wake up naked in each other’s arms one morning, having made love amidst some kind of exotic prop- a forest of sarcophagi in the Museum storeroom, for instance. Jonathan is able to remain completely not-emasculated by his encounter with this lady of steel, as he sensitive and therefore, open to such complexities as a woman who wears hiking boots. Meanwhile, bed-headed Sydney finds herself feeling uncharacteristically vulnerable in the hands of this charming scholar. Could it be love? Of course it is, and of course the exhibit will open to rave reviews and then there is nothing left but for the pair to set off into a life of adventure traveling the world together. Sydney will even wear a dress when they have an impromptu wedding at a temple in Tibet. They are the perfect team, partners in the crime of making the rest of the world feel bad about its break-ups and divorces. And all because Jonathan was responsible enough to adhere to the code of the formula, and have himself happen upon his corresponding female.
If Jonathan were not the type of man who sits in museums to write, though, then he would be the type of man who goes to a friend’s house on a summer evening for an impromptu barbeque. And his name would his name would be Chris, though his mother almost named him Ryan or could have named him Sean. At this early June get-together, he sits on a chair on the porch and pets his friend’s hyperactive dog whenever it moors past. Chris has a tired back from hefting boxes at work that day, but it’s a Friday so it doesn’t matter. He loves to read so much that he’s ruined his eyes doing it, so he has to squint to see things far away, kind of like he’s doing now. His friend offers him a glass of wine from a box and he accepts, making a requisite joke about the classiness of the box. He dreams of going to Italy some day to see the vineyards. He was supposed to go with an ex-girlfriend a couple years back, when she finished her degree, but they broke up before it happened so he got a refund on his ticket and bought a computer for his sister’s birthday instead. (She loved it. He missed his girlfriend.) Of course, Chris notices the woman with the red hair when she comes into the backyard, because he doesn’t know her. Unluckily, her name is a little easy to forget the first time a man is introduced to her because it is a lovely name, but its essence stops at lovely, giving no further clues- it’s Karen, or Sara, but Chris is told the redhead is most definitely Julia. He is told this twice, the second time by Julia herself after he has to admit that he has forgotten it already. Julia is not offended; she will tell her friends later that she could tell he was a nice guy because he was “sweet” to the host’s dog every time he moseyed over to Chris with a hopeful tennis ball in his mouth.
They will realize the other is attractive only after a few minutes of talking one-on-one in their friend’s kitchen. The conversation is awkward because it has no right to not be- they just met, and have no inside jokes between them yet, and Chris is trying to not wonder what Julia looks like naked while she is debating how to subtly ask if he is involved elsewhere and if so, how seriously.
It must be stated that the characters in this part of the story are a little younger than in the others, because outside of romance novels anyone who has the eligibility credentials of a Brent or a Dana at close to thirty is already spoken for. This will actually make the story more interesting, as younger people fall in love harder.
They will only see each other again because Chris gets up the nerve to call Julia and express, as casually as possible, that he might be hungry sometime early Saturday evening and that maybe she would like to eat something at the same table with him somewhere perhaps but it’s no big deal. It is such a small deal, in fact, that Julia freshly dyes her hair a new shade of red Thursday night and at the diner, Chris insists on picking up the tab. Their encounters continue and nearly always involve Chris making sure Julia does not starve or thirst to death and Julia making sure her hair is always the most beautiful in the room so Chris will feel good standing next to her. In between nervously silent moments in the car, they find things out about each other. He is the assistant manager at Stater Bros. until he figures out what he wants to do with his life, but she adores him anyway, ferociously; he could be getting paid to hunt whales in the sequel to Moby Dick for the hero he is to her. She is the most beautiful woman he will ever see. This he is sure of.
She knows he writes poems and short stories at night. He knows she is self-conscious about the way her legs look in a skirt. They find these things out and this is the way they fall in love.
The sex doesn’t happen as a result of the tension- it causes it. Julia finally decides they have been holding their breaths long enough and spends the night at what she has begun to think of as her boyfriend’s apartment. Chris no longer daydreams about vineyards in Italy, but rather, Roman and Sicilian hotel rooms where he can listen to Julia sigh the way she does when he bites her neck. Julia starts to read more and more women’s magazines for the sex tips and relationship quizzes, because she wants to not screw things up like she did with the last guy, and the guy before that. Her birthday comes around and Chris thinks of buying another pair of plane tickets, but then remembers what it felt like refunding the last one. He takes Julia to dinner and a concert instead.
When Chris comes an hour later than he said he would two date nights in a row, Julia cannot help thinking back on the magazine article she read about properly asserting your needs to your man, or the one about the seven signs that he’s afraid of commitment, or the one about the five signs that he’s not boyfriend material. She wants, desperately, to ask Chris to tell her she is everything to him and to really mean it, but another article said appearing needy is a turn-off. Chris tries to fight being afraid when Julia sleeps next to him at night, because when he listens to her breathe for too long it makes him dread the time when she’ll leave and take her sounds with her. He begins to feel more at home in the dread than in her promises, and almost hopes that when he shows up late a third and a fourth time, it will hurry things along so he can test his ability to survive the pain.
The romance ends when the couple has a fight over a little something that was said, which is actually about the everything that was not said. Julia sobs and sighs and packs up the things she has left at her boyfriend’s apartment over the span of a few months. Chris finally finds out that he can survive the pain, barely. If Chris had talked to the brunette at his friend’s barbeque, perhaps things would have been different, but she was too busy making eyes at the man who was playing guitar by the cooler of beer. The brunette might have been more his type, maybe the perfect type; yet Chris chose Julia. He has no one to blame but himself.
The story would make more sense if it ended happily, because it is a love story and we’re used to that rule. But in romance, sex, and other realities, the formula gets broken. Things that don’t apply can still get broken.