The Accidental Immigrant: America Observed

By David Bouchier

Transatlantic humorist David Bouchier brings wit, wisdom and a touch of philosophy to the everyday dramas of American suburban life. This book brings together more than a hundred essays, originally broadcast on National Public Radio, or published in his Out of Order column in the Sunday New York Times.

When work and marriage brought David Bouchier to Long Island in 1986 the endless suburbs seemed mysterious and exotic to him. He was inspired to begin writing essays and newspaper columns about his life there - a personal and public diary of the Resident Alien experience. In 1992 a weekly public radio essay was added to the newspaper columns, and thousands of listeners still enjoy David's weekly radio broadcasts.

These are the affectionate and sometimes acerbic observations of an Accidental Immigrant, who still finds life in America endlessly stimulating and wonderfully strange. David Bouchier's thoughts about love, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in the suburbs will make you smile, and make you think. Boring suburban rituals like lawn care mall shopping, wedding rehearsals, and barbecues will never seem the same again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 24, 2004
• ISBN: 9781469743301

David Bouchier

David Bouchier is the award-winning essayist for National Public Radio Station WSHU, and a popular workshop leader at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. He is the author of five books including The Cats and the Water Bottles and The Accidental Immigrant, and has contributed a regular humor column to the Sunday New York Times. David lives in Stony Brook, Long Island with his wife and two cats.

Book preview

All Rights Reserved © 1996, 2004 by David Bouchier

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher.

ASJA Press

an imprint of ¡Universe, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

2021 Pine Lake Road, Suite 100

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

Originally published by Mid Atlantic Productions & WSHU

All the essays in this book were first broadcast on WSHU or published in The New York Times, and are reprinted with permission of WSHU and The New York Times.

Cover drawing: P.C.Vey

Book design: East End Publishing Services

ISBN: 0-595-32312-X (Pbk)

ISBN: 0-595-77230-7 (Cloth)

ISBN 978-1-4697-4330-1 (ebook)

Contents

Preface

PART ONE

The China Syndrome

Equality at Last, I Think

Love’s Letters Lost

Rehearsing for Life

More Humbug

The Ideal Lover

Love on the Radio

Below the Beltway

Pennies from Heaven

The Truth About Lies

Plastic John

Toys for the Boys

The Bridges of Suffolk County

Love in the Twilight Zone

Where the Girls Are

PART TWO

The Toxic Tree

Dirty Money

Fear of Frying

Allergic to Life

My Syndrome is Your Syndrome

Something to be Sad About

Happy Trails

Insomniac Nation

Survival of the Fittest

Fatal Vision

Fiftysomething

No Respect

The World According to AARP

PART THREE

Resident Alien

Freedom Trail

Hard Labor

Eyewitness to History

Drowning in Paper

Conspicuous Consultation

Everything in Order

Dances with Wolves

Free to be Me

Multiple Choices

Power Cut

The Business of America

On Walden Pond

The List of Life

Save Time Now, Don’t Spend it Later

A Question of Honors

Fashion Victim

Evolving Backwards

Heimlich Maneuver Meets Heisenberg Effect

PART FOUR

The Pleasure Principle

Infinite Games

The Race Not to the Swift

Gods for Our Time

You Have Just Almost Won Ten Million Dollars

Indian Givers

The Ideal Murder

Creativity to Go

Spare Time

Art Alfresco

The Right to Arm Bears

Bored in the USA

The All-Plastic. Beeping, Whining Horror Show

Wake me When it’s Over

Uphill Skiing

Personal Growth and the Problem of Shrinkage

Help Yourself

The Secret of Zen Revisited

Last Call for Happy flour

Looking at Prozac

PART FIVE

The Secret Plan of Kevin Blott

The Country Mouse Trap

Unreal Estate

All the News That Fits

The Vanishing Dinner Party

Do Not Try This at Home

More Garbage

The Green Plague

Jean Jacques Rousseau Meets John Deere

Lawn Care Victim

The Birds

Men’s Stuff

Forward to the Past

Men Like Gods

After the Fall

Suburban Deadly Sins

PART SIX

The Scandal of Domestic Slavery

The Closet of Good Intentions

In Safe Hands

Wild Turkey

Cold Comfort

Playing with Fire

Adequate Homes and Gardens

Inferior Decoration

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

In the Heat of the Night

Do it Yourself

Flushed with Pride

PART SEVEN

Passports to Paradise

Time Out in Utopia

On the Beach

In the Wild Wood

The Tourist Test

Timeshare

Prisoner of Culture

Wish You Were Here

The Accidental Library

There Goes the Endless Summer

Out of This World

A Visit to the Country

It’s Not Just a Car

Philosophy in the Slow Lane

Home Alone

The Vogue for Trucks

The Coneheads of Summer

Signs and Portents

The Romance of Air Travel

The Bus to Gotham

Dennis Does New York

The Bottom Line

PART EIGHT

Historical Vertigo

Pubs and Puritanism

Small World

No Sun, No Fun

Down the Tube

The Menace of the Eurosausage

Silly Suffolk

Deep Waters

English Comfort

A Postmodern Christmas

And a Letter From France …

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

PART NINE

You Must Go to the Mall

The Last Book

Remembering Too Well

Feet First

The Best Radio Essay in the Entire History of the Universe

Unfair Competition

Prom Night

New Age Meets Middle Age

Be Prepared

The Wealth of Nations

Eureka!

Normal Science

Do You Believe in Magic?

Halloween II

Beyond a Joke

The Greeks had a Word for It

I Remember it Well

The Radio Art Critic

The Lessons of History

Out of Thin Air

Cyberbabble

The Great Megabooks Mystery

Parkinson’s Law

Going Too Far

Mixed Messages

Dumbing Down

Strip Show

Beam Me Up

Also by David Bouchier

Idealism and Revolution

The Feminist Challenge

Radical Citizenship

The Song of Suburbia

The Cats and the Water Bottles

Preface

How does someone become an Accidental Immigrant to these United States? It’s easy, if you do it by stages. For many years I travelled back and forth to America from my home in eastern England, teaching as an exchange professor at Universities in New York, Connecticut and California. My own university seemed so keen to exchange me that it seemed this transatlantic life might go on forever.

Like so many Englishmen, including King Edward VIII and Winston Churchill’s father, I was captivated by an American woman. After an unsatisfactory period of commuting across the Atlantic, we tossed a coin and I became a Resident Alien in the United States.

With a whole vast continent to choose from, we settled in suburban Long Island, where my wife Diane was teaching at the State University of New York. This turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For a writer, Long Island is the perfect place. These endless suburbs are utterly peaceful, disconnected from both culture and nature. There are no distracting influences here—no dramatic landscapes to engage the imagination, no exciting cultural events to burn up one’s mental energy. Writers and artists come here from all over America, so they can concentrate on their work. The great British humorist P.G. Wodehouse wrote all his best stories about Edwardian England in Remsenburg, a short drive from where we live now.

When we arrived on Long Island in 1986, I felt like an anthropologist who has found his tribe. Everything seemed new and exotic, and I was inspired to begin writing essays and newspaper columns about my life here, a personal and public diary of the Resident Alien experience. In 1992, a weekly radio essay was added to the columns.

All the pieces in this book were originally broadcast on National Public Radio station WSHU, or printed in my Out of Order" column in The New York Times. There’s no narrative, nor even any chronological order. These are the affectionate and sometimes acerbic observations of an Accidental Immigrant, who still finds life in America endlessly stimulating and wonderfully strange.

David Bouchier

Long Island, New York

PART ONE

Love

The China Syndrome

White limousines are on the road again, making wide turns into the catering halls. It’s wedding season and romance is not quite dead. You’d never guess it by observing teenagers at your local high school, or listening to the words of their favourite songs, but nine out of ten Americans (both sexes) still get married at the rate of 2.3 million weddings a year. They do it at a later age than previous generations, they do it with pre-nuptial agreements, pre-nuptial counselling, prenuptial blood tests, FBI checks, credit checks and psychoanalysis—but they do it in the end, much the way it’s always been done.

The wedding is the last great romantic tradition left in an unromantic world. Today’s young brides and bridegrooms never had to learn the elaborate rituals of courtship—the chaste meetings, the hand holding, the first kiss, the passionate letters, and the terrifying first visit to the beloved’s parents. These things make about as much sense to them as the primitive rites of an Amazonian tribe. Teenagers don’t go out, they hang out. They don’t have love affairs, they have relationships. Relationships are well-organized and sensible—like college projects We have to work a bit more on this relationship to get it right. These kids are cool. Their idea of safe sex is to park the car first. Only as the wedding looms on the horizon do they begin to warm up to fever heat. Or rather, she does.

When the wedding machine grinds into action the bridegroom-to-be soon realizes something very strange is happening to his adorable fiancee. Suddenly, she is swept into a world of feminine mysteries he never knew existed. She starts reading bridal magazines. These are larger than most college textbooks. Each one contains hundreds of pages of advertisements, advice and admonitions about organizing the perfect wedding. The latest issue of Bride’s magazine broke all records with a whopping 1,046 pages. After ploughing through a couple of these, the bride-to-be is ready to graduate with an A in consumerism. She begins to talk knowledgeably about crystal and bone china, flatware, sheets, registry consultants, and engraved invitations. She becomes engrossed in things like trivets, lemon forks and chafing dishes, that are not part of her young man’s vocabulary. How do you eat a lemon with a fork, anyway?

This is a danger point in their engagement. You can see it acted out this time of year in the china department of any large store, where engaged couples gather to choose their china, flatware and crystal. They sit side by side at a perfectly-set formal dinner table under a fake chandelier, while the elegant registry consultant goes through her routines.

The young man looks dazed, hostile, like a bullock in a china shop. His jeans and t-shirt seem out of place. He stares at the ranks of plates, cutlery and glasses with wild surmise. Will married life be like this? Will he have to eat like this every day? Which of those five forks do you use for pizza? He’s only just mastered the styrofoam take-out package, and now this. As the patterns flash before his eyes—Mikasa Gold Tierra, Wedgwood Osborne, Royal Doulton Candace—he begins to feel stunned and disoriented, like a bird that flew into a window.

This is the moment of maximum danger, when his commitment to marriage can suffer a catastrophic meltdown. This is the China Syndrome. The girl of his dreams has changed, even before the wedding, into somebody he doesn’t recognize, but who sounds remarkably like her mother. Unless he acts quickly, the marriage may be doomed before the ink is dry on the pre-nuptial agreement.

There are no magazines to help bridegrooms in this crisis, unless you count Sports Illustrated, which is hard to find in a china department. The bridal magazines are worse than useless. They carry a small bridegroom’s section, hidden between hundreds of glossy advertisements for wedding gowns. The bridegroom’s section is printed in black and white on recycled paper. It advises him to get in touch with his feelings, and do whatever the bride and her mother tell him to do.

This is excellent advice in general, but it won’t save him from the China Syndrome when it strikes, without warning and with terrible force, after he has stared at the ninety-second identical china pattern. Direct action is necessary. To save the marriage, or at least the wedding, he must get out of the china department fast, run to the nearest food outlet and eat something disgusting from a paper plate, using his fingers. Beer out of the can is also therapeautic. The symptoms should begin to subside almost at once, and reason can take over. Common sense tells him that, after the wedding, he’ll never see the stuff again. It will be carefully stored in the basement for special occasions which (with luck) will never happen. All that delicate tableware is not for use, but for memory. It symbolizes that, for one magic moment on the wedding day, everything was beautiful, precious, and perfect. And it may even come in handy, if they ever run out of paper plates.

Equality at Last, I Think

Young men today take sexual equality for granted. They think it was always ok for men to express their feelings, change diapers, and go all the way on a first date. Nobody remembers the casualties, the men who went to the wall for equality when the wall was a million miles high.

We male veterans of the sex war are past middle age now, and still suffer twinges of guilt and regret. National Women’s Equality Day, August 26, brings on a sad, reflective mood. It’s a time to look back and repent of our past sins and present failures. Raised in chauvinism, indicted by feminism, and bypassed by the sexual revolution, some of us have spent half our lives coming to terms with the complicated demands of sexual equality.

It began with a paradox. The militant feminist movement appeared first and spoke most forcefully in America in the late sixties. In America of all places, where women’s power and freedom were internationally legendary. Most men of my generation were stunned. It had never occurred to us that women were oppressed. They seemed to do extraordinarily well out of the games we all played. After all, who was setting the rules? The rules of courtship, for example: the chaste dates, the first kiss, the gifts, the first meeting with her parents. These were things young men had to learn the way rats learn their way through laboratory mazes. The game made no sense to us, but we ran the maze out of training and habit.

Having played the game, we collected the prize: marriage and suburban life. About three days later, or so it seemed, along came feminism and the sexual revolution.

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(Which was rather late for me)-

Between the end of the Chatterley ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

wrote the English poet Phillip Larkin. All the rules were changed. Women were declared the equals of men, and no longer to be treated as passive wives and sex objects. The New Woman would be sexually and economically free, just like a man. I wouldn’t mind being a sex object for just one day, muttered a confused male friend of mine, almost weeping into his beer. The great liberation had arrived, and we had missed it.

But there was something intriguing about the prospect of sexual equality at last. Some men decided that the liberation of women and the liberation of men were part of the same problem. We came to see sexual liberation as a total, revolutionary thing, that would abolish male responsibility for women and children, and equalize (finally) the sexual game; so we gritted our teeth, and set out on the road to equality.

The process was full of surprises. Number one was the discovery that sexual equality was a terrible bore. Women had always complained that housework and child care were tedious and exhausting. Now we knew the truth of it. The men who took on an equal share of domestic work discovered that they had bought into a zero-sum proposition. One less boring job for her was one more boring job for him. Large chunks of our free time vanished into domestic tedium, and we got little in exchange but the cold comfort of self-righteousness. Things weren’t much better at work. The flood of highly qualified women into every business and profession simply made life tougher for men, as more people competed for the same number of jobs and promotions. The war between the sexes expanded out of the home and into the office.

And, of course, the family changed. The new, two-career equalitarian family felt different, more businesslike, less homelike than the families we grew up in. Clearly, we had to change our dreams. Exit those nostalgic family stories of grandma the apple pie wizard and grandpa the successful entrepeneur. Welcome to the new post-feminist nostalgia: how grandma became a mid-level IBM executive with the support of grandpa, the busy househusband. It was all a bit deflating.

But the abolition of the traditional family was nothing compared to the abolition of sex. We early male enthusiasts for feminism misunderstood the sexual consequences of equality. Sex was never about equality but about difference, and sexual equality seemed to imply the phasing-out of male/female differences—in the jargon of the times, androgyny. Yet the appearance of women as different and beautiful and sexually exciting turned out to be more fundamental than we had imagined. Women who looked and acted like men baffled the impulse to desire and to love. Superwoman, with her business suit and busy schedule and stuffed briefcase, was too much like the guy at the next desk. And Superwomen soon began to say out loud that the domesticated, emotional male was pretty unattractive too: the term wimp was freely used.

But we didn’t give up. We learned a lot about ourselves as men, most of it bad; and the struggle with the Old Adam continues. Male chauvinists, like recovering alchoholics, are never completely cured. But I’ve been trying to make myself over into an equalitarian male for almost a quarter century. On good days, I can persuade myself that the feminist revolution is over, and that both sexes won.

Yet most of my friends have slipped or crawled back into traditional marriages, and the younger generation looks strangely familiar. Teaching and talking to teenagers, I get a dizzying sense of déjà vu, as though peering down a long funnel into the fifties. Forget about androgyny. There they are, lined up in the college classroom, row after row of Barbies and Kens. The gulf of misunderstanding between these young women and men seems as great as it was thirty years ago, and they still play the games I remember so well. Sometimes, the post-feminist relationships of the nineties look like reruns of old Doris Day movies.

What keeps me awake the night before National Women’s Equality Day is this. Suppose I have finally changed, and everyone else has remained the same?

Love’s Letters Lost

The mail carrier was once a heroic figure, braving sleet and fog and dark of night to keep our ancestors in touch with the world. Now, he’s become a garbage man in reverse, delivering the stuff instead of collecting it. I’m sure postal workers are no happier about this than the rest of us. They must surely hanker after the days when people ran smiling out of their houses to grab the day’s mail, just the way you see it in old black and white movies. Not any more: today’s homeowner is more likely to hide in the basement when the postman (or woman) calls.

About 70 billion pieces of unwanted mail are sent out every year, and the old habit of civilized correspondence has been overwhelmed by sheer quantity. The mail used to bring news from the family, stories from travellers, ideas and opinions from friends, and best of all love letters. Every delivery was precious, and potentially exciting.

Letters are precious because they are so personal. The mere fact of writing a letter implies that you care enough to spend the time, and that you have something more meaningful on your mind than a greeting card message. The final degradation of the personal letter is the already-written note card that contains a printed message like: In this dysfunctional world, it’s nice to know I have someone to feel functional with. Even without the preposition at the end of the sentence, this qualifies as junk mail whether you write your name on it or not.

Real letters are the diary of our lives and relationships. Phone calls and e-mail leave no traces, no history behind them, which explains their attraction for illicit lovers. But your love won’t leave a trace either, unless you write it down. In your old age, when all the other fires have burned low, you will still have your love letters to keep you warm: if you wrote any.

Many of the great love affairs of history and literature are preserved in correspondence. Hundreds of romantic plots depend on love letters lost, letters found, letters mailed in the wrong envelope, or letters like Emma Bovary’s, lying like a time bomb in some forgotten drawer. Will future romance novelists have to depend on malfunctioning fax machines and system errors in computer networks to separate their heroes and heroines, and bring them together again?

Love itself was different when people conducted their affairs by letter. For separated lovers in America’s early days, correspondence was the central fact of their relationship, allowing the couple to learn each other’s minds and characters more deeply than they could by hanging out at the mall. Lovers would correspond if they were apart for only a few hours, and the whole process induced a delicious state of suspense. The mail carrier was love’s messenger, until the railways and the phone made it possible for lovers to be always together, and discover their hidden shallows.

My friends claim that they don’t have time to write letters: they’re too busy reading junk mail and lugging bags of it out to the curb. But that’s not the real reason. Most of us just don’t want our intimate correspondence to appear in such sleazy company. A letter is supposed to be special; but nothing is special when it arrives in the middle of a heap of gaudy catalogues. And, in these days of clever deceptions, there’s always the danger that your real letter will be mistaken for another cunning charity appeal, and thrown away.

So it seems we’re condemned to a lifetime of soulless electronic communication, unless we can overcome the junk mail problem. Here’s my modest proposal to bring back real letters and incidentally to restore the mailman’s status as a bringer of real news. First-class service should be reserved for letters, that is non-bulk mail without computer-generated labels. The daily delivery would thus be small, but all guaranteed as good stuff, or at least worth the effort of opening. All other mail, including those fake-personal letters from politicians (perhaps especially those), should be consolidated at each postal distribution center, and trucked directly to the dump, where it’s going anyway. The enormous amount of time, effort and aggravation saved could be put to wonderful use, writing letters.

Rehearsing for Life

It’s wedding season again, and brides are everywhere. I spotted my first bride, in full white regalia, in the lobby of the local Best Western last Wednesday morning, along with a whole wedding party. A large sign at the back of the lobby annonunced Glen and Cindy’s Wedding Rehearsal.

The men looked uncomfortable in their uniforms, like farmers press-ganged into the British navy during the war of 1812. Some still showed the circular dint of a ghostly baseball cap in their newly-trimmed hair.

Glen and Cindy, arm in arm and glowing with energy like characters in a TV sitcom, were taking the whole thing very seriously. The cliché is: bad rehearsal, good wedding. This rehearsal was going so smoothly that a catastrophic wedding day seemed inevitable.

We love weddings in America, which is why we have so many. Our ancestors thought that one was enough, but two is the average now, and some energetic folks manage three or four. There are two and a half million weddings every year, and the giant wedding industry is gearing up for high season. It’s a big investment for the family, and rehearsals help to guarantee that every player knows his or her part, and doesn’t laugh in the wrong places. It gets easier after the first time.

We don’t rehearse nearly enough. Life is mostly a ragged performance with missed cues and half-remembered lines. And when we do rehearse, we practice only the easy bits: the wedding for example, and not the honeymoon. Any expert on marriage will tell you that more things can go wrong on a honeymoon than could ever go wrong at a dozen weddings. Glen and Cindy would be well advised to rehearse being stranded for hours or days in remote airports, being felled by seafood gumbo in alien restaurants, losing luggage, and spending nights in a hot hotel room with no air conditioning or television.

They should certainly rehearse having children, one of the least well-planned of all human activities. A full scale rehearsal would involve borrowing a baby and learning to do without sleep for a year or two; borrowing an eight year old and learning to yell at a brick wall; and borrowing a teenager so as to get accustomed to diabolical music shaking the foundations of the house twenty four hours a day. Then they would be perfectly prepared for the experience itself, assuming they decided to go ahead.

It may seem cynical to suggest that Glen and Cindy should rehearse divorce. But they have a fifty-fifty chance, which is much better than the odds of winning the state lottery. Divorce is always a shock if you haven’t trained for it. A few more yelling exercises, several volumes of mutual accusations, and a hundred simulated hours in a lawyer’s office, should make the whole process comfortingly familiar.

Everything predictable can and should be rehearsed. I wish now that I had put some time into rehearsing middle age, experimenting with bifocals, arthritis, memory loss, and unwelcome senior citizens discounts in hardware stores. Perhaps I could tolerate the whole process more gracefully.

Optimists could have fun rehearsing for their future success. What a shock it must be to become rich and famous overnight, with no preparation. Rehearsing for success would involve some tough assignments, like trying to make intelligent conversation with other members of the Country Club, opening tons of mail appealing for money, and no longer knowing who your real friends are.

Pessimists should rehearse for failure, by lowering their self-esteem, putting on the traditional sackcloth and ashes, and residing in the traditional cardboard box for a while. Really dedicated pessimists might enjoy training for a whole range of predicable disasters, like the stock market collapse, the next hurricane, the first east coast earthquake, terminal gridlock, and a Newt Gingrich Presidency.

Rehearsal takes the fear out of the unknown. In 1950s, kids used to rehearse for nuclear war. Duck and cover became a sort of game. Today, you can see young people energetically rehearsing for the end of their own lives, lying totally immobile and watching TV all day. When they finally get to the nursing home, they will be perfectly prepared. When they die, they will scarcely notice the difference.

All life, like all art, is experimental. There is no post-experimental stage when we have it exactly right. So in life, as in the theater, rehearsal is always more fun than the actual performance. Glen and Cindy are on the right track . One day they will sit down with their grandchildren and share the memories: their wedding rehearsal, their first baby rehearsal, their vacation rehearsals, their daughter’s wedding rehearsal, and so on to their retirement rehearsal, and their funeral rehearsal. After all, you only live twice.

More Humbug

If love came in the form of a tablet, or a fragrant smoke to inhale, or a white powder to sniff up your nose, love would certainly be a criminal offense. Love is addictive. It warps the mind and makes us incapable of rational thought or operating machinery. Love is also the source of huge illicit profits for the pushers. But love is not controlled by the DEA. Anyone can produce it, anyone can use it, and anyone can sell it.

And how they sell it! Valentine’s Day is rolling down on us like a huge scarlet and plush monster, threatening to engulf us all in its sticky sentimental embrace. And it’s not just Valentine’s day. We live year round in an atmosphere saturated with synthetic, commercialized love. Love oozes through the car radio from a hundred FM stations; it seeps down on us from speakers in elevators and supermarkets; it trickles and pours into our living rooms through the television screen. Newspapers and magazines are full of love triangles, love quadrangles, and all the disasters and miseries and betrayals that go under the general name of love in our mawkish culture.

Scarcely a month passes without another bestselling book on love-madness. Women who love too much, women who love men who hate them, women swept away by love, women addicted to love, women, in general, afflicted, obsessed, prostrated, and ruined by love. Men are immune, it seems: I’ve yet to see a book about men who love too much.

We have inherited from our ancestors a monumental amount of nonsense about love. Here are three crazy ideas we have adopted wholesale from the darkest recesses of history.

From the ancient Greeks, we got the notion that love is a sickness of the brain, a madness sent by the Gods (hence all those little Cupids with their poison arrows). From the courtly romances of medieval times, we learned that love is for men a passion for remote feminine perfection, and for women an infatuation with knightly courage (this fantasy appears in bubble bath ads. and expensive clothing promotions.) From the nineteenth century romantics, we got the message that love is a state of sickly spirituality (which is why we have all that elevator music, all that soft-focus photograpy and all those ghastly poems in Valentine cards).

The twentieth century has added two more ingredients to this seething brew of lunacy. That love and sex should go together; and that love and marriage should go together. If you add up all the logical contradictions in this list, you’ll be ready to take a vow of celibacy before the fourteenth.

Small wonder that we have a love-crisis, mirrored in all those advice books. The social scientists have only made it worse by confirming that there are two distinct, equally incorrect answers to the eternal question What is love?—his answer and her answer.

For him, love is the mastery and possession of attractive women, the more the better (love equals lust). The sting in the tail of his enterprise is that total success with one woman (marriage) leads to his exclusion from the competition. Then a man must sublimate his love into family responsibilities (love equals guilt), which is a lot less fun. Men built the world around their lust and guilt, and may yet build the universe around them if Captain Kirk’s warp drive is ever invented.

For her, love is closer to the traditional stuff of romance—the successful and permanent involvement with one man, who will provide lifelong emotional support and security, and with any luck financial security as well. Sex, beauty and romance are her weapons in this hunt, and women’s magazines are the training manuals. Between the Harlequin romance and the James Bond romance there is a great, unnavigable swamp.

He learns just enough of her language, and she learns just enough of his to keep the game going. He brings flowers and whispers breathless phrases of adoration borrowed from TV shows he has seen. She flatters his male virility and practices the arts of seduction, borrowed from TV shows she has seen. The outcome of the love game is the same for both sexes. She ceases to play because she no longer needs to; he ceases to play because he has been warned off the field.

In the matter of love, women and men communicate like two people each trying to speak an unfamilar foreign language. Smoke gets in your eyes, indeed. Sometimes it feels more like tear gas.

We scarcely need to be reminded of the divorce statistics to know what a mess this has gotten us into. A friend remarked, ‘There’s an undeclared war going on out there, and she was right. Like most wars, this one is based on a misunderstanding over words : what do we mean by freedom, destiny, sphere of influence, ethnic purity," "lebensraum," love? Linguistic conflicts could be the death of us.

Browsing among the shelves of Valentine cards this week, I was struck by the thought that love, like peace, might be an idea whose time has not yet come. We’re not ready for it, not mature enough or generous enough, or smart enough or maybe even loving enough for love, though we can sense that somehow, sometime, we might be.

The British writer Jill Tweedie once said that love is like a reverse star, whose light reaches us before the star is born. So it may take a while to get here; but it should be worth waiting for.

The Ideal Lover

Here’s the nasty secret Mr. Hallmark wants to keep from you: Valentine’s Day is really all about sex.

Valentine’s day is a very ancient festival for young lovers, dating back at least to the Roman feast of Lupercalia two thousand years ago. Traditionally, it was the date by which birds chose their mates for the coming breeding season, and our ancestors chose February 14 as a celebration of the human mating instinct.

What you see in your local card shop is the victory of commerce over biology—all those red plush hearts, and flowers, and chocolate boxes, and syrupy sweet Valentine songs have nothing at all to do with the real purpose of Valentine’s Day. Looking at the racks of Valentine cards in my local pharmacy, you would think that February 14 was dedicated to family values. The first four feet of the card rack is filled with Valentines for husbands and wives. But it’s too late for Valentines, when you’re married. Getting a Valentine from your spouse is like reading the safety instructions in an aircraft after the wings have fallen off.

It gets worse, and more perverse, as you move down the rack. There are cards for mothers and fathers (very Freudian), grandmothers, aunts, cousins, dogs, goldfish and the UPS delivery man. Only at the farthest end, just before the pharmacy counter, do we find cards for lovers. This is bad planning. It’s hard to work up a romantic mood surrounded by geriatric seniors waiting to pick up their pills.

A Valentine is supposed to be a secret message to the object of a secret passion, a shot in the dark. That’s the romance of it. Not too secret of course, no need to post it in Paraguay, or the object of your desire may never figure out who sent it. I know at least one couple who got married by mistake, each thinking they had received a Valentine from the other.

There’s no fun in getting Valentines that are signed. A mystery lover with a name is no mystery at all, and everyone needs at least one anonymous Valentine. It adds spice to life, and even a hint of danger if your spouse discovers it.

Properly used, Valentines have a part to play in the mating game. And who can say that it’s easy these days, with such high expectations and such low standards? Women complain that all the good men are taken, and that the only available men are wimps and losers. But the truth is that the good men only look good from a distance. In reality they’re just more wimps and losers who happen to be married. On their side men complain that, in the age of equality, all dates are blind, and that they never know from one minute to the next which particular version of Madonna is sitting on the other side of the restaurant table.

This is where the Valentine tradition could be helpful, if we use it right. The whole point of Valentines was to take the agony out of choice. In the Roman feast of Lupercalia, unmarried men and women drew lots for their next partner, thus saving a fortune on classified ads, flowers, Valentine cards, chocolates, candlelight dinners and all the other paraphenalia of do-it-yourself romance. Marriages in wealthy families used to be arranged by the parents, and in some countries they still are. Statistically, arranged marriages have a much better chance of success, because they are based on money and property rather than romance. As Tom Wolfe once said, when it comes to relationships between the sexes, real estate is at the bottom of everything.

Public marriage markets still flourish in some parts of the world. A recent television documentary showed such a market in Morocco, and some of the hopeful brides and grooms were interviewed on camera. One man said, I want a woman with strong legs to carry wood from the mountains. A young woman said, I want a man with money, and lots of goats. Now that’s what I call truth in advertising. No danger there of any romantic illusions, no smoke to get in your eyes, no heart-shaped chocolate boxes to confuse the issue.

The public marriage market seems like an idea whose time has come again. Roosevelt Field would be a good place. Let’s just get all the singles out there, once or twice a week, with little placards stating what they want, and what they are willing to settle for.

But it might not work for women, especially women who hope to do love and marriage the old fashioned way. There’s a real scarcity of unmarried men, and they are having far too good a time staying unmarried. The men are hopeless. Spread out thinly across Roosevelt Field they would be even more obviously hopeless.

Many Valentines come with a cuddly bear. My advice to single women is to keep the bear and dump the Valentine. Teddy Bears, unlike men, come with labels, so you can see exactly what you’re getting. All new materials; made in USA; fun for all ages; non toxic; hard-wearing. How many men can claim as much? Your Teddy Bear will always be ready for a cuddle, he will listen to everything you have to say, never comment on your weight, and never ever compare you to any of his previous owners.

And a Teddy Bear is forever. Once you take his label off, he’s yours for life.

Love on the Radio

Music has been around forever, since long before writing, and perhaps even before articulate speech. If you listen to some of the latest songs, you might think that articulate speech hasn’t been invented yet.

Plato said that music is the most primitive, passionate expression of the soul, and that’s why most music is about love. It always has been. When the phonograph was invented back in the 1880s, it was an instant popular success because you could buy records of romantic songs like Silver Threads Among the Gold or Shine on Harvest Moon, or Ida Sweet as Apple Cider, and play them over and over again.

Then suddenly, in the 1920s, you could pluck music out of the ether with that magical invention, the radio. The air was filled with invisible music, crackly and full of static, but recognizably music. My grandmother refused to have radio in the house, because she didn’t want those radio waves coming through her walls. If she had taken the risk, she would certainly have disapproved, because it was nothing but love songs. I’m Just Wild About Harry, Where’d You Get Those Eyes, "If you were the Only Girl