Romance is more than a dozen roses and a box of chocolates. It’s not a sappy card on Valentine’s Day and a limo ride to a restaurant. And it’s certainly not just a quick round of the game of 20 toes.
Robert Brancatelli’s job is to get that message across. He’s a religious-studies professor at Santa Clara University in California, where he teaches the school’s most popular course, Theology of Marriage.
“As part of teaching theology I have to debunk a couple of misconceptions [students] have about what it is to be in relationships, what is love, what is happiness, what is the purpose of life, the meaning of life, what is [being] married about,” Brancatelli said.
In the course, students examine pop culture’s view of romance, then interview married couples to get what is perhaps a more realistic view.
“I have to deconstruct a lot of the cultural mystique of love and romance and personhood, and what is important and what is not important,” said Brancatelli, who has been teaching the course for seven years.
The course was started about 25 years ago by a Jesuit priest–he later left the priesthood and got married–and through the years has become the course at Santa Clara.
“It was one of those courses that everybody talked about,” said Chicagoan Brighid O’Shaughnessy, a personal life coach and teaching artist who took the course shortly before she graduated in 1995. “It was the one class that people felt the content was really relevant to our experience, so it wasn’t just a lot of book learning.”
O’Shaughnessy, who said the course included readings, writing papers and book discussions, said she recently went back and looked at a number of papers she had written in the class. They focused on things from a person’s connection to spirituality to what it means to have a healthy relationship, and the customs and rituals and practices people engage in to bring that relationship to a deeper level.
The right course at the right time
“I especially enjoyed the class because at the time my parents were going through a divorce,” she said, “and it was the one class where the papers and the readings we were doing allowed me to think about it and speak to it and to get feedback from an adult in my life, which was very special to me.”
For 2000 Santa Clara graduate Carrie Syvertsen, the course didn’t alter her idea of marriage as much as reinforce it.
“Looking back on my views of marriage before the course, I would say I had a realistic view just because how my parents raised me,” said Syvertsen, a middle school social worker from Chicago. “The reality of it was, it was work and you had to work at it. So the course didn’t change my views, it just empowered my views. You had to have the commitment, and you had to work at it. It’s like a job.”
She and her husband, Andrew, are working on their first year of marriage. They were married last July, with Fred Parrella–her instructor in the Theology of Marriage course and a Universal Life minister–presiding.
“We wanted someone who knew us [Andrew is also a Santa Clara graduate] and someone we knew and respected,” Carrie said.
O’Shaughnessy and Syvertsen had an advantage in that they saw what marriage is–warts and all–at home. Others are clueless.
“I actually had somebody say this, that all that she learned about love and relationships is from `Sex and the City,'” Brancatelli said.
“What I’ve found out is that in order for me to really teach about theology and marriage in the way we traditionally have been doing it, I was confronted with this immense, monolithic cultural thing about romance. And so they come in thinking that love is about finding your `soul mate’ or `the one,’ and . . . they think that the work of marriage usually is just trying to maintain a level of romanticism.”
Students in the course are immersed in popular culture. Brancatelli shows videos. There’s a collage of clips of different contemporary movies that show how love and romance are portrayed. Students also read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being.”
“We bring all this stuff in, and they look at it in a critical way,” he said. “It’s not all bad. It’s not all as if it’s going to hell. But it does presume certain things about love and happiness, and a lot of it is having this idea of having to meet someone and finding the one and being happy.”
Field trips to the real world
Students learn that you don’t always get your needs met and that love is a little different from what you see in the movies.
Maybe nowhere are those things more apparent than in the field trips, where groups of four or five students will interview couples who have been married 10 years or more.
What they hear sometimes shocks them, he said, but those stories are lessons in the reality of marriage.
“They find out there’s been an affair or there’s another child somewhere. . . . It makes a very strong impression on them, that this is very serious stuff.”
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And now, back to the fantasy
You’ve spent–what?–two hours with her and now you’re in love?
OK, OK, maybe it was a whole, long weekend curled up with him and you’re head over heels in love?
Don’t worry, Q understands. Fictitious characters–whether they’re on television, in movies, on stage or in books–are great for romance. No fuss. No muss. And breaking up is so easy to do.
So which fictional characters would you like to romance? We’ve come up with a few favorites.
MEN WORTH ROMANCIN’
Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” He’s kind, righteous and can handle a weapon. Add the Gregory Peck factor and, well . . .
Mark Darcy in “Bridget Jones’s Diary.” He’s sooo understanding, and Colin Firth captured him cute on screen. (Yes, we know: Jane Austen had first crack at Darcy in “Pride & Prejudice,” who was played by–drum roll–Firth for the BBC.)
Kevin Hill in TV’s “Kevin Hill.” A baby tames a player. How cute is that? Even better: Taye Diggs plays him.
Han Solo in “Star Wars.” A bad boy who comes through for you in the end. And the, uh, force is with him–in this case, Harrison Ford.
Jed Bartlet (Martin Sheen) in TV’s “The West Wing.” Brilliant, funny and powerful, and his presidential status surrounds him with Secret Service bodies. Hey, who doesn’t love a challenge?
Bobby Simone in TV’s “NYPD Blue.” A tough but soulful Big Apple detective. Add Jimmy Smits and those designer suits and he smoldered.
Macauley “Mike” Connor (Jimmy Stewart) in “The Philadelphia Story.” So Mike’s a little cranky and has commitment issues–what guy hasn’t? But his blend of romanticism, pragmatism and gentlemanliness prompted one gal to gush, “I think men are wonderful.”
Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) in “Sleepless in Seattle.” He may not be the most easygoing guy, but he’s a sensitive dad who lives on a cool houseboat. And who can resist that cute curly hair?
WOMEN WORTH ROMANCIN’
Sydney Bristow in TV’s “Alias.” A nice balance of babe and brains. Oh, yes, and Jennifer Garner plays her.
Maya in “Sideways.” So do you love her (Virginia Madsen) because of her soul-baring ode to wine, her voluptuousness or her patience with messed-up Miles?
Dr. Neela Rasgotra (Parminder Nagra) in TV’s “ER.” She’s waaay clever and knows how to flirt in the face of blood and guts.
Princess Leia Organa in the “Star Wars” trilogy. Once Carrie Fisher lost that cinnamon-bun hairstyle, Leia became a sexy action hero for the last two films.
Betty Rubble in “The Flintstones.” What more can you say about an animated, barefoot, two-dimensional woman who never wavered from her love for her little man. Why, even some Web sites dub her “hot.”
Alex Munday (Lucy Liu) in “Charlie’s Angels.” Quiet and sexy, Alex can clip our wings anytime.
Becky Sharp in “Vanity Fair” by William Makepeace Thackeray. She’s a saucy, headstrong minx–a real challenge. (For book-o-phobics, that’s Reese Witherspoon in the most recent film version.)
Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez) in “Out of Sight.” She’s a tough, focused U.S. marshal on the trail of bank robbers. OK, so she does fall for one of the robbers–you would, too, if he looked like George Clooney.
