It's one of the most popular and powerful stories of our time.
That in a universe of immeasurable size.
In a galaxy filled with 300 billion stars.
On one of millions of planets that can sustain life, filled with 7 billion
human beings, living in 2,800 cities in 196 countries; that among all
this, we will all one day meet...
our soulmate.
And if you don't believe this, then you are the minority.
I saw one survey that said 84% of young Americans believe The
One is out there, somewhere.
Look at Google's archive of books, and you can see the word has exploded in
popularity in the last hundred years.
But go back before 1900, and the word's hardly used at all.
And you know why?
Because it didn't exist!
This guy, Samuel Taylor College, invented it in 1822.
So the word isn't even 200 years old, but 84% of us are so certain the
concept is real, But love — it turns out — is a little bit more complicated.
So here's a tender scene from one of the oldest love stories ever told.
On the right is Achilles, the mythical warrior, and the tragic love story between
him and Patroclus is central to the plot of Homer's epic poem, The Illyad.
But there's this great twist — something that didn't get repeated for a
long time — because Patroclus, you might have noticed, is a dude.
People still argue about whether there was anything sexual between these
guys, but really it doesn't matter.
The bromance was real.
And in ancient Greece, a country pretty much always at war, the bonds between
brothers in arms was what really mattered.
People still fell in love, of course, but romance as we know it, it's hard
to imagine, but it just didn't exist at all and it certainly wasn't celebrated.
That is until a new love story came along.
So there's this guy called William of Aquitaine.
He was a Duke in the south of France in the Middle Ages, and
when he wasn't jousting, he fancied himself as a troubador, a sort
of medieval singer songwriter.
And his songs sound nice enough, but they were mostly about tricking
women into having sex with him or comparing them to horses.
Charming.
Then — probably stealing ideas from some Arabic poetry — which was popular at the
time, he switched the roles and made the woman the powerful character: so desirable
any man would dedicate his life to her.
For the first time, in the west anyway, the idea of romantic love between a man
and a woman became an ideal, a fantasy — from Rapunzel to Romeo and Juliet.
Love stories celebrated men pursuing unattainable women.
So yes, our entire idea of romance, was invented by a sexist douchebag.
But now the love stories we told looked completely different, and
the bromance the Greeks believed in, well, that was actually made
illegal for a very long time.
Society now celebrated love and romance with anyone really— as long
as they weren't your husband or wife.
Yes, as strange as it sounds, for most of history, marriages have been more
like a business arrangement and you didn't want feelings to get in the way.
These are wedding portraits amazingly, and they're not exactly full of passion.
But then a Dutch artist called Franz Hals painted this, and it tells us
everything about how marriage changed.
Couples married for love.
They held hands and kissed in public — things that had never
been seen in Europe before.
Right!
But then it changed again!
Because nearly 700 years later, Europe was obsessed with a novel
about a young artist who falls in love with his friend Charlotte.
The only problem— and I'm sure you've heard this one before— is that Charlotte
is already engaged to someone else.
The young artist's solution to the problem has a big impact, literally.
The Sorrows of Young Werther published by Wolfgang Von Goerthe in 1744 was
like 50 Shades of Gray without the handcuffs: it was insanely popular.
Men started dressing like the main character, and some even shot themselves
in what's considered to be the first case of copycat suicides in history.
This all helped launch the romantic movement, the most
passionate, but also the darkest version of love we'd ever seen.
We assume the romantic movement was, well, romantic, but the
reality was very different.
Gave us some of our best art though, Keats, Beethoven, Blake, and a young
poet called Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who in 1822 wrote in a letter to
a friend: "to be happy in married life, one must have a soulmate."
It's funny, we think the concept of love is something eternal and universal.
But actually it changes all the time, and each time it seems to
come from the stories we're telling.
And isn't that more true now than ever?
"Hollywood!
Glorified, glittering, fascinating, fabulous mythical Kingdom!
Hollywood, the glamor capital of the world!"
Unlike epic poems or novels, movies and TV shows work best with simple stories.
And while the idea of romance has been around for a long time now,
it's been transformed into the most simple and idealistic version of all.
And so now we expect our lover, our best friend, our lifelong companion, and the
best sex we ever had — in one person.
And the thing is, it's not just movies.
"Hamms!.
Mmmm".
For a hundred years, companies have used this story to sell us stuff.
And in our age of consumerism, we've somehow turned love itself into
a shopping trip: always keeping our eyes open for an upgrade.
But with such simple and idealistic expectations, are we putting too much
pressure on other people and on ourselves?
So I guess our version of love is not the first.
And you know what?
It's probably not the last.
In a hundred years we might be telling a completely different love story.
All we're waiting for is someone to write it.