True Romance to Die For

Jordana Willner

Originally published San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday February 18, 2001

LADIES, do you want to win his eternal love? To burn your image indelibly into his mind? Want to freeze the moment in time when your love affair was at its most passionate and wondrous? Hollywood has the answer for you in two simple words: Die young.

Winona Ryder did it. So did Charlize Theron -- twice. Both savvy members of the next generation, they are following the hallowed footsteps of such screen legends as Meryl Streep, Debra Winger, Barbara Hershey, Susan Sarandon, Ali McGraw, Madonna, and Julia Roberts, all of whom have portrayed tragic, terminally ill female characters who died too young.

That's the way to do it, ladies. When you fall in love, when you are in the throes of that magical honeymoon moment, begin to plan your own demise. Calculate the moment when the your union will climax, when reality, laundry, and morning breath hover somewhere over the horizon, and pull your own plug just prior. Don't risk letting the real world invade and threaten the purity of a new romance. Better to do as they do in the movies and let an untimely death immortalize the moment.

Consider the benefits that Hollywood has been insightful enough to demonstrate. If you die young, you can dedicate your remaining days to teaching your partner about life and showing him everything he'll need after you're gone. You can spend every final gasping breath worrying about him, demonstrating all you've learned in your limited days on earth, regarding him with wisdom beyond your years, demonstrating the power of commitment, but dying before he actually has to act on it.

As an added perk, remember that if you die young, your face can pale and your hair can thin with no worries, because delicate frailty will only become you in your weakened state. A fading complexion at the hands of illness is hardly the aesthetic affront you might inflict upon him if you live long enough to sag and wrinkle naturally. Better to check out in your prime, while your youthful beauty still thrives.

This strategy is gold, ladies. And who should know better than those hedonistic lovers in Hollywood? With a gusto that any red-blooded romantic can admire, our movie stars go at mating with all they've got, yet long-term love affairs are not exactly thriving among our favorite celebrity power couples.

Anyone with radio contact to the broadcast world knows that the marriages of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, Jane Fonda and Ted Turner and Harrison Ford and his wife Melanie have recently dissolved, joining countless other defunct Hollywood unions.

But thanks to their public lives, we've been able to learn from their mistakes and observe the obvious problem with their relationships: No one died when the going was good. When the romances were idyllic, when true love vibrated in the purified air around them, no life-ending event occurred to capture the moment forever. Instead, just over the peak from blissful happiness lurked the work conflicts, differences, distractions and mismatched timing that fell well outside the realm of paradise and instead presented the challenges that don't arise when one lover (usually the woman) is good enough to die first.

Now I know what you're thinking, ladies. Your life has just begun. Wise women keep promising you that life begins at 30, then at 40, and once again at a zesty, gutsy 50. Sure, if you're lucky enough to possess the genetic potential for longevity, the years ahead may hold many wonderful opportunities for you. You might build a career and a family, form relationships and make contributions that sustain and buoy you through good times and bad. But how romantic is that?

Forget "happily ever after." Think "during visiting hours only." Hollywood's been crafting fairy tales longer than most of us have been alive, and they know a little something about staging a love story. If they say that a beautiful death scene is more romantic than filing yet another set of divorce papers in Los Angeles County, if they acknowledge that their own love stories are evaporating instead of flourishing, who are you to disagree?

Unless Hollywood has it wrong. Unless you think you can actually have your romance and live it, too. Feeling lucky? Feeling greedy? Willing to risk the mundanity of everyday life by outliving the golden age of your new love, and seeing if you can't find compromise and passion in the demands of two busy lives merging into one crowded relationship?

In that case, it's clear that you're talking about work. Hard work. A lifetime of grueling, troublesome toil. Well, that and, you know, lasting partnership and love and that other crap. But who would want that? Better to cut your losses and make a grand exit.

It's the way to true romance, ladies. Hollywood said it. And before you cast a cynical eye on this surefire method, consider this final incentive. Dennis Quaid is single again. Now isn't that an opportunity worth dying for?

--Jordana Willner wrote a monthly "Next Generation" column for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999, 2000, and 2001