As we walk in, we notice that the bar isn’t as occupied as usual. There are two distinct groups of people here tonight: older people in business attire that seem to just have gotten off work and come to unwind, and the others are college students that are looking for a good time. Looking around at the few couples in the room, no real passion can be sensed. One couple, male and female Latino, are sitting at the bar conversing. The male’s body language shows that he is very interested in this woman. His whole body is facing the female and as they talk he is looking her in the eye. The female’s body language, on the other hand, is opposite from his. She is sitting there, inattentive to what he is saying. As he talks, she is not looking at him; instead she is looking around the room or watching TV. Another couple, male African-American and White female, is sitting in the middle of the room at a table by themselves. They are also conversing but both of them are very attentive to what the other person is saying. They rarely take their attention away from each other. In the back of the room sits another couple, White male and female. Even though they are there with a group of friends, it doesn’t stop them from being all over each other the whole night. The last couple I saw was two people probably in their twenties. As they approach the bar, the girl is approached by a male that is not her boyfriend. The guy that approached her is obviously drunk and trying to spit game on her. Her boyfriend notices this and tries telling the other guy to back off but he just kept persisting. The boyfriend, obviously bothered, starts to get firm with the guy and he starts backing off. When they go back to their table they start making out and every time they stop, the guy wipes his mouth. As the night progressed, the guy in couple one eventually gave up on talking to the woman he was with and they both are just sitting there watching the crowd. His body language drastically changed. Now he was also facing the bar either watching TV or gazing into the crowd. The second couple continued to engage in deep conversation, but as their night ended, they paid more attention to the crowd than each other. Nothing changed with the third couple. The whole time we were there, they were all over each other sucking face. The last couple ended up leaving shortly after because the girlfriend started looking like she was going to get sick or pass out from drinking too much.
On the first day of class we were asked to define love in our own perspective. There are many degrees of love, but the love I will be referring to is romance. I deeply believe that love is a facade. It is something we spend a lot of time thinking about. Love is this thing that we can never grasp. We are all chasing the ghost of a good thing. When people think they have fallen in love with someone, they actually haven’t fallen in love with a person; they’ve fallen in love with the idea of what that person could be and what the future holds for them.
Finding love at a bar is almost always unheard of. People usually go to a bar not to look for romance, but to indulge in something that the naïve know as love, but to everyone else it is lust. In “Romantic Comedy Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre”, McDonald states:
Maybe… Or Maybe the whole love thing is just a grown up version of Santa Claus, just a myth we’ve been fed since childhood so we keep buying magazines and joining clubs and doing therapy and watching movies with hip-hop songs played over love montages, all in this pathetic attempt to explain why our Love Santa keeps getting caught in the chimney.
Saussure states, “Our definition of the linguistic sign is a combination of a concept and a sound-image.” Love is just a word that the media has connected some arbitrary meaning to. Since all we know about love is what the media shows us, no one actually knows what real love is. The media portrays love to be the greatest thing in the world. People search their whole lives for the perfect love, and most of them fail at finding it. This is due to all the high hopes the media generates. When reality sets in, those hopes and dreams of finding true love are crushed in a heartbeat. A great example of this comes from a scene from “500 Days of Summer”, in which Tom gives a speech about how the media can construe people’s views of love. He blames the misinterpretations of romantic comedies and love songs for giving him this fake sense of this thing we call love.
