Shortly before COVID lockdown hit us the first time around, a friend of mine, let’s call him Emmery, had been seeing a girl who had a hard time making up her mind before finally deciding that Emmery wouldn’t be the one to loosen her bed springs. Fast forward two months and she’s suddenly hitting him up again, so he calls me with the very valid question: Had this woman actually had a change of heart, or was she just corona-horny?
This made me think about the power of boredom and the bad decisions it can cause people to make.
In Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary from 1856, Emma Bovary is so aggressively bored in her marriage that she spends all husband’s hard-earned francs on frivolities and throwing herself at more or less the only eligible men who cross her path. Unable to grab life by the balls due to constraining social conventions, she imitates what she believes is the ideal by pursuing luxury, romance and grand drama. Oh, the perils of growing up in a convent and reading too many novels. Relatable, right?
Fortunately, for women in this day and age, marriage doesn't have to result in inevitable ennui – even trophy wives have charities to run and puppies to save, and today’s singles aren’t forced to wait for the next ball to flex their flirting skills or sit around with their embroidery hoping some gentleman will eventually drop by. At least this was the case before COVID.
Now suddenly, men and women alike could relate to Emma Bovary’s state: “... deep down she was waiting for something to happen.” Anything.
How we took the options for granted before! Catching someone’s eye at a smoky bar, hoping a co-worker will get drunk enough to finally notice you, landing a Tinder date after copy/pasting the same whimsical yet sophisticated intro to every match. Of course all the singles would still complain how IMPOSSIBLE it is to meet someone, but I think the pandemic added some perspective there: slim pickings or not, the possibilities were many, and you were certainly not forced to passively wait for something to happen.
So how did the singles handle the closed bars and social distancing? Did they welcome the break from the chase for a compatible partner, read some good books, look inwards and finally experience that deep feeling of self-love and acceptance?
Haha. No. They installed Zoom, lowered their standards and went through their little black books.
If Emma Bovary has anything to teach us in our current predicament, it’s probably that decisions made on a foundation of boredom don’t turn out well. She ultimately kills herself by swallowing arsenic when she can’t pay back the debts from her excessive shopping, and she’d rather die than accept a life of poverty.
It did not turn out quite so dramatic for our friend Emmery, he basically just got dumped again, because of COURSE the girl was just corona-horny.
And this is not the only case I've heard from lockdown of ex lovers suddenly dropping by your IG to like that post you made about eating all your meals from the same plate, or maybe just using that enigmatic "poke" feature on Facebook (seriously, what is that?) If any of these COVID affairs turn out to last past the pandemic, I'll make a new post about love springing from desperation that by some miracle turns out to be the romance of a century. I have a feeling it won't be a very long post.
Nothing screams "role model" like a vacant expression and bloody wedding dress.
I could probably find plenty of operas with characters who make bad decisions out of boredom, mostly lusty men who get quickly get bored with women, but for this post, I’ll make a little tie-in and recommend Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, the 1835 opera based on Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Bride of Lammermoor from 1819, as this melodrama is one of the tales Emma has read and possibly taken an unhealthy interest in. What, you don’t think women should aspire to going mad and dying for love? How very progressive of you.
Maybe you’ll change your mind after seeing and hearing the famous “mad scene” performed by wonderful Natalie Dessay. I obviously use the term “famous” loosely; it was all the rage in the 19th century when entertainment was more limited and you didn’t need to have a blue perm and a walking frame to enjoy opera.
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