What Daniel Sloss’ Net­flix spe­cial teach­es us about love, actually

In his Twit­ter bio, stand-up come­di­an Daniel Sloss is keep­ing a tal­ly. At the time of writ­ing, it reads as fol­lows: 10000+ break ups, 40 can­celled engage­ments and 54 divorces. He’s ref­er­enc­ing, with an appro­pri­ate amount of pride, the unhap­py rela­tion­ships his Net­flix spe­cial has put paid to, trig­gered by a salient part of his rou­tine where he derides the pres­sure soci­ety puts on peo­ple to be in rela­tion­ships, and the arro­gance that entails.

“It’s not a break up show,” he explained on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, ​“it’s a love let­ter to sin­gle peo­ple.” He’s also clear he’s not deny­ing true love exists: ​“Some peo­ple are absolute­ly tru­ly in love. I can’t break those rela­tion­ships up and I would nev­er want to. All I’m doing is ask­ing you the uncom­fort­able ques­tions you don’t want to ask your­self and I’d bet my mon­ey on it that it won’t last.”

In his show, Sloss sug­gests that his gen­er­a­tion have been raised on gross­ly unre­al­is­tic ideas of romance, with rela­tion­ships seen as the key to solv­ing our prob­lems. He uses the jig­saw metaphor to explain how find­ing a part­ner to ​‘com­plete’ you is viewed as tan­gi­ble, that you aren’t whole unless you’ve cou­pled up. He cites the movies we’re reared on as par­tial cul­prits for this imprac­ti­cal ide­al: ​“Every Dis­ney princess has a prince, every prince has a princess, every tele­vi­sion show or movie always has a char­ac­ter in it that doesn’t want to be in a rela­tion­ship… but then by the end of the series, guess what, they were wrong! …My gen­er­a­tion has roman­ti­cised the idea of romance, and it is can­cer­ous. Peo­ple are more in love with the idea of love than the per­son they are with.”

Real­is­ti­cal­ly, he’s not wrong, but this hap­py-ever-after notion is increas­ing­ly being exposed as a fic­tion. Recent sta­tis­tics sug­gest that 42 per cent of mar­riages in Eng­land and Wales end in divorce. Even though mil­len­ni­als are the gen­er­a­tion of the Dis­ney renais­sance and the ​’90s rom-com, they’re also the last gen­er­a­tion to expect that some­day their prince will come, or that if he does, it’ll be any­thing like the movies sug­gest. The films they’re choos­ing to watch are start­ing to reflect this.

Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Sum­mer, star­ring Joseph Gor­don-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel as Tom and Sum­mer respec­tive­ly, seems to have been a cat­a­lyst. The film’s non­lin­ear nar­ra­tive means that we see the cou­ple break up towards the start, and Tom spends much of the film try­ing to deci­pher where things went wrong. The film know­ing­ly derides the con­cept of soul­mates from the begin­ning, say­ing that Tom’s belief in them ​“stemmed from ear­ly expo­sure to sad British pop music.”

The char­ac­ters debate the nature of true love at length, and although the cou­ple don’t end up togeth­er, the film is so skil­ful­ly craft­ed that it retains a hap­py end­ing. When Tom and Sum­mer even­tu­al­ly part ways just before the end cred­its, you’re not embit­tered towards either of them, and the con­clu­sion makes per­fect sense. At the time, this felt revolutionary.

To what extent( 500) Days of Sum­mer real­ly changed things is debat­able, but it seemed to pave the way for a more prag­mat­ic style of rom-com, where love isn’t per­fect and char­ac­ters have flaws. Films like David O Russell’s Sil­ver Lin­ings Play­book fol­lowed, in which both leads suf­fer from men­tal health issues. And in Richard Linklater’s Before Mid­night, the lead cou­ple who’ve been togeth­er for nine years spend the bulk of the film argu­ing before real­is­ing that what they have is true love, in all its sham­bol­ic real­ness. TV fol­lowed suit, with Netflix’s Love, Mas­ter of None, You’re the Worst and Ama­zon recent’s For­ev­er depict­ing the prob­lems of exten­sive com­mit­ment to one person.

We’ve had films that cel­e­brate being sin­gle (How to Be Sin­gle, Train­wreck), films that see a cou­ple fall in love in unusu­al cir­cum­stances (Obvi­ous Child, The Big Sick) and art­house films address­ing the issue of the hap­pi­ly-ever-after myth (The Lob­ster). What’s more, these films are increas­ing­ly diverse – recent­ly we’ve had Love, Simon, a gay roman­tic com­e­dy not explic­it­ly aimed at an LGBT audi­ence, and Crazy Rich Asians, with an all-Asian cast. An all-white, all-het­ero cast just doesn’t fly with audi­ences nowa­days. It lacks credibility.

In Damien Chazelle’s La La Land, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone’s prospec­tive sweet­hearts take a while to meet – and when they do, their careers remain their pri­ma­ry focus. After the stan­dard ups-and-downs of any new rela­tion­ship, with a song or two along the way, it’s telling that they don’t end up togeth­er. Audi­ences and review­ers alike hailed the film as a thor­ough­ly mod­ern romance. The notion of a cou­ple going their sep­a­rate ways in order to pur­sue their careers seems to res­onate with a wider audi­ence than the rom-coms of the ​’90s, where char­ac­ters fall in love at the drop of a hat and cou­ple up despite a lack of screen time togeth­er and the dif­fer­ence is stark.

So why the shift? Young peo­ple today live in an increas­ing­ly arti­fi­cial world – fake news, fake fil­tered social media pro­files – and most of them are smart enough to be sick of it. They’re also more like­ly to know divorced friends and rel­a­tives than a gen­er­a­tion ago, and their needs are dif­fer­ent – it’s no longer con­vinc­ing that a part­ner is enough to com­plete you. Case in point, when Brid­get Jones’s Baby was released in 2016, mil­len­ni­als took to Twit­ter, less both­ered about whether Brid­get found love again than they were con­fused about how she could afford a flat in London’s Bor­ough Mar­ket. Mil­len­ni­als are seek­ing real­ism in their art, and the old style of rom-com is now viewed as fluffy and for­mu­la­ic. May it rest in peace.