In a park near my house someone has taken a marker to a children’s slide and written chunks of a diary or poem about the end of a relationship. “I was so important to you, then someone better came along,” reads the black scrawl on the bright pink plastic of the slide. “Do you know what it feels like to be replaced?”
Then the inevitable accusation of misleading: “Ellusionist!” (I don’t know if that’s a misspelling or something poetic.) There is the usual combination of self-loathing – “I never realized how ugly I was until I saw how beautiful you are” – and claims of superiority: “If only you’d give me a chance.” And then the vague but deliberately worrying to-be-or-not-to-be reference: “What if he existed and I didn’t?”
The writer (and I don’t know if it’s a boy or a girl) must have been listening to a lot of contemporary love songs; they’re all about victimhood.
My toddler erases a little more of each deep thought with his diaper-padded bum every time he swishes down the tube. It’s an undignified ending for such plaintive and universal human emotion. As a form of publishing, the pink plastic slide is not a bad medium: It has a large public but also targets its intended audience pretty narrowly (I’m guessing it’s near the school where the love object is to be found, and word of its existence has no doubt already reached him, as is its intent). The medium’s only real setback is its instability: Already the rain and the steady scrubbing of toddler bums have corrupted most of it. But then the anger and agony it documents probably also will not be long-lived.
Simultaneously one of the past summer’s big pop songs is mercifully fading: You can still hear the British singer Adele’s chartbuster Rolling in the Deep in a coffee shop or taxi only about once a day, which is a lot less than the constant barrage of mid-August, when it was simply the soundtrack of every daily activity. That song too is an accusation: “You had my heart inside my hand, and you played it to the beat.” The refrain is, “We could have had it all,” a reproach common to a lot of these resentment-love songs.
The idea is that the love object made a terrible mistake that he will soon come to understand, particularly when he sees how successful his ex becomes and finds how empty and unkind his new paramour is. Adele’s song also contains a couple of vague threats of despair and retribution (“Don’t underestimate the things that I will do”), which are commonplaces of the genre.
Poor Adele has been dumped a lot. But she has made a lot of money from it. Her massive hit Someone Like You begins “I heard that you’re settled down/ That you found a girl and you’re married now/ I heard that your dreams came true/ Guess she gave you things I didn’t give to you.” Then comes the stalking part: “I hate to turn up out of the blue, uninvited/ But I couldn’t stay away, couldn’t fight it/ I had hopes that you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded/ That for me, it isn’t over.”
If this sounds familiar, it’s because you are recalling Alanis Morissette’s stalker anthem, the epitome of the genre, You Oughta Know – in particular its chilling lines: “You seem very well, things look peaceful/ I'm not quite as well, I thought you should know/ Did you forget about me Mr. Duplicity/ I hate to bug you in the middle of dinner/ It was a slap in the face how quickly I was replaced.”
When men indulge in romantic victimhood, they tend to be just straight-out violent (“Hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?”), but most women are familiar with the passive-aggressive weepy-poem guy too. A guy like W.B Yeats. I’ve always been embarrassed by Yeats’s poem When You Are Old. It’s a poem that promises an ex-lover that she will regret her silly choice, and “Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled/ And paced upon the mountains overhead.” What ego!
So we teach sensitive high-schoolers, in literature class and in the mall, that a loss of love should be punished by indignation and condescension. It would probably be healthier to teach them it’s no one’s fault. But then we wouldn’t have the thrilling existence of playground marker poetry, and the promise that everyone who’s been dumped could be famous for it.
