So Jemima Goldsmith and Hugh Grant are an item. Or no, it’s more than that. Hugh is seriously involved with Jemima, the first time he has reportedly been so enamoured by a woman since his relationship with the curvaceous Liz Hurley ended. They are an advertiser’s dream. She, a blonde, leggy, British heiress; he, a millionaire star, best known for playing the archetypal, upper class Brit. No old-fashioned match maker could have pulled off a more suitable match.One can almost hear the clamour of approval as like returns to like. The ‘‘it figures’’ and ‘‘I told you so’s’’. Imran, the dark easterner. Pakistan, the foreign land. Religion, hardship, tradition. It could never have worked. And of course it didn’t. And as Jemima slips back into the world she was bred to inhabit, the familiar mini-skirts, the swinging nightlife, the glamorous resorts, the old could recede further and further away to the point of turning into a distant memory. Or a morality tale for young, impressionable girls on how never to marry the unsuitable man.From the look of it though it is a morality tale that does not need to be told. For every young man or woman already appears to know it. One has to only cast around. For all the paparazzi and the fighting over photo rights, there is a remarkable lack of drama about today’s celebrity couplings. The Brad Pitts of the world marry the Jennifer Anistons, the Akshay Kumars, the Twinkle Khannas. There are no pairs to evoke the aura of a Charles and Diana, or a Dimple and Rajesh, let alone the romances of yesteryears. Perhaps, the lack of difficulty is the very reason for the waning of romance. There are no clans, no unbridgeable differences any more. Parental disapproval is ridiculously outdated as a notion. Globalisation has brought about a blurring of cultural differences. So much so that a Liz Hurley can fall into the arms of an Arun Nayar without invoking more than a dash of snobbery. Distances are easily crossed by a range of technology. Is it any wonder then that the Romeos and Juliets, the Lailas and Majnus have vanished leaving Ken and Barbie to walk into a plastic sunset?And is it because of the lack of intensity in today’s love matches (with some notable exceptions such as the Stefi Graf-Andre Aggassi duo) that we look at other sources for our dose of excitement? The last wedding to create a sensation of sorts was the Mittal shindig. Before that there was Karishma and Raveena Tandon and in each case it was not a stirring love story that caught public attention but the pure and simple spending of money or the roll call of well-known people attending.Money and fame, these oil Cupid’s arrows in our listless times. Check out any of the current crop of American reality TV shows for evidence. The Bachelor is a show in which a large number of attractive and allegedly smart women jump through the hoops to win a presentable young man’s heart — and the West scoffs at India’s ‘‘quaint’’ arranged marriage rituals! Not one of the ‘‘bachelors’’ to have appeared on the five series has actually made a match of it with the women on the shows yet fame, brief-lived though it may be, is clearly a powerful reason for women to keep appearing.Race to the Altar is another show where several couples planning to get married put themselves through a series of endurance tests and let their lives be recorded by hidden cameras just to win a stupendously expensive wedding ceremony (Versace gown, blue and white hydrangeas, a “classic” champagne fountain poured from a giant Balthazar bottle of Veuve Clicquot). Love now needs elaborate packaging. There are no instinctively grand gestures or towering passions.Even Nora Ephron, who still valiantly writes love stories for our times, wisely has her main protagonists reaching for small ordinary dreams while her subsidiary characters make assertions such as “love is a matching of two people’s neuroses” or, as the dullest man on earth maintains in Sleepless in Seattle, “marriage is hard enough without bringing low expectations into it.”The only issue that perhaps still exercises minds is age. Not older man marrying younger women. That had happened forever and has achieved a certain fashionability at the moment with couples such as Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta Jones, Warren Beatty and Annette Benning and their prolific output on the baby front adding that much needed confirmation of continued virility. No, the news is older woman dating younger men (Demi Moore and Ashton Kuchner). In this too, it is the shifting power balance that has made ripples. Not love. Not romance.
