Oh sure, there’s the music, the nostalgia (phone boxes!) and Leo Woodall’s perfect, mournful face. But none of those are why Netflix’s adaptation of David Nicholls’s novel One Day has achieved such hysterical popularity. No, people love it so much because it’s so sad. Overwhelmingly sad: one friend, a normally sane 55-year-old man, told me he “took two days off work” to recover from One Day. Masochistically sad, even, given most of us knew the ending, having read the book years ago. And still we submitted ourselves to this meat-grinder of emotions. But that’s how it’s always been with love stories.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a classic love story must be in want of a dead girlfriend. Or she can live and he can die — audiences have never been fussed, just as long as one of the lovers carks it before the end. From Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (he dies) to La Bohème (she dies), Romeo and Juliet (they both die) and the other big love story of the moment, All of Us Strangers (you’ll see), an impressive number of love stories are, in fact, tragedies. The only alternative ending for a love story is the marriage ending, as perfected by Jane Austen, and therein lies the problem: the romance is in the courtship, according to love stories, and that can only be concluded by the tedium of domesticity.
The Bridget Jones sequels exemplified this problem, with their diminishing returns about Bridget and Mark Darcy’s boring married life, until Helen Fielding solved the problem by — yes — killing off Mark. How much more romantic to turn Emma into roadkill and leave Dexter weeping into a bottle of whisky, letting viewers revel in the exquisite pain of it all, as irresistible as a scab that you can’t stop picking at. (And no, I will not apologise for One Day spoilers. The book came out 15 years ago. The statute of limitations for One Day spoilers has long since expired.)
When Nicholls’s novel was published, there was a bit of fuss about why he had decided to end it that way, as though he had in some way cheated. Apparently those people had never seen Titanic, in which the death ending was so ridiculous that its writer-director, James Cameron, has had to spend the past 25 years dealing with snarky hacks asking him why Kate Winslet’s Rose couldn’t share her wooden board with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack. Snarky hacks like, um, me: I asked Cameron that very question when I interviewed him a decade ago, and he snapped back, “Wait a minute — I’m going to call up William Shakespeare and ask him why Romeo and Juliet had to die.”
Aside from giving me an enjoyable glimpse of Cameron’s famously gargantuan ego, his retort taught me this: writers of tragic love stories are often working more consciously within a tradition than audiences realise. Jack had to die, just as Emma has to die, because that’s how love stories have always worked. (If I were going to complain about anything in One Day, it would be Emma and Dexter eventually getting together. Speaking as a once awkward student who harboured multiple crushes on confident boys with excellent hair, I can tell you those boys never get together with that girl, and especially not after she has barricaded herself into the friend zone for several decades. You can consider that frontline reporting on the realism or otherwise of One Day.)
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There is something about the death ending that audiences find especially satisfying. Even ostensibly happy romantic endings work best when leavened with a bit of morbidity, such as George Eliot breaking off from describing Dorothea’s wedded bliss to imagine her years later in an “unvisited tomb”. An overly sweet love story becomes a fairytale without some tartness. Or maybe it’s just that even the most gifted writers struggle when it comes to depicting happily married life, and opt instead to end the narrative just when a couple’s life together is beginning.
But, contrary to the impression I got from the love stories I had spent my whole life reading, the dating — all those awkward misunderstandings and missed phone calls — is actually the most forgettable part of a relationship. The real stuff comes from the private jokes and the cups of tea brought in bed, not the frantic confessions on rainy street corners (as though any woman still in the insecure dating phase has ever stood on a rainy street corner. Have screenwriters never heard of hair frizz?).
Similarly, it’s funny how love stories are almost invariably about twentysomethings, when everyone knows that twentysomethings are basically children and know nothing about anything. Show me a love story about two fiftysomethings, burdened by emotional baggage and tricky teenagers, and I’ll show you a story with nail-bitingly high stakes.
But that’s not how love stories work: they need to be about young people, and they need to end in marriage or death. The ancient Greeks knew it, and so does Netflix: Dexter is Orpheus and Emma is Eurydice, just with added Britpop. The madness of love is as overwhelming as the hysteria of grief, and audiences like to experience them together vicariously: the two most terrifying yet fundamental human emotions for the price of one. And, to be fair, heightened emotions generate better drama than marital contentment. So to everyone struggling to recover from the end of One Day, ask yourself: would you really rather see Emma and Dexter ten years from now, arguing over whose turn it is to take the bins out?
