Making Love
The day the scientists discovered love, they opened a bottle of champagne. For centuries, people had been trying to find a way to synthesise love under laboratory conditions, and it was this small group of dedicated researchers who had achieved the holy grail of emotional science. Finally there was hope that humanity could escape the emotional blight which had scarred its entire history. At last the world could dream of a day when the attainment of love ceased to be dependent on the whims and vagaries of fortune, when love was not reserved for the lucky, the attractive and the gregarious. This discovery opened up the possibility of eliminating accident from the pursuit of love, and opening love to all men and women regardless of personal circumstances. Perhaps, finally, the disasters that seemed to accompany all mankind’s haphazard quests for love could be left behind.
The scientists couldn’t have been happier as they toasted each other’s endeavours and prepared to share with the world their marvellous creation: the tiny test tube in which resided the bare few droplets that represented, at that moment, the entire world’s supply of artificial love.
Of course it wasn’t just a few droplets for long. At first love was producible in minute amounts in research labs, at enormous expense and unviable for commercial exploitation; but building on the fine work of that pioneering team, other scientists soon discovered new methods of production, economies of scale, that allowed the production of larger and larger quantities of love. Before long synthetic love was available commercially, albeit only to the well-off, the lonely millionaires, bereft heiresses and industrialists who had neglected personal lives in their drives for material success. For them it was a godsend, an end to years of regret — no longer need they worry that their professional drives had necessitated the foreswearing of love. Now love was widely available in a convenient, easy to take form. The upper classes flocked to it, and soon it was all the rage on the swanky side of towns around the world. In high society, love parties became quite the fashion, rich folk gathering together to down their doses of love together and enjoy evenings of uninhibited affection.
Naturally research efforts continued, and as methods for the distillation of love became more sophisticated and scientists learnt more about the behaviour of love under controlled conditions and its suitability for mass production, love factories began to spring up everywhere, huge squat grey edifices belching out black smoke from their fat chimneys and emitting an endless stream of neatly packaged bottles, jars and presentation boxes of love from their conveyor belts. The love was shipped to shops across the globe; at first in specialty love boutiques, and then in the department stores, the supermarkets, the convenience stores. Love had been made affordable to the masses, and the masses rushed to get hold of it. The factories ran 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to keep up with demand.
The media hailed the democratisation of love. Now that almost everyone could afford to keep themselves well-stocked with love, statisticians reported that sadness rates were plummeting, and yearning was at an all-time low. Misery was declared extinct in the wild, as the streets and the malls and the bars and even the halls of government were filled with people basking in the warmth and beauty of love. To be in love was not only wonderful, but now so exceedingly common that you didn’t even have to feel guilty about the people who weren’t.
The global economy boomed, as productivity skyrocketed, all the man-hours hitherto lost to chasing love and mourning its absence redeployed into useful work. A golden age had come upon the earth, thanks to the selfless efforts of those dedicated scientists.
Yet not even the most golden of ages can avoid backlash. After a few years of the love boom, naysayers started to emerge. There were those who said we had become too dependent on love. Learned columnists stroked their chins and filed 1000-word stories bemoaning the modern fixation on love at the expense of more sensible desires. Sometimes, it was muttered, it seemed that the modern citizen cared more about rushing out every night to sit in the pub and knock back a few bottles of love than they did about contributing to their community, or maintaining valued cultural traditions. Nobody could remember what the valued cultural traditions were, which just went to prove how badly they’d been neglected.
Old-timers, who remembered the days before love was so easy to get your hands on, lamented the attitudes of the young, who used love as a crutch. Recalling the sturdy self-reliance of their own youth, they decried the modern habit of simply assuming that love would solve all one’s problems. It might be better, the old-timers mused, if love weren’t so cheap, weren’t so easy to get. Might teach the youngsters a bit of discipline, they said. And yet the old-timers too set out each week to do the groceries, and brought home their regular supply of love. Because mourn them though they might, the days of self-reliance were gone, and to be without love would simply be intolerable.
The world went on in this way: the tenth anniversary of the discovery of synthetic love was celebrated, and the fifteenth, and the twentieth. People had never been happier, or wealthier, or more comfortable. Could people become too comfortable? There was sensed, by those whose job was to sense such things, a certain ennui. The learned columnists once more filled their columns, with tales of folks grown jaded, weary of the world. Perhaps, they surmised, something was needed to shake things up? Perhaps the scientists who had done so well at creating love should stop resting on their laurels. Perhaps they should try to create something a bit more interesting. A bit more fun.
They tried, but what was there? The scientists worked day and night to discover the next great leap in human emotion. They managed to generate hate as a gas, but attempts to monetise it proved disastrous. There was some progress on synthesising fear, but it was much too unstable to withstand shipping and packaging. An attempt to commercialise the production of hope was depressingly brief.
Changing tack, the big love companies turned to the marketing men. Love began to be sold in an ever-increasing range of colours and flavours. Additives were included in the love recipes, to make love longer-lasting, more intense, healthier, better for your bones and teeth. Love-sellers competed to pay big money to big celebrities to assure the buyer that their particular brand of love was the most reliable, the best value for money. Love remained as popular as ever, but many love manufacturers went out of business as the mills of capitalism ground them down. Before long there remained only four or five major love companies, battling each other ferociously in their endless crusade to make people feel that the love they were buying was something exciting and new.
More and more people were suspecting that it was not. As the big companies continued their ruthless commercial wars, some people began to cut down on their love consumption. Daily love-takers dropped off to a weekly dose. Some gave up altogether, or tried to — it made a person lonely and morose to give up love, but those feelings were at least a novelty. There were even those who flaunted their despair and irritability as proof of their purity — a lack of love, they declared, was a rejection of capitalism, of the remorseless usurpation of the human spirit by corporate interests. Our forebears, they declared, lived perfectly well without love: perhaps it was time to return to those simpler days. To be dissatisfied, to be gloomy and fractious and restlessly bereft, was to live authentically. So they said.
And yet love, though selling in less spectacular volumes, was still the choice of the majority, and the love-sellers kept getting richer, even while their customers found the effects of the product less and less noteworthy, and their own moods more and more dark, and their lives more and more lonely, until there were times when a person might wonder why they bothered taking their love of a morning, when they seemed not much happier than the love-abstinent hippies next door.
The economy, meanwhile, boomed all the more, as nobody had much else to do but work.
One day a young man walked down a cold street, wrapping a thin jacket around bony shoulders. He stopped in a doorway to shelter a minute from the wind, stamping his feet and glancing through the shop window to see the glittering array of coloured bottles, tied up with shiny ribbons, filled with best-quality love for the discerning consumer.
The young man could not afford any of the love in the window. He hadn’t had any love since he was a boy — there never seemed to be enough left over to buy any. More respectable folk pushed past him through the doorway to buy their share.
The young man stepped out of the doorway to go on his way. As he did so he saw a young woman, pressing her face up against the glass. She was in an old dress. Around her neck was an old scarf. The young woman was looking raptly at the love bottles. As the young man passed her, she pulled back from the window with a sigh, and she saw him just as he saw her.
The young man and the young woman looked at each other for a moment, and then together looked at the bottles. They looked back at each other. The young man shrugged. The young woman grinned. The young man went on his way. As it happened, by strange coincidence, it was also the young woman’s way. They walked the same way for a while, and then a while longer, walking a little closer to each other. Nobody paid them much attention, for they were two people in a throng of thousands in the centre of a big city. They passed a lot more shops, and they saw a lot more things they couldn’t afford, and the more shops they passed, the more they laughed at the things they couldn’t afford, and the more they laughed, the less they wondered what it would be like to afford things. And they kept on walking for nobody knows how long, and they kept walking closer and closer to each other, until they couldn’t get any more close if they tried.
They had no idea what this feeling was called, but it seemed it would tide them over for a bit.
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