Luv: It just ain't enough

Instead of taking a road trip to the Sunshine State this past spring break like many of my friends, I stuck around B-Town and took up a challenge on a topic I’d never even thought about before. A New York Times Magazine essay competition for college students challenged writers to answer the question: “Modern Love: What is it now?”
Although the deadline would not be until the end of March, something drove me to the library well in advance to get a hold of at least a few inspirational tomes, everything from “The Beatles And Philosophy” to “Hemingway on Love.”

You might say I tried to diversify my research. And I really did. When all was said and done, however, I was more likely to drive up to the Big Apple, sneak into NYT headquarters and urinate all over their printing machines than seriously consider submitting my piece to them.

I came to realize that they weren’t really looking for creative drive, emotional veracity, intellectual integrity or rudimentary research and writing skills, whatever their purported criteria for evaluation.

What, then, could possibly be worth the prominent endorsement of the NYT Magazine’s “Fashion & Style” section, an appearance on mtvU (MTV’s college network), and $1,000? If previous winners are any indication, the price would be pretentious, fatuous, pop-cultural drivel passed off as deeply introspective discoveries of love in their own lives.

To be fair, some of the entries were quite good. One piece, entitled “I Married A Republican: There, I Said It,” gave me a sort of aesthetic-intellectual orgasm. I wanted my piece to be exactly like the rollicking adventure I’d just read, not some glorified diary entry, nor the drug-induced bitching, moaning and whining of some of my favorite songs.

Yet the reality of modern essay competitions is a lot like the reality of modern love: to try to portray, explicate or even mock it requires one to contribute to what one of my former professors called “a world of superficialities.”

It’s true that writing a research paper isn’t the same as trying to represent, in words, one’s most permanent and intimate understanding of love. Equally true, however, is the crude maxim that writers – all writers – are whores.

Those who enter high school or college essay competitions thinking they can get around this crude maxim are some of the biggest and most unfortunate whores. They believe that by appeasing judges who are bound by preconceptions and prejudices (concerning things like “creativity,” “originality” and in this case, “love”), they can win something more than fleeting recognition and material prizes.

In order to succeed, however, writers must have a semblance of honesty and substance about them as much as a sense of style, and these “winning entries” placed infinitely more emphasis on the latter than the former.

Love is undoubtedly the most subjective of all possible subjects. It’s far easier to write about the “luv” of our AIM and Facebook-charged generation. It certainly isn’t honest, but it is more specific and far more marketable than the real thing.