What's Love Got To Do With It?
Poster for What's Love Got To Do With It? (2022). Image source: IMDB.com
The marriage crisis
Marriage is in an ongoing state of crisis. People are choosing to wait longer before they marry—median age at first marriage is now in the 30s for both men and women in the UK—and more are choosing never to get married at all. Although in the U.S. the legal right to marry was extended in 2015 to gay and lesbian couples in all 50 states, the number of marriages per 1,000 people is entering its fifth decade of decline: in 1980, there were 10.6 marriages per 1,000 people, while in 2020 there were around 5 (a COVID low; the number has since rebounded to around 6, but the long-term trend is steady decline). The marriage rate has fallen even though the percentage of people of marriageable age has increased over the same span, from around two-thirds to almost three-quarters of the population.
U.S. marriages per 1,000 people, 1980-2022. Data source: Provisional number of marriages and marriage rate, United States 2000-2022, CDC/NCHS National Vital Statistics System; Sally C. Curtin and Paul D. Sutton, Marriage rates in the United States, 1900-2018, NCHS Health E-Stat, 2020.
One reason for more women choosing to remain unmarried may be that, as Clementina Ford writes,
Marriage is not now and never has been designed with women's happiness in mind — and yet we're told that without it, we will be miserable. As any sociologist can tell you, it's men who benefit from marriage: they live longer, they are generally healthier and happier, and their economic prospects improve [compared to single men]. On the other hand, studies have shown that married women die earlier. [1]
Ford is citing a study of 100,000 Europeans that found that marriage adds 1.7 years to the average husband's lifespan, and subtracts 1.4 years from the average wife's. [2]
As marriage rates have fallen, so have divorce rates, but they are still proportionately high: in the U.S., the divorce rate fell from 5.2 per 1,000 people in 1980 (49% of the 1980 marriage rate) to 2.3 in 2020 (45% of the 2020 marriage rate). In other words, roughly speaking, for every two marriages there's one divorce. Let me just say that I would not get on a plane if I had little better than a 50% chance of making it to my destination.
Share of marriages ending in divorce in the US, by year of marriage. Image source: Our World in Data
Given our spectacularly poor track record at picking people who will be good, fulfilling, and reliable partners in the long term, shouldn't we seek assistance in making that choice? Two recent phenomena reflect this idea:
- Marriage Pact: Begun at Stanford in 2017 as an undergraduate project, Marriage Pact is an algorithmic matchmaking service. According to a recent story in the San Jose Mercury News, each participant fills out a 50-question survey about their "core values," such as "communication styles and conflict resolution. Smoking and drug habits. And things like: 'If you do nothing for an entire day, how do you feel?' On a 1 to 7 scale, 'like a lard' is 1 and 'like royalty' is 7."
No pictures or swiping are involved. Each participant receives one name, an email address, and a percentage: their highest-rated match among fellow participants. The marriage pact is a pledge to marry your algorithmic best match if you don't find someone better by a mutually-agreed date—a kind of marital backup plan. It has now spread to nearly 90 campuses around the country.
According to the San Jose Mercury News story, of the nearly half-million participants to date, "a tiny fraction land in long-term relationships, even marriage." But the creators claim that 30% of the matches meet in person, and one-ninth of those wind up dating for a year or more. If those numbers are true, that's a 3.3% relationship success rate, or 33 out of 1,000 participants. With a current U.S. marriage rate of 6 per 1,000 people, on your own you could do a lot worse.
- Indian Matchmaking: A 2020–23 Netflix reality series created by the Indian-American documentary director Smriti Mundhra, Indian Matchmaking features Sima Taparia, a Mumbai-based "marriage consultant." Mundhra had featured Taparia in her 2017 documentary A Suitable Girl (co-directed with Sarita Khurana), which followed the efforts of three middle-class families to find husbands for their college-educated daughters.
One of the families was Taparia's, and we watch her struggling to succeed as a matchmaker for her own daughter, Ritu (who would prefer to continue her career in financial services).
The TV series follows Taparia's efforts to find acceptable matches for multiple clients each season. In a Guardian article a viewer criticized the first season as a "cesspool of casteism, colourism, sexism, classism." Women must come from a "good" (i.e., high-caste) family and be light-skinned, slim, and at least average in height; "the prospects for women who are dark-skinned, overweight, or under 1.6 metres (5ft 3ins) are presented as bleak, if not a lost cause entirely." Women are also subject to "moral policing": they must not have an extensive romantic history, or children from previous relationships. An NPR story reports that in Season 3 the series introduces "Priya, a pretty 35-year-old who is dating after a divorce and worries that men she encounters think she is 'broken.'"
Mundhar has now created a spinoff, Jewish Matchmaking, which dropped on May 3 of this year. Can Poly Matchmaking be far behind?
What's Love Got To Do With It?
Many of us could clearly use some help in finding good romantic partners. Which brings us to What's Love Got To Do With It?, the 2022 feature film written by Jemima Khan and directed by Shekhar Kapur. [3]
The film starts promisingly. Zoe (Lily James), an "award-winning documentary filmmaker" (is there any other kind?) has grown up with her Anglo-Pakistani next-door neighbor Kazim (Shazad Latif). When Zoe finds Kaz at his brother's wedding, sneaking a cigarette in their childhood backyard treehouse, he confesses that he is ready to settle down and is willing to try to find a Pakistani bride through an arranged marriage: "Well, 'assisted marriage.' That's what we're calling it these days." Zoe is initially incredulous—"What, like assisted suicide?"—but then decides that Kaz's search for a wife will be the perfect subject for her next film.
Shazad Latif (Kazim Khan) and Zoe Stevenson (Lily James) in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Greg King's Film Reviews
Zoe herself is starting to feel that it would be nice to have a relationship that lasts longer than a weekend. But despite (or perhaps because) of these feelings, she continues bonking men she's just met in bars, waking up in strangers' beds, and shying away from a handsome, kind veterinarian (Oliver Chris) she meets through her mother's dog's misadventures. Her desire to be in a couple is more than cancelled out by her fear of commitment; while she's looking for Mr. Right, she seems only to be attracted to Mr. Wrongs.
Of course, unlike the characters we can see exactly where this story is heading, but there's a good deal of pleasure in getting there. In the initial part of the film the humor in Khan's script can be delightfully pointed, as in Zoe's clueless but well-meaning mother Cath (Emma Thompson) calling the wedding celebrations "exotic" ("'Exotic' meaning good foreign rather than threatening foreign?" asks Zoe. "Yeah, exactly," responds Cath).
Cath Stevenson (Emma Thompson) in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Cinema Clock
Or Zoe's white male producers (Ben Ashenden and Alexander Owen) gradually becoming more interested in Zoe's proposed film about Kaz as they run through possible working titles ("My Big Fat Arranged Wedding"; "Meet the Parents—First"; "I Hope She's A Pretty Woman") and check off the funding boxes: "Eth? Tick. Female director? Double tick." (The white producers later critique her film as being shot through a "white lens"—evidently not "eth" enough.)
And although Zoe defends the practice of arranged marriage to the producers, in conversation with Kaz she's still skeptical. When he says of arranged marriages that "over time, you grow to love the person you're with," she responds, "What, like Stockholm Syndrome?" When, on the way to an appointment with the Muslim matchmaker (Asim Chaudry) hired by his parents (Jeff Mirza and E&I favorite Shabana Azmi), Zoe asks Kaz the difference between using a matchmaker and using a dating app, Kaz says "I suppose you could call it a bespoke, 3D, halal Tinder. Operated by your parents."
Kaz's parents Aisha Khan (Shabana Azmi) and Zahid Khan (Jeff Mirza) in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Firstpost
When the matchmaker Mo asks asks what they are looking for, Kaz's mother Aisha brings out the stereotypical criteria: "A girl from the same. . .background, soft-spoken, long hair. Not too dark." Kaz's father wants the bridal prospects to have complexions no darker than "wheatish." The film's portrayal of reflexive color prejudice is all too real.
Kaz soon begins to meet over Skype with Maymouna (Sajal Aly), a lovely young Pakistani woman. Of course, both sets of parents are hovering in the background the whole time, and can't help themselves from interjecting regularly. But perhaps Maymouna is not quite so chaste and demure as she appears, and has her own agenda. . .
Maymouna (Sajal Aly) and family in What's Love Got To Do With It?. Image source: Variety
The most treacherous moment in any romantic comedy, though, is the ending, and there's no way to talk about where the movie goes wrong without spoilers. So if you want to avoid them, please skip the next two paragraphs:
- Spoiler 1: There's a subplot featuring Kaz's sister Jamila (Mariam Haque), who has become estranged from her parents and the family matriarch Nani Jan (Pakiza Baig) because they have rejected her marriage a non-Muslim white man. Towards the end of the film Kaz invites Jamila to the family Eid celebration without telling his parents or Nani Jan. When Jamila arrives, she has her husband and new baby in tow. Of course, fulfilling her traditional role as mother instantly erases all discord, and Jamila, her husband and baby are welcomed back into the family. This feels like a reinforcement, rather than a critique, of motherhood as a woman's destiny.
- Spoiler 2: When it comes time for the main characters to figure out the pairing that has been obvious to the audience from the first scenes, there are a couple of problems. Since Zoe and Kaz have grown up together like sister and brother (although we do learn that as kids they shared their first kiss), when they finally start thinking about each other romantically it seems queasily semi-incestuous. And the big kiss they exchange just before fadeout is anything but electric. Since movies are shot out of sequence, my guess is that Kapur unwisely shot the kiss early in the filming schedule, before the actors had gotten to know and feel comfortable with each other. Perhaps the lack of spark is a deliberate directorial choice, signalling the difficulties and awkwardnesses that lie ahead for the couple. But a sense of difficulty and awkwardness is not the final impression that most romantic comedies want to leave with their audience.
—End of spoilers—
What's Love Got To Do With It? is worth seeing for the witty first 90 minutes or so of Khan's script, the performances of Lily James and Shazad Latif as people who only slowly come to realize that their best match may be right next to them, and the pleasures of watching veteran actors Thompson and Azmi as their mothers. As with many romantic comedies the ending doesn't quite fulfill the film's early promise. On the other hand, you could do a lot worse.
- Christina Ford, "Marriage is an inherently misogynistic institution—so why do women agree to it?" The Guardian, 30 October 2023.
- Roger Dobson, "The stress of marriage shortens your life by a year (if you're the wife)," The Independent, 26 February 2006.
- Screenwriter Jemima Goldsmith Khan is the British former wife of Pakistani cricket star, later Prime Minister, and current prisoner Imran Khan. Director Shekhar Kapur began his career in India, directing Masoom (The Innocent, 1983), with Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi; the indelible Mr. India (1987), with Anil Kapoor and Sridevi; and Bandit Queen (1994), with Seema Biswas. He then moved on to the UK for Elizabeth (1998), with Cate Blanchett, and then to Hollywood for The Four Feathers (2002), with Heath Ledger and Kate Hudson. Since the sequel Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2008), however, he's only contributed segments to anthology films, directed short films and some TV series episodes, as well as the 2016 documentary Science of Compassion.
