Coming to a Slow Burn
I freely admit I never watched soaps for the romance. I started watching when I was a toddler and was much more interested in family based stories. Sure, I liked romantic stories as I got older and I've been a devout fan of many couples, but when a soap was going through a drought of really romantic storylines, I barely noticed.
I don't need a soap to be drowning in couples, love triangles, and forbidden lusts. But there is no doubt that it drives everything on a soap. Every single thing that happens on a soap surrounds love in some way. Families have to start somewhere, someone at some point had to be in love with the town matriarch if she's gonna have five children.
Of course, the beauty the multi-generational canvas soaps' have is that you can show several different stages of love. There is the stable, secure, and long lasting love of the town's older residents, there is the settling down and family growing feel of the middle-aged couples, and then there are the teenager and twenty year olds who are in the middle of lusting, exciting, adrenaline rushing romances.
But I've noticed that with the bulk of most soaps, that the latter has been stolen from soaps. It's just disappeared. Oh sure, writers go through the motions; here is the boy from the wrong side of the tracks and watch her fall for the goody two shoes and have parents object. Here is the sexy foreigner that jump starts the life of the formerly vibrant young girl who's been saddled in a boring relationship, blah, blah, blah. But everything about each obstacle appears to be false, forced, and annoying.
Couples across the board, old and new, are suffering from a lack of romance, spark, and life. One Life to Live recently had Natalie and Cristian wed. I know many fans who at one point was for them, who at one time would have been counting down the days till their wedding that who were no longer even watching the show. When I asked a fan if she would be tuning in for the wedding, she actually shrugged her shoulders. I frankly find that disturbing since I know very few couple fans that actually lose interest in a couple while they are still together. But the lifeless relationships are rampant.
From Guiding Light's Gus and Harley to General Hospital's Jason and Courtney, soap couples that were not born out of hasty, quick, and out of character match-ups have still had major hiccups. It doesn't give me much hope for the couples on the horizon.
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