True love is what first comes to mind when I see this image. Romance not so much right away, but after you begin to think about it, it seems perfectly romantic, well the socially constructed idea of romantic anyway. The image provides a template. It gives you a heart shaped by two hands in the foreground with a colorful sunset over some body of water in the background. From here you can infer that the two hands forming the heart are from separate people. This leads you to believe love is the reason that they are forming this heart in the first place. And this isn't just any love, they are in love, true love. It isn't the love you have for your parents or your child or your best friend, this is the kind of love that makes you crazy, keeps you up at night, makes you not you, and everything else they tell you in the movies. What else leads you to believe they're in love? You may have not even realized it was part of your thought process, but the shape of their hands and the similar aging adds to your schema. And all of this happens from a glance at the photo, but what is it exactly that makes you think this is love? romance? The movies, everything they tell you is what allows you to form these ideas of what love is. Of course it isn't just the movies, it's every form of media and more. Magazines, commercials, billboards, music, books, friends, family, the list is endless. 
But everyone has learned love the same way, they may interpret it differently, but love is universal. They could have called it anything, instead of saying 'I love lamp,' you could be saying 'I lamp love,' but no, someone chose to call it love and that's what you learned. It's the same thing with romance. The romance you see in this picture comes from the intimacy. They share a special connection and you can see this just through the lens that allows you to see one of each of their hands. All of this is constructed by the world around you. These predetermined notions plant these ideas in your head. Why else would you think to shape you hand to form a heart with someone else? It's almost surprising you don't see a sandy beach in the background and their feet up leisurely resting on something. But this is romance. At least what the world has told you what romance is to be.
Going further on this, the bottom three images at the bottom that you've presented, represent this idea of 'two lovers in love' that use a gender to define the love. With this in mind, a compelling argument is brought to light: these images create an illusion of heterosexuality the same way they create the illusion of love.
ReplyDeletePerhaps the next step is to develop an understanding of how the practices which we find 'normal' within a relationship, a part of the illusion constructed entirely by media messages.