Who's Afraid Of Eternal Love?

The horror of "The One," "TiMER," and love without a love story.

Hannah Ware as Rebecca Webb, giving the hard sell. Photo: Netflix.

When Rebecca Webb (Hannah Ware) strides onstage in the first minutes of “The One,” she’s in sales mode. She’s the founder of an English startup, The One, that matches people to their soulmates using DNA testing. In less than two years, Rebecca has been catapulted from lowly PhD candidate to pantsuit-clad glamazon girlboss, and she’s a true believer in the technology she’s peddling, which she claims will effectively end bad dates and divorce. She’s also a living advertisement for it. She calls her hunky, white-grinned partner onstage to share a passionate kiss with her, claiming that she loves him so she can’t bear to leave him at home during her business trips. “I want that for you guys, too,” she declares to the roaring crowd. “To truly love and be loved: Isn’t that what we all want? Isn’t that what makes us human?”

“The One” takes a well-worn but powerful fantasy -- perfect, immediate, everlasting love -- and translates it from the realm of fairy tale to that of science fiction. The feel-good factor doesn’t make the trip. In the cold light of the testing lab, the guarantee of love quickly comes to look dystopian -- or at least everything around it does. The prime minister wants to regulate The One in response to a tidal wave of divorces precipitated by the discovery of genetic true loves, Rebecca has fallen out with her one-time business partner, and detectives are asking questions about the suspicious death of their old friend. 

“The One” immediately intrigued me because it reminded me of a less dystopian 2009 movie called “TiMER.” Apparently it was a bit of a cult hit, but I watched it because the algorithm serves me all the rom-coms it possibly can. Last week, I tried to rewatch it, but couldn’t; it’s not on Netflix anymore, or Amazon Prime or Hulu or Redbox or anywhere. (We are in the midst of realizing that the Internet isn’t actually forever.)

It’s too bad, because I really wanted to see if I felt differently about it now, and in comparison to “The One.” When I first watched it years ago, I didn’t like the movie. It’s a sci-fi rom-com about a society in which people can get a device implanted into their wrist that counts down to the moment when they will meet their soulmate, as long as that soulmate also has their device implanted. 

The heroine’s timer has no number on it, meaning that her soulmate hasn’t gotten an implant. She ends up meeting a guy who also doesn’t have an device, and they begin to fall for each other. Then, abruptly, her timer blinks on: she’s going to meet the one. At a party the next day, she locks eyes with a man who has been dating her stepsister. Their timers go off. It’s meant to be. The woman initially resists it. She tries to pursue the timer-free guy she’s been falling for, but he gently rejects her. He can’t ignore the edict of the timer. She needs to be with her stepsister’s boyfriend. At the end of the movie, it’s fairly clear that the matched pair will pursue a relationship.

I am not unique: I watch romantic comedies to feel good. “TiMER” did not make me feel good. I want to watch movies about people reacting to each other, sparking and warming, enacting their mutual but inchoate desire. A rom-com is the story of two people constructing a shared life out of nothing but hope, tenderness, and plenty of chemistry. There are missteps and misunderstandings as they dance around each other, trying to see what could be between them. This is not what I remember seeing in “TiMER.” Maybe it was just incorrectly labeled. It’s a movie about romance, I suppose, and maybe it has jokes (I don’t recall), but it struck me as distinctly tragic. The heroine would have love, but at the cost of her agency. The romantic endgame was so meant-to-be, it was a trap. 

Not that I don’t understand the appeal of romantic certainty. After all, dating is terrible. I remember being 24 -- a baby! -- and sobbing to my best friend, night after night, that I would never escape from the misery of OKCupid into a committed relationship. The prospect of facing years more of rejection, disappointed hopes, and unpleasant evenings with men I didn’t want to see again was inconceivably daunting. I would have gotten a timer. Or, as in “The One,” I would have tried to get DNA matched with my soulmate, so I could finally go on a date guaranteed to end with transcendent physical and emotional connection. No more toxic relationships; no more blindsiding breakups or comically bad dates. 

I did meet someone, when I was still 24, and four years ago we got married. We wrote our own vows. Mine were about love stories, and how my relationship with my husband had meant letting the template of the love story go. My one previous relationship had been tumultuous; the cycle of fights and reconciliations, break-ups and reunions, was both profoundly stressful and satisfying to my sense of what romance should be.  Each day I could see the narrative arc unfolding: conflict and ecstatic resolution. In my vows, I tried to express that sustainable love didn’t work like this, and that instead of the love story I’d always dreamed of, I’d gotten something better: daily, uneventful happiness. This wasn’t really an argument against love stories, but more a recognition that the courtship can’t cycle around forever: It ends, and is replaced by a reassuring constancy.

Functional love, like a Netflix home reno show, is an escape from the exhausting demands of plot. After all the work and heartbreak of dating, the story ends on a tableau of placid bliss. Who wouldn’t want to just skip right to the happy ending?

But watching “TiMER” and “The One,” it’s chilling, almost violent, to see this foreclosure of chance, choice, seduction and rejection.

I watched the trailer for “TiMER” and browsed some viewer reviews of the movie before sitting down to write this. The takeaway, apparently, is that it’s all about the journey. But if the movie shows this, it’s mainly through photo negative: It represses the horrors of the world it depicts, in which romance is all destination, no journey -- or in which the journey, if it does exist, is severed from and made irrelevant to the ending, which is predetermined. We’re presented with a rom-com about two people finding love who have no shared story; the whole movie was about them falling for other people.  

Unlike “TiMER,” “The One” is not a romance. Which at least makes sense: there’s not much excitement in a meet-cute if the outcome is predestined. Rebecca is a thwarted romantic at best, all too aware of the compromises that have been made in the name of skipping to the happy ending. “The One” is a dystopian thriller, relentlessly shadowed and grim, and Rebecca’s fervent paeans to the world-changing power of DNA matching only serve to give her a slightly crazed aura, like a cult leader. 

It’s difficult to take “The One” seriously, largely because the science of it is so transparently ludicrous. It’s explained in flashbacks that Rebecca and her eventual cofounder, James, discovered that ants in a colony communicate through optimally compatible pheromones thanks to shared DNA markers, and that humans also have this — just, you know, for one monogamous romantic partner that you have undeniable chemistry with.

So much hinges on one’s willingness to accept a version of our world in which for each person there exists exactly one non-genetically-related person who bears the same genetic marker, and that this marker is expressed in all the qualities that lead to romantic compatibility. Matches might live oceans apart, come from different classes or cultures, and perhaps not even speak the same language, but they seem to be similar to each other in age, attractiveness, and have compatible sexual orientations. (This is highly revealing of what we currently consider to be appropriate compatibilities on which to base a romantic relationship.) It’s a pulpy, absurd show, from the squint-inducing science and the wild plot twists that carry the show’s momentum to Hannah Ware’s slow-blinking, portentously monotone performance.

But “The One,” in its melodramatic way, does attempt to openly grapple with the moral weight of predetermining people’s romantic pairings, not only through Rebecca -- whose personal DNA matching success story is more complex than it first appears -- but through characters like Hannah and Mark, a happily married couple who have not been matched. Rattled by the turmoil The One has caused in their friends’ relationships, Hannah becomes obsessed with the idea that Mark might get matched and leave her for his DNA-validated soulmate. Another character gets matched only to learn that his ideal mate has already died. 

The possibility of getting matched with someone who, despite their romantic compatibility, would be a bad partner -- an inveterate cheater, a career criminal -- also looms; so much for going to therapy and making better dating choices, if you’re destined to end up with someone who would make you miserable. What’s more, the technology gives Rebecca immense power over something deeply important and personal to people, a power that she recklessly abuses. At one point, she rescues a group of Somalian refugees so that she can use one of them, the soulmate of one of her adversaries, as leverage to win his cooperation. 

A romance this irresistible ceases to be a fantasy and becomes a threat. It’s as if love, instead of being a delicate thing two people create together, is a ruthless assassin hunting them down. Or, ultimately, a prison. 

At the end of the first book in Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, which I am working my way through now, a playwright notes to the narrator that she’s lost her ability to write plays because she’s developed an incorrigible habit of summing them up in her mind. Once she sums up the theme of a play as “jealousy,” for example, she doesn’t see the point of writing it. At last, she explains, “she herself felt summed up, and was beginning to question the point of continuing to exist day in and day out when Anne’s life just about covered it.”  Distilling the story down to its conclusion, stripping away the mess and detail of how it arrives there or expresses itself, renders life pointless. 

Of course being guaranteed to get the thing you really want is terrifying. What exactly is the point of living, if you know exactly how it will turn out?