Funnyman Chris Rock is coming to Broadway in a new play that aims to take a fresh look at love and fidelity. The play promises to be refreshing, with Chris turning his roll-on-the-floor-in-laughter inducing gags on two such weighty issues. The play may just do for men what The Vagina Monologues did for women — bring into open, humorous discussion, concepts that are considered taboo among a particular gender.
Where love and commitment are concerned, men tend to be slotted into two extremes: The commitment phobic, alpha male who looks at women purely as objects for one night stands, and the chocolate lover, as made famous by Shah Rukh Khan. Of course, it’s chocolate lover that a majority of women are shown swooning over. But does nothing lie in between these two extremes?
Investment adviser Ankush Makhija says most men have a common conception of fidelity, but differ widely on what they expect from love. “Fidelity to me, as to most men, means physical loyalty, which is hard enough. The problem is that most women expect men to be loyal in their minds as well — which is impossible. So men tend to lie, and women pretend to believe those lies,” he says.
But the male species fall deep when they do fall in love, qualifies Ankush: “As Shakespeare once said, ‘love doth make jackasses of us all’, I think that for all our posturing, men are the greater fools for love. We just pretend that we’re not, because it’s cooler that way.”
Law student Samarth Moray, on the other hand, entertains no such tender feelings. “They mean nothing,” he asserts, grudgingly admitting that it may be because he’s had several bad relationships.
While some display honesty and others dismissiveness, a lot of men still treat love and fidelity as concepts deserving ridicule. “Love is when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie,” jests Delhi-based blogger Bharat Iyer. “And fidelity is the degree to which an electronic system accurately reproduces the sound or image of its input signal.”
Dance guru Sandeep Soparrkar puts the concepts back in perspective: “I don’t believe love and fidelity have changed for either the ‘New Age’ or the ‘Old Age’ man! There were men whom you called ‘a one-woman man’ and there were others who had plenty of affairs. And there are as many men of both types even now. It’s an individual’s choice. You can never spot a trend where men are concerned.”