«A love that can't fail»: the boyfriend with a guarantee in «Mejor que Ben Affleck»

Call now. Stocks are limited. If you're not completely satisfied, we'll refund your money. We all grew up with that late-night shopping-channel voice, the knife that slices tins and tomatoes, the shapewear that takes off three sizes, the mattress that changes your life. And when I read the chorus of «Mejor que Ben Affleck» («Better than Ben Affleck»), that's the voice I hear:

He creado un amor / ¡Que no puede fallar! («I've created a love / that can't fail!»)

A love that can't fail. Exclamation mark included, like the crossed-out price on a sale sign.

On the song's own page I've already gone through the list of the perfect boyfriend, the Jennifer López joke and the punchline in the title. Here I want to stay with that promise, the craziest one in the whole lyric. Because a boyfriend who's handsome, clever and punctual is a fairly common fantasy. What isn't common is anyone daring to say he won't fail. Not even the priest says that at the wedding.

And it interests me because failing, in love, is the only thing we really know how to do. Everything else we learn as we go. Failing comes naturally.

The heart's shopping channel

The song is built like an advert. I can hear it in the rhythm of the published lyric, which repeats the product's qualities over and over, like those ads that tell you the phone number three times so you won't forget it. He's handsome. He's clever. He's punctual. He's nice. He's sensual. Then the guarantee. Then the comparison with the competition: better than the ones before, better than Ben Affleck.

It's the exact structure of a shopping channel. First the problem: flesh-and-blood men let you down. Then the product: a boyfriend made with artificial intelligence. Then the benefits. Then the satisfied customer's testimonial. And finally, the guarantee that seals the deal.

It's not the only time I go into shopping-channel mode about love. In «3 años de garantía» the narrator sees a boy advertised on television, orders him, has him delivered to the living room and even leaves him a good review on Google. These two songs are first cousins. Both treat the boyfriend like a household appliance, and both laugh at an idea that, if you think about it, is everywhere: that love can be picked from a catalogue, like an energy-efficient washing machine.

Dating apps work a bit like that, don't they? You filter by age, height, distance, smoker or non-smoker. You draw up your list of requirements and wait for the catalogue to serve you the product. The song just takes that logic one step further: if you're going to choose from a catalogue, better to build your own.

The trouble is that catalogues never warn you about the most important thing. That the product, once it gets home, never looks like the photo.

Handsome, clever and always on time

Before going on, I want to linger on the list. Because of all the made-to-order boyfriend's qualities, there's one I find the most revealing, and it isn't «handsome» or «hot». It's «punctual».

Always on time. Look at what that says about whoever's asking. Nobody puts punctuality on their ideal-boyfriend list unless they've done a lot of waiting. Unless they've sat on a terrace in Malasaña watching the clock, ordering a second beer to save face, pretending to read something on their phone while the waiter looks at them with pity. Unless they've had the «there in five» message that means forty. Unless they've dressed up for a dinner that started an hour late and ended with an excuse.

Punctuality is a humble quality. It never makes the cover. Nobody falls in love with someone for turning up on time. But anyone who's waited a lot knows it's a form of respect, a way of saying «you matter enough that I won't keep you waiting». That's why it's on the list, next to handsome and clever, as if it were just as important. For her, it is.

And there's a community irony here I can't resist pointing out. Lateness is almost a cultural trait on the scene. You arrange to meet at eleven and the first girl turns up at quarter to twelve, hair still wet, with a story about a taxi. Anyone who's been out on a Saturday night in Chueca knows it. So asking for a boyfriend who's always on time, in certain circles, is asking for an outright miracle. No wonder he has to be manufactured.

And mind, I'm not saying it from on high. We've all turned up late at some point to important dates blaming the Metro, line 5, a breakdown at Callao station that never happened.

Nice, hot, sensual. A real man can have all of that, even if only now and then. Always on time: that's science fiction.

Failing is the only thing we know how to do

Let's take stock, because there's plenty of material in my lyrics.

My songs are full of boyfriends who turn up late, boyfriends who don't turn up, boyfriends who turn up with someone else. Men who lie, men who vanish, men who dump you by WhatsApp, men who come back when you no longer want them. And also, in all fairness, a narrator who fails a great deal. Who falls for the wrong man. Who goes back when he shouldn't. Who wonders, as in «La casa de los mil cadáveres», how he can be so stupid.

Failing is our thing. It's the most human thing we have. And that's why the promise of a love that doesn't fail sounds so good and so false at once. So good, because we're tired. So false, because we know that the day something can't fail will be the day it's no longer alive.

In «Me rindo» there are some very precise sums about what a love gone wrong costs: forty shares of blame handed out, a three per cent of pain the other one doesn't feel. Put that song next to «Mejor que Ben Affleck» and you have the before and after of the same story. First you give up. Then you build one who'll never make you give up again.

I understand. I swear I do. Some days I'd build one in the living room, instruction manual and all.

A satisfied customer

There's another detail I really like, and it shows in the comparison with Jennifer López: the song is told by a woman. She's the one who created the boyfriend. She, the satisfied customer in the advert, showing him off to all her friends the way you'd show off a new handbag.

Writing from inside another skin is something I do often. Not all my lyrics speak as a forty-something queer from Madrid, though plenty do. Sometimes the voice telling the story is a fed-up woman, a nosy neighbour, a mother, a diva. And here the choice is a clever one, because the fantasy of the perfect catalogue boyfriend is one of those that has been sold to women for decades, in the romance novels at the newsstand, in the magazines, in the afternoon soaps. Prince Charming was the flagship product.

The song takes that product and changes the manufacturer. Destiny no longer delivers him, and the prince doesn't arrive on horseback. You build him yourself, at home, with artificial intelligence. She doesn't wait for the perfect man to come along. She makes him. It's a very modern way of taking the power away from the fantasy: if he won't show up, I'll program him.

And there's something liberating in that, even as a joke. The customer no longer depends on the catalogue getting it right.

The Ben Affleck bar

Now, the comparison in the title. Why Ben Affleck?

Because Ben Affleck is the Hollywood leading man we all carry in our heads. Not the handsomest man in the world, nor the finest actor of his generation, but something more useful: the standard. The magazine boyfriend. The one in the red-carpet photos in a well-cut suit and in the paparazzi shots with a coffee in his hand and a Monday face. He's the average bar of the desirable man according to the gossip press.

And the song takes that bar and clears it effortlessly. My made-to-order boyfriend is better than Ben Affleck. With two exclamation marks at the end, in case it wasn't clear.

That way of measuring makes me laugh. Because it's how we really measure, even if we don't admit it. We compare the boyfriend to the ex, the ex to the actor, the actor to the cover star. We live surrounded by measuring sticks we never chose. And flesh-and-blood love always loses, because the flesh-and-blood man snores, leaves his socks on the floor and doesn't have a make-up team behind him.

The song's joke is that to beat Hollywood you have to leave the human realm. No real man can be better than Ben Affleck in a photo. Only an invented one. And that, when you think about it, is sadder than it is funny. But I'll leave that for later.

Bennifer at the hairdresser's

Here I have to talk about a sentimental education so many queers of my generation shared: the magazines at the hairdresser's.

While the ladies had their rollers put in, there were kids reading ¡Hola!, Diez Minutos, Lecturas, Semana. Aristocratic weddings, bullfighters' divorces, exclusives with the great ladies of Spanish song. It was our serialised soap opera. And in those pages you learned things school would never teach you: that love was a spectacle, that famous couples broke up with the same pomp they married with, that there was always another cover after.

Jennifer López and Ben Affleck were one of those soaps. The press christened them with a single name, Bennifer, as if they were a brand. They got engaged, they split, they went their separate ways for years, they found each other again much later, they married, and they split again. All on the cover. All with photos.

What those magazines taught, moreover, is that the gossip press has one golden rule: nobody wants to read about a love that works. A happy couple gives you one cover, the wedding. A couple breaking up gives you twenty: the crisis, the rumours, the photo without the ring, the statement, the dividing of the house, her new boyfriend, his interview. The money is in the failure. And that, which looks like newsstand cynicism, is also a truth about us: what hooks us in love stories is the chance they'll go wrong.

And here's the song's subtlest irony, the one that makes me smile every time. The bar it uses to measure the perfect boyfriend is precisely that of a couple who failed. Twice. With every resource in the world. If not even Jennifer López and Ben Affleck could make a love that didn't fail, what hope is there for the rest of us? None, except to build one.

That's why she compares herself to Jennifer López. Not the one on stage, but the one on the covers, who knows love on a grand scale and disaster on a grand scale. «I'm like her», she says. But with a boyfriend who can't fail.

No prenup

The best-known line of the lyric is this one:

Soy como Jennifer López / Sin contrato ¡prematrimonial! («I'm like Jennifer López / without a prenup!»)

And to me it's a perfect joke about the fear of failure. Because a prenuptial agreement is, at heart, a plan for when things go wrong. It's love with a fire extinguisher beside it. It's saying «I love you» and, at the same table, signing off on how the furniture gets divided the day you stop loving me.

The woman in the song doesn't need one. What for? If her love can't fail, there's no need for a notary. No need for a plan B. The made-to-order boyfriend comes with a factory guarantee, so the paperwork is superfluous.

There's something very small-town in this joke, and I say it fondly. The idea that the rich and famous need lawyers to get married while the rest of us just get on with it. The trouble is, the rest of us then divorce all the same, only without expensive lawyers, dividing up the sofa at the top of our voices. I've worked quite a lot on dividing-up in my lyrics, by the way. In «La Shakira y el pique de Todo a 1 euro» spite becomes a pound-shop spectacle, which is how divorces are done in my neighbourhood.

Much better than the ones before

There's a line at the end that almost slips by amid all the Ben Affleck, and it's the one that speaks to me most:

mucho mejor que los de antes («much better than the ones before»)

The ones before. Plural and nameless. A whole list of exes summed up in four words. No need to count them, name them or explain what they did. The ones before. The listener already knows what it's about. We've all got our «ones before».

I'm fascinated by everyday language's knack for packing an entire story into one phrase. «The ones before» is what your friend says when you introduce the new one: let's hope this one's better than the ones before. It's what your mother says with one eyebrow raised. It's what you tell yourself when the new one leaves you on read for the first time.

And the song cheats, of course. Because any manufactured boyfriend will be better than the ones before. It's like racing a car with no engine. The ones before had flaws because they were people. The new one has no flaws because he's nobody.

That's the twist that interests me. The song isn't only laughing at men who fail. It's also laughing, a little, at her, for preferring to win the contest by cheating rather than keep playing.

What can't fail can't surprise you either

And now the serious part. Just once, as always.

A love that can't fail is a love that can't surprise you either. If everything is programmed, if he's always on time, always says the right thing, if in bed it's always pure action and never a hilarious disaster, then there's nothing left to look forward to. No night when he turned up late but with flowers nicked from someone's garden. No absurd fight over the TV remote that ended in fits of laughter. No day when he said something so daft that you fell in love all over again.

What fails is what's alive. And what surprises, too.

That's why «Mejor que Ben Affleck» is a party song and not a manifesto. The made-to-order boyfriend fantasy is hilarious for three minutes. You laugh, you dance, you send the song to your ex with a message that just says «I've got a replacement». And then you turn off the music and go back to the world of people who fail. Which is the only place where real love is possible.

I've touched on the relationship between artificial intelligence and love several times. In «He creado un novio con inteligencia artificial» the same fantasy is told from another angle. And I, who make the music and the vocals of my songs with artificial-intelligence tools, am very clear about where the line is: the machine helps me dress the song, but I write the lyrics, with my failures, my exes and my silly days. If a machine ever wrote my lyrics without failing, they'd stop being mine.

Track 127, between El segundo exacto and El canario que miente

In the singles list of Planeta Gayfolk, «Mejor que Ben Affleck» is track 127 of 273, on «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk», the first album of the trilogy.

And its neighbours seem to have been chosen with malice. Just before it comes «El segundo exacto», where someone tells me what I do is artificial intelligence, that I press a button and that's that. Just after, «El canario que miente», with a flesh-and-blood man doing exactly what the manufactured boyfriend never would: lying.

It's an almost perfect order. First the argument with someone who looks down on AI. Then the AI-made boyfriend who can't fail. Then the real man who fails with all his might. Like a village-church triptych, but with wifi and sequins.

On the trilogy's first album everything is a first. A new planet appears, and on that planet, it seems, one of the first things anyone tries is building themselves a boyfriend. It makes perfect sense to me. If you reach a place where you make the rules, the first thing you do is fix whatever hurt most in the place before.

For anyone fed up with the ones before

If you've spent a year on dates that never happen, messages that go unanswered, men who promise and don't deliver, this song is for you. Turn it up. Laugh. Picture the perfect boyfriend, punctual, handsome, sensual, who never lets you down, who leaves Ben Affleck looking like an extra in an afternoon soap.

And then, when it ends, remember one thing. The fantasy is for the dance floor. For life, you'll have to carry on with the ones who fail. Me included, and I fail a fair bit.

And if one day you come across one who turns up on time, makes you laugh and also fails now and then with a bit of style, don't compare him to Ben Affleck. Or to the ones before. Or to the one you'd build in your living room. Let him be what he is: that's miracle enough.

But hey, at least with us you won't need a notary.

Frequently asked questions

What is «Mejor que Ben Affleck» about?

A woman fed up with flesh-and-blood men who builds herself a boyfriend with artificial intelligence, with a shopping-channel promise: a love that can't fail.

Why do Ben Affleck and Jennifer López appear?

They're the gossip press's measuring stick. The song uses the most famous cover couple as the bar, and the manufactured boyfriend clears it.

Who wrote «Mejor que Ben Affleck»?

I wrote the lyrics. I'm a lyricist, composer and music producer. The music and the vocals are made with artificial-intelligence tools such as Suno.

Which album is it on?

It's part of «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado Gayfolk», the first album of the GAYFOLK trilogy, and it's track 127 of the 273 singles.