I went to see a screening of the movie "500 Days of Summer" tonight. They say in the previews that it's a story about love but not a love story and I can agree with that. But I will say this, it just helped cement how much of a complete and over the top romantic I am. As much as I have tried in the last few years to downplay it and be practical about ever finding it-I am wildly, passionately, whole-soulishly devoted to the concept of true love.
I was talking to someone this week about gratuitous PDA and she said, "you know at our age, we are just not going to be in love with the same intensity as we would have ten years ago." I had to disagree. I believe in crazy romance and finding a soul mate and that falling in love changes everything. And I know it sounds kind of naive, and maybe even a little bit unrealistic, but over the years I've had enough glimpses at what it CAN feel like to keep my little dream alive.
That's not to say I'm expecting perfection, or that I don't understand that love is not always fun or easy. In lots of ways I'm just as excited about getting through the crappy stuff as I am the good stuff. I was trying to explain this one night to a couple of my married friends who thought I was diminishing my own life by saying that I think people are better off in pairs. But after 32 years on my own, I believe it more then ever. It's good to be on a team. It's even better to be on a team with someone you can fight with just as comfortably as you can sleep with. I also happen to believe that people should do their own thing for as long as their own life schedule requires. I'm a person who just never would have been happy getting married young. I've had lots of things I wanted to do and gone through lots of things I think I have absolutely needed to do alone. Being single is really great and I feel lucky to have had the time to figure myself out in ways I personally probably wouldn't have had I been married.
But.
I only have to see the way my grandfather still looks at my grandma after like a million years together and how much they just genuinely like to be together and well, that's what I'm holding out for. And I'll totally wait.
Anyway, see the movie. It's sweet.
4 comments:
For what it's worth being four years and two biological kids in to a marriage (so, early days still, admittedly), for me the mundane becomes the romantic. That's tough to articulate and probably sounds miserably boring, but the demands of life don't allow for many "classic" romantic moments. Fortunately, it's all the small things that do it for me. To the degree that Tauni and I are both always fighting to find more and more time to spend together (less work, less distractions), I think it's a great barometer of us doing well. In many ways, love is who you want to spend your time with. My wife and kids trump everyone in that department.
hi, i'm a blog stalker. :)
this is excellent: "It's even better to be on a team with someone you can fight with just as comfortably as you can sleep with. "
So well said!!!
Sounds like a good movie. I'm totally romantic at heart too. (My favorite movie is Moulin Rouge.)
I would need to see it first to know what I think, but once I started learning about adult attachment theory and viewing THAT as love rather than just the infatuation at the beginning, my views totally changed and I think we really can be in love, even with GREATER intensity (security or safety is probably a better word) than we are at first.
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