( Continue... )
There is an ideal of love that escapes me. I understand Real Love, the kind of love that sparks comfort and consideration in the little things-- like "I Bought Your Favorite Candy Bar and Put it in the Fridge for When You Got Home" Love, "You Had a Long Day So I'll Rub Your Feet" Love, or "I Left You the Last Bowl of Cracklin' Oat Bran" Love. This kind of love I know well. It is another kind of love that has come to both obsess and repulse me recently. We'll call it Literary Love.
Literary Love is the timeless ideal embodied by every Prince Charming sought by every self-acclaimed princess from Sleeping Beauty to Sarah Jessica Parker. It's the core element of classic romance and Chick Lit. And it drives me batshit insane for two reasons: it is either something I have yet failed to achieve, or it is (in all likelihood) an impossible ideal. I wish I could say I don't know which thought bothers me more, but it is most decidedly the former.
It would only irk me slightly to view Literary Love in the same light as I view other fictional ideals and fictional characters. It seems to me that someone miscast Infatuation (a "Phase One" relationship trait) as an enduring concept. It's a nice idea, one that during my mid-teens I believed in very much. But I look around me and even in the most stable, loving relationships I fail to see even a glint of Literary Love. The people I watch fall in and out of Literary Love pass through countless brief sparks of passion, crash into heartbreak and repeat the process. It never lasts. So I can either choose not to believe in this once-treasured ideal... Or...
I can decide that I haven't experienced it because I haven't found Prince Charming. And that's what Chick Lit would like me to believe. That I ought to be the Perfect Woman with the Perfect Man (other fictional roles that modern society loves to embrace). It would be easy to brush off this absurd notion had I not been so obsessed with romance at one time, and so disenfranchised with it now. It would be easy if some part of my brain didn't keep nattering that I shouldn't settle for anything less than True Love, Literary Love.
Settling. I equate that word with personal death. All my life I watched my parents "settle" for one thing after another, their hopes and dreams wasting away into bitter, withered self-pity and self-loathing. My dad told me to prepare myself for an adult life filled with disappointment, and in my own way, I did. I promised myself not to settle for anything less than my expectations, because if I did, I would become just like them.
And that's why Literary Love infuriates me. Because I'm either being lied to, or I'm not good enough. I'm caught between a little girl conscience and the voice of my father, the idealist and the rationalist, the ignorant optimist and the level-headed pessimist. It makes me a little bit cynical.
At the core of it is that whole bit about "settling." If the world around me tells me that I ought to have Literary Love to be happy and I see that everyone around me doesn't have it, I oughtn't "settle" for less, right? I equate it with stangnancy, apathy, and giving up. The truth is that I ought to ignore the word entirely; throw it out. I might try on "acceptance" for size. Acceptance of where I am and who I'm with instead of struggling against the flow to get somewhere better. I know this-- but what's that stupid saying?
"Knowing is half the battle." Only half.
Posted on October 06, 2005 @ 4:28 PM | 3 comments
Comments:
You have identified the real reason why Literary Love frustratres you so: you equate LL to settling and you equate settling to unhappiness. An unfortunate model of settling has been modeled for you, as you say of your parents, and you have made a consious decision that you don't want to follow the model that they have shown you.
So how does this tie into your current relationship? I know that you know that LL is not sustainable, nor functional. So why desire it at all? There are other checks and balances available to ensure that you are not merely settling for the Real Love that you have.
I guess I am left confused as to why you would want a Literary Love figure anyway. Perhaps it a mental check and balance on Real Love?
By 
Rachel, at
3:14 PM, October 08, 2005
Because another safety mechanism I've developed as a result of my parents' "deadly mediocrity" is overachievement. Nothing's ever good enough, and despite those checks-and-balances I find myself constantly second-guessing and reanalyzing a so-called "decision" I may have firmly made a minute, a day, or a month before. I have problems veryfying my feelings and/or understanding what they mean. A part of me thinks that when everything is "right," it will all be clear. But in my experience, this has never happened, and so far as I know has never happened for anyone I know... but there's that sort of fairy-tale stereotype that it WILL happen or SHOULD happen, which I think my subconscious overachiever mind still believes.
By 
Kat, at
2:20 PM, October 09, 2005
I am surprised to hear you start your new blog with this crisis of faith - the same lingering haze that has left wisps of doubt on my horizons for the last five years.
Of course there might be better matches, new and different dawns - but will could any of them every truly part those doubts?
The cynic would say that once one begins to question, there is no return to that state of blissfull certainty. You must decide, then, how much risk you are willing to accept. Yes... you could find something new, but you will always, always wonder if there is something better - or if there could have been something better if you'd not taken that risk.
Someone trying to offer wisdom might say that you cannot predict the future, so you must accept the present. You must act in the interest of what you feel - there is no analytical means to know what is "right" or what is possible.
One thing is true of adult life - it is sure to be filled with uncertainty. Whether or not that will equate to disappointment is... I like to hope... something that one has the power to determine for oneself.
Besides, just to say point out the obvious and cliche, how many literary love stories have you read that ever went on in detail about anything more that the first few months of a relationship in any terms other than "and they lived hapilly ever after" or some other uncertain but optimistic conclusion.
Still... one wonders how that concept of love came to be such a powerful archetype in the human psyche if it is truly an untouchable ideal? Does it bear any more relevance to the reality of your life than any other great icon of myth?
By , at
2:07 AM, October 10, 2005
