The Mirror Has Two Faces

As I stood at the altar beside my sister and her husband-to-be, it struck me that this “ritual” called a wedding ceremony is really just the final scene of a fairytale.

Nobody ever tells you what happens after the ritual though.

Nobody ever tells you that Cinderella drove Prince Philip crazy with her obsessive need to clean the castle (because she missed her day job, right?).

Nobody ever tells you what happens after because...there is no after.

The be-all and end-all of romantic love was/is marriage. Marriage, that's right.

But it wasn't always like that...

Around the 12th century there was a notion called courtly love where love had nothing to do with marriage and nothing to do with sex. In most cases it was defined as a passionate relationship between a knight and a lady of the court who was already married; and so they could never consummate their love. They would have to rise above your ordinary (you know, going to the bathroom in front of each other kind of love) and find something more divine. They took sex out of the equation and what was left was a union of souls.

Now think of this: sex was always the fatal love potion.

Look at the literature: 'Lancelot and Guinevere', 'Tristan and Isolde' (for examples) - all consummation could lead to was madness, despair, or death!

Clinical experts, scholars, and my Aunt Esther are united in the belief that true love has spiritual dimensions while romantic love is nothing but a lie...an illusion...modern myth...a soulless manipulation.

Speaking of manipulation...

It's like going to the movies to see a romance film, when we see the lovers on screen kiss, the music swells, and we like it, right? So that makes you think when my date takes you home and kisses you goodnight, if I don't hear the philharmonic in my head, you dump him!

Now the question is: why do we buy it?

We buy it because whether it's a myth or a manipulation, let's face it: we all want to fall in love.

Why?

Because that experience makes us feel completely alive! Where every sense is heightened, every emotion magnified, where our everyday reality is shattered and flung into the heavens!

It may only last a moment, an hour, or an afternoon...but it doesn't diminish its value because we're left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives.

I read an article a while ago that says when we fall in love we hear Puccini in our heads. I love that. I think it's because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and romantic love. And while we listen to La Boheme or read 'Wuthering Heights' or watch 'Casa Blanca'...a little bit of that love lives in us too.

So the final question is: why do people want to fall in love when it can have such short shelf life and be devastatingly painful?

It leads to the propagation of the species? Psychologically, we need to connect to somebody? Because we're culturally pre-conditioned? Good answers but much too intellectual for me.

I think it's because, as some of you already may know, while you have it...it feels fucking great!

Happiness vs. Excitement

Too many people pursue happiness. You shouldn't. Because happy situations rarely stay happy. Instead, you should pursue excitement. Everyone gets excited over little and big things. Excitement is actually the glue that holds together happiness. -- Frankie

Or some bullshit like that. The point is...embrace the excitement and treat it as happiness and be content with that!

I get excited over lots of little things: seeing my nephews after weeks and weeks of not, the thought of doing something i've wanted to do in a long time, a new episode of Once Upon A Time, hearing someone's good news, etc. Thinking like this helps me get through tricky times and would highly recommend practising the principle if life is dealing you a shitty hand lately.

The Jane Austen Marriage Manual

Tagline: Doesn't every girl wish she could find her Mr Darcy?

My friend sent me this book yesterday and I read it all last night.

It's a romantic comedy, sort of like a modern Pride and Prejudice. I love the Jane Austen themes and how the beginning of each chapter starts with a Jane Austen quote, such as: “Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief" - Emma (Jane Austen).

It's about a single, forty year old woman who goes on a mission to prove that she can “make a good marriage” in modern times. In other words, she throws her scruples out the window and sets off on a mercenary mission to marry for money.

Sparkle

Carrie Bradshaw mentioned the "sparkle" in one of the Sex and the City movies, someone wrote a whole book about it, and we have lost it. Anyway, "life is like a washing machine" so...make sure you have a good plumber on stand-by? Or something to that effect. It's late and my brain is mashed. I'll leave you with this excerpt of relevance to how i'm feeling right now from a book I read once:

There was an unsettling feeling in her stomach. Not just the pit of her stomach like if she was upset or ashamed. But a stirring in the whole of her stomach, unsettling her, because she sensed what was coming.
"In light of the situation," she found herself saying, "I think we should--"
"No." He interrupted abruptly. "Take a break? No. Split up? No. I'm not having that."
Exasperation made her rolls her eyes.
"It's not just your decision, Stace."
"It's not just yours either." She countered. "And besides," she added to her argument, "when I start messing you around THEN you can come at me with that." She exhaled the stirring tension in her stomach. "I am sick to death of how you're treating me - I'm tired of the whiplash of changing emotions that you cause me."
Silence.
What was she expecting exactly? A better expectation for his questionable actions? An apology?
She exhaled calmly again.
"I don't know what you want me to say..."
She offered him a wan smile, her usually unwavering sympathy disappearing into thin air, and then she nodded slowly.
"When it comes to me, you never do."
He opened his mouth to protest.
He's socially awkward. He's not a good communicator. He's unable to think up conversions. He's inept at speaking his own thoughts.
"Yet when it comes to anybody else, you become a poet with your ideas and your music and your stories..."
By the end of every day, the only thing he had left for her was a simple goodnight when all she wanted was to know about his day.
"Stace..."
"Stop." She held her breath for exactly ten seconds, she counted in her head.
That's when she walked away. She could no longer deal with the stress of this conversation.
Or if she was quite honest with herself, she was fed up of having the same conversation over and over again. The awful thing about it was that she knew when she woke up the following morning things will resume their normality.
Life is like a washing machine, it has plenty of different settings, but she was pretty sure hers was faulty and was stuck on a repeat spin cycle.

It took me five hours to do this floor plan. Picking out correct shapes, readjusting the angles, resizing the items,  measuring distances, adding colours, and locking each item in place... Very tedious work. That is the last time I do a favour for someone.

A friend of mine e-mailed me this picture and said "I imagine your life to be like this". I don't know what he's trying to say about me...