ThinkBlog

That’s a long query of a title directed at the heart of a fallacy any well-read person is exposed to over and over in fiction (or, for that matter, on-screen).

Whereas* in the popular media we are taught that the man must be dapper and witty, subtle yet charming—and that women must be seductive but innocent, beautiful and passionate; and whereas both partners are supposed to have neatly-packaged pellets of emotional distress, easily resolvable between the penultimate commercial break and the end credits: I submit to you that real people run deep, have concerns and fears, sometimes smell less than petunia-esque, get indigestion, and are wont to commit multitudinous faux pas.

I submit to you that sharing fears and doubts, along with laughter and fun, is more romantic than anything you read in the books—at least the ones that are meant to be romantic. Being caught up in feelings of romance—and they are feelings, mind you, much less to do with rational choice than with baser magnetism—is like watching a fireworks display that you’re both setting off together.

Maybe you giggle with nervous attention as he lights an M-80 and holds it in his hand till the last second before throwing it just above your heads; maybe you dazzle as she lights a dozen bottle rockets all in a row. You banter with scripted wit, you kiss and imagine it means more than it ever can, you do whatever it is you do to make those fireworks keep going. Meanwhile, all your emotional tender is going up in smoke. “Let not the sparks die out! We shall have more!” And you spend some bit of your heart you don’t have to give on more and more fireworks for this one moment—be it hours, days, weeks, months, however long you can both keep up without destroying one another—for this one night full of aluminum-powder flashes and gunpowder-reports.

You know what happens with that kind of romance? The next morning, you both wake up and realize that you’ve burned yourselves and each other; your clothes are pocked with ash-holes, and you both reek something awful of sulphur. You can’t find enough ice for all the little burns, your clothes are going to have to be thrown out, and you get this sickening, sinking feeling of remembering that you just blew all the money you had the night—the moment—before. Bacchanalian passion, warm and shadowy in the pale moonlight, gives way to a hunger and regret in the morning sun. You go outside and all the flashes of the night before lie in spent hulls around your feet, and you feel strangely like a spent hull yourself. Confused that what you thought was love that would sustain, never to want again, turned to ash on your clothes, in your mouths, in your hearts—you eventually turn one from another, disillusioned and just one notch more jaded. The kind of jaded that “can only be cast out by much prayer and fasting,” if I may be so bold.**

No, real romance, gentle reader, is in the patient, hard times that you both share. It’s in the daily living. It’s in the details. It’s the way you don’t have to keep up appearances. It’s the way you forgive him for being short with you when you’ve had just as hard a day as he has. It’s the way you show up at his place in pajama pants and no makeup and he’s so glad to see you he just melts into your arms. It’s the way he does chores you know he hates to give you tacitly something deeper than Sinatra could ever sing. It’s the way you both admit you’re scared or worried or apprehensive or have doubts about anything and everything and neither thinks any less of the other—because that’s life. It’s the way you take your 27 cards and he takes his, and you both leave the jokers in the deck just to spice it up a bit, and then you shuffle them and suddenly your deck is fuller together than any Hoyle ever pressed.

When you’re not wearing a scarlet silk tie and shiny black loafers to match your fedora; when she’s not wearing diamonds or eyeshadow or the high heels. When there’s nothing left in the martini glass but a lipstick stain and a toothpick bereft of its olives; when the lights go up and the band packs out. When you both take off the rose-colored glasses and your hair is tousled and you have broccoli in your teeth and sunlight burns off the “magic.” When you’re just one person sitting across from another person, each with your own burdens and joys but sharing them with one another—doing life. Together. That’s romance. The unshakable foundation of a solid friendship, secure brother/sisterhood in Christ—here’s the secret—makes for a pool of such emotional tender that you can put on your own fireworks displays, but without the desperation to do it all before the metaphorical morning burns the beauty away.

(More on this later.)

Notes

*(Reading Washington’s address makes me realize that not nearly enough sentences these days start with “whereas,” involve a colon, and are Faulknerian (Kantian?) in length while still retaining syntactical integrity.)

** It’s important to realize that I’m not talking about sex or even necessarily anything all that physical; but the building of castles in the sky, the chasing of a feeling for that feeling’s sake (thereby making a drug of the other person), the storing up of grain for oneself, as it were, when one’s soul will be demanded of him or her that night.

Shout out to my friend JR, who nailed it with her poem, “Wife for a Weekend.“

That’s a long query of a title directed at the heart of a fallacy any well-read person is exposed to over and over in fiction (or, for that matter, on-screen).

Whereas* in the popular media we are taught that the man must be dapper and witty, subtle yet charming—and that women must be seductive but innocent, beautiful and passionate; and whereas both partners are supposed to have neatly-packaged pellets of emotional distress, easily resolvable between the penultimate commercial break and the end credits: I submit to you that real people run deep, have concerns and fears, sometimes smell less than petunia-esque, get indigestion, and are wont to commit multitudinous faux pas.

I submit to you that sharing fears and doubts, along with laughter and fun, is more romantic than anything you read in the books—at least the ones that are meant to be romantic. Being caught up in feelings of romance—and they are feelings, mind you, much less to do with rational choice than with baser magnetism—is like watching a fireworks display that you’re both setting off together.

Maybe you giggle with nervous attention as he lights an M-80 and holds it in his hand till the last second before throwing it just above your heads; maybe you dazzle as she lights a dozen bottle rockets all in a row. You banter with scripted wit, you kiss and imagine it means more than it ever can, you do whatever it is you do to make those fireworks keep going. Meanwhile, all your emotional tender is going up in smoke. “Let not the sparks die out! We shall have more!” And you spend some bit of your heart you don’t have to give on more and more fireworks for this one moment—be it hours, days, weeks, months, however long you can both keep up without destroying one another—for this one night full of aluminum-powder flashes and gunpowder-reports.

You know what happens with that kind of romance? The next morning, you both wake up and realize that you’ve burned yourselves and each other; your clothes are pocked with ash-holes, and you both reek something awful of sulphur. You can’t find enough ice for all the little burns, your clothes are going to have to be thrown out, and you get this sickening, sinking feeling of remembering that you just blew all the money you had the night—the moment—before. Bacchanalian passion, warm and shadowy in the pale moonlight, gives way to a hunger and regret in the morning sun. You go outside and all the flashes of the night before lie in spent hulls around your feet, and you feel strangely like a spent hull yourself. Confused that what you thought was love that would sustain, never to want again, turned to ash on your clothes, in your mouths, in your hearts—you eventually turn one from another, disillusioned and just one notch more jaded. The kind of jaded that “can only be cast out by much prayer and fasting,” if I may be so bold.**

No, real romance, gentle reader, is in the patient, hard times that you both share. It’s in the daily living. It’s in the details. It’s the way you don’t have to keep up appearances. It’s the way you forgive him for being short with you when you’ve had just as hard a day as he has. It’s the way you show up at his place in pajama pants and no makeup and he’s so glad to see you he just melts into your arms. It’s the way he does chores you know he hates to give you tacitly something deeper than Sinatra could ever sing. It’s the way you both admit you’re scared or worried or apprehensive or have doubts about anything and everything and neither thinks any less of the other—because that’s life. It’s the way you take your 27 cards and he takes his, and you both leave the jokers in the deck just to spice it up a bit, and then you shuffle them and suddenly your deck is fuller together than any Hoyle ever pressed.

When you’re not wearing a scarlet silk tie and shiny black loafers to match your fedora; when she’s not wearing diamonds or eyeshadow or the high heels. When there’s nothing left in the martini glass but a lipstick stain and a toothpick bereft of its olives; when the lights go up and the band packs out. When you both take off the rose-colored glasses and your hair is tousled and you have broccoli in your teeth and sunlight burns off the “magic.” When you’re just one person sitting across from another person, each with your own burdens and joys but sharing them with one another—doing life. Together. That’s romance. The unshakable foundation of a solid friendship, secure brother/sisterhood in Christ—here’s the secret—makes for a pool of such emotional tender that you can put on your own fireworks displays, but without the desperation to do it all before the metaphorical morning burns the beauty away.

(More on this later.)

Notes

*(Reading Washington’s address makes me realize that not nearly enough sentences these days start with “whereas,” involve a colon, and are Faulknerian (Kantian?) in length while still retaining syntactical integrity.)

** It’s important to realize that I’m not talking about sex or even necessarily anything all that physical; but the building of castles in the sky, the chasing of a feeling for that feeling’s sake (thereby making a drug of the other person), the storing up of grain for oneself, as it were, when one’s soul will be demanded of him or her that night.

Shout out to my friend JR, who nailed it with her poem, “Wife for a Weekend.“