Thoughts from a book.

Howard and I share many interests, but there are a few things we feel very differently about. He persists in renting zombie movies which I won’t watch and I continue to read books written in different centuries than my own which baffles him. I enjoy modern books as well. Modern books are like being taken for a ride. All the events and characterizations are compact and flow quickly making the books exciting to read and hard to put down. In contrast books from prior centuries read much more like a scenic stroll through the countryside. They lend themselves to frequent stops for contemplation and lots of wandering thoughts. Right now I’m just getting into Middlemarch by George Elliot. I’ve never read it before and I’m enjoying watching the characters unfold without knowing how it will turn out. This is a nice contrast to re-reading one of Jane Austen’s books. I love Austen, but I already know all the endings three or four times over.

As I was reading Middlemarch I came across a passage which prompted a pause for contemplation. The passage was this:
“now more than ever she was active in sketching her landscapes and market-cares and portraits of friends, in practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.”

It caught my attention because I remember doing exactly that during my teenage years, altering my actions as if I were in a movie or somehow on display even when I was alone. In my head I was the heroine of a musical or some other grand romance. I imagined futures for myself and then got confused when other people departed the script. I think many of my romantic failures occurred because my chosen hero refused the role I had chosen for him. Just prior to meeting Howard I decided that I needed to stop seeking romance and just seek to be myself. Ironically this decision ushered in three months where I had dozens of romantic prospects just when I didn’t want any. Then came Howard. Somehow he came along, grabbed my romantic script, and completely revised it. I ended up with something much more meaningful and lasting than any of the books, movies, or fairytales had prepared me for.

American society is awash in tales where people fall in love. Frequently the romantic pair spend the whole movie or book misunderstanding each other only to discover at the end that they’ve “loved” each other all along. (As an aside, I don’t believe in love at first sight. Lust at first sight, yes. Attraction at first sight, yes. But Love is something that takes time and effort to grow.) In movies and books we always see “falling in love” without ever seeing “being in love” or “building a life together” or “toleration and forgiveness.” Is it any wonder that my youthful romantic scripting was so skewed?

I think that is one reason why I like old literature. The characters have time for complex motivations and gradual growth of feelings. Events aren’t compressed to take place in a mere three days time so a relationship has time to grow over the course of months or years. It much more accurately represents the way that real relationships grow and wane. I sometimes ponder how to counteract this “falling in love” culture. How do I teach my children the value in building and nurturing a relationship even when the adrenaline rush of courtship is over? The best way I can think of is to stay happily married to Howard. If my kids can see their parents being happy together, playing together, laughing together, and sharing a closeness that can only be grown over years of shared experience, then they’ll at least know there is something better available. Whether that will be enough for them to build realistic expectations for relationships I don’t know.