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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
"so that ideas like licking warm whipped cream off his hairy belly seems like a delicious prospect"
That was the funniest thing I have read all day. Thanks for making me LOL.
I have for a long time thought this obsession we Americans have with encouraging excessive princess-thinking in our girls is part of what leads to disappointment in young women out of their live and marriages.
It is as if we encouraged our young men to fantasize and fetishize beautiful young women as the only acceptable women to like.
Granted, boys and girls both will dream their dreams, but pushing those dreams to unrealistic levels is where the problem lies.
I like the line someone said, that marriage is a choice to love and work with the other person, not something to bail out on at the first sign of trouble.
I sure would feel a lot more secure about the idea of marriage if I thought there was any plausible reason to believe women are willing to work on marriage. I see a lot of people instead giving up way too easily.
I love romance, I love to treat women well, but lately it seems I am with the wrong women or something, they use me for the romance and do not feel the need to reciprocate back (and I am not talking about just sex!). It is as if the women EXPECT princess treatment just because they are women, as if they are only there to take things. No wonder I give up on women and treating them well. With that kind of BS, it only makes sense to treat women badly, like the sort of guys that women actually sem to gravitate towards.
If you wait for your life to get as romantic as those cheap paperbacks, one day you'll wake up too old to appreciate the beautiful reality that is there for you.
Disclaimer:
You'll never too old, I know. Segovia learned to play the guitar at 50, etc. But for a woman, if she wants to have kids, she'd better get realistic about partners by age 30 or so, just as an example.
The point is, don't waste your life waiting for the impossible. It IS possible to wake up and realize you've wasted decades you can not get back when you could have been savoring life and making the most of it instead of waiting for an impossible fantasy.
Yes, cosmic mojo is right. We (especially women over 30, of course) should all just find someone stable and nice enough and settle down. Why aspire for more? Security and following the path socially prescribed for us is what we all must be after, right?
Did it occur to anyone that passion and true love are the stuff of life? Give me an hour of true love over a lifetime of ho-hum anyday. Dying without ever having felt passionate, soul-baring love is an absolute tragedy. I'm tired of watching friend after friend settle when they're not really in love, out of fear of being alone. Life can be so much sweeter!
Actually, there is one person out there who has the ability to make your life thrilling, complete, and fulfilling. That person is You.
I can't help but notice the parallels here between romance novels and beauty magazines. Studies have shown that women feel worse about themselves after reading beauty magazines, presumably because they're disappointed about their real life not measuring up to the standard of perfection. I wouldn't be at all surprised if women who regularly read romance novels similarly feel disillusioned in the relationships they do have or feel like they will never find true love.
I just celebrated my 12-year wedding anniversary. My parents have been married more than 30 years, which was a positive example, but they also said that I should hold out for my "soulmate", the one with whom I would have a magical, passionate, intense chemistry. And so for the first half of my marriage I was constantly disappointed and figured that I chose the wrong man, because we didn't have that fairy-tale kind of magic and I thought that there must be such a person waiting out there somewhere for me. I was overlooking the good marriage I already had because I was so busy thinking that I had missed my soulmate who would make me feel the romance-novel kind of fireworks.
During one of my conversations with my husbands (which was probably pretty obnoxious, in retrospect) in which I worried about the fact that we weren't soulmates, he said that he thinks we are. He said that soulmates aren't something you're fated to be, but something you become over time. I think he's right. I've known more than my fair share of people who claimed to be marrying their "soulmates" and ended up divorced later. Once you have really gotten to know your spouse over many years, and you still love them and want to be with them anyway, that's a soulmate. That's a mature kind of love, rather than a blind one. It's not about settling for less than you deserve - it's about choosing someone, growing together and becoming true lifemates.
I believe it was in the movie "Closer" that said something like "If you're looking for love at first sight, you never stop looking." I think there's a lot of truth to that. A lot of women approach looking forward to meeting Mr. Right the same way kids look forward to Christmas. But the problem with that approach is that, if you think back to Christmas as a kid, there's always the moment of letdown when you realize everything you waited for is here and there's no more anticipation. Love is about a lot more than magic; it's about how you make it through when the initial excitement is gone.
i held out for my soulmate after years and years of dating lots of okay guys... i hoped every boy before him might thrill me, and some of them did, but the one i married does so in quieter ways, just by being himself, lots of the time.
i agree with cary - just stay open to it. create that space. that's about the most you can do. that's what i did.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
