Love that silences your imagination

Hello. I really would like to talk to you about love tonight.

I shouldn’t really know what love is. I’ve never had a proper relationship and my parents were very poor examples. (They are bitterly divorced.)

And yet I know what love is. I know what it looks like, I can sense when it is present. I can even imagine what it feels like. And best of all I feel confident that I will recognise it when it comes into my life. And guess how I know …

My friends showed me.

I have had four good friends get married, and another to come in January. And when I attended their weddings - which were celebrations of their love - I was given the opportunity to really look and think about their relationships. And it was only then I began to get a sense of what love is.

Truman Capote once said this about short story writing:

The test of whether or not a writer has divined the natural shape of his story is just this: after reading it, can you imagine it differently, or does it silence your imagination and seem to you absolute and final? As an orange is final. As an orange is something nature has made just right.

It is a gorgeous piece of imagery that I would also like to apply to love. That is not to say that each of the afore mentioned relationships were all smooth sailing - in fact there were significant challenges in almost all of them. They were not “destined to be”. And yet they came to be, and now as they are, it cannot be imagined any other way. There is something about these relationships that wholly and wonderfully makes sense.

That is how to recognise love. When, on reflection, no other alternative can even be imagined.

In defense of Pride and Prejudice’s Caroline Bingley

You know what one of the most terrible things about unrequited love is? Realizing that you were never the main character.

When you have a crush on someone, you assume you’re Elizabeth Bennett or Mr Darcy, of the beginning of what is going to be a very great love story. There are all these longing looks and coded meaning behind your friendly talk, but we all know what is going on here. Or at least you think you do.

The terrible thing about realizing that the person you were crushing on doesn’t give a rats ass about you is that all along you were actually Caroline Bingley. Don’t remember who she is? Of course you don’t, because she’s just a minor character in the story. Here’s Wikipedia to help jog your memory:

Caroline Bingley is the snobbish sister of Charles Bingley with a dowry of twenty thousand pounds. Miss Bingley harbours romantic intentions on Mr Darcy, is jealous of his growing attachment to Elizabeth, and is disdainful and rude to her.

That’s right. Caroline Bingley is the TOTAL DELUDED BUMHEAD who so stuuupidly thought she had a chance in hell next to the beautiful, smart, special ya di ya ya Elizabeth. She was but an insignificant blip in the horizons of the epic love affair that we’re all actually here to tune into (Darcy <3 Lizzy 4eVA). She makes no real impact on the storyline except to serve as an unlikeable foil to Elizabeth and to serve as a source of comic relief (where the joke is on her rather than with her.)

Sometimes I think that that’s all love really is. Two people who mutually agree to star in the same love story and render everyone else as minor characters.

Were it not for the fact that I know it’d be changed back almost immediately I’d change Caroline Bingley’s Wikipedia entry to:

Caroline Bingley is the much misunderstood sister of Charles Bingley. Like any single woman in the world she was vulnerable to romantic feelings and had the mistaken impression she and Mr Darcy would make a good match. When this turned out not to be the case she was bitterly disappointed (and perhaps unfairly took this out on Mr Darcy’s actual love interest Elizabeth, but who hasn’t been there?), but in time she got over this and eventually found a more appropriate match.

Boyfriend dreams

This is something that’s really only began in the last year or so - I’ve started having boyfriend dreams. That is, dreams where I have a boyfriend. We’re always doing super mundane things like lying on a bed (clothed) talking, or kissing.

The weird thing is that the guy in question isn’t usually someone I even have feelings for. Last night my “boyfriend” was this guy who is a mutual (and distant) friend of this guy that I do like. And I’ve even had a dream where I didn’t even want to be in the relationship, but I suppose had conceded to whatever social pressures there are on a 28 year old girl to have a boyfriend. Egads, what a thing to dream of.

I suspect these dreams have had something to do with the three weddings I’ve attended this year (and one more to go.) I have simply entered “that stage” in life where everyone you know is getting married, or already done so, and you become part of a very special breed of person because you’re still on the scene. You know, the Sex and the City age. At my recent high school reunion about half the grade had married, and the other half were all in long-term, stable relationships.

So there is a reality to face here. The pool of single people is dwindling. I don’t say that in a desperate, panicky way, just an observation. It changes the dynamic. When you’re in your teens and early 20s, there’s a youthful, flirty energy happening whenever you’re out, socially. Even if you knew people in relationships, those relationships weren’t always very serious. Which meant there was always this sweet feeling of: “anything could happen!”

But as our 20s grew to a close and people began figuring themselves out, and figuring out what they wanted in a partner, they each began to “lock someone down”. And so now that seductive, sexy air of possibility has been sucked out of socialising. Partying is, and never will be, as fun anymore - for a myriad of reasons - but I think this one in particular is high on the list.

A girl in Sydney, a boy in Melbourne

A friend of mine - one of my best friends, in fact - recently asked me to do a reading at her wedding. She flattered me by saying how much she liked my writing so could I read something I’d written or write something for the ceremony? Of course I agreed, but did so without any awareness of how difficult I would find the task.

My previous pieces of writing more frequently featured titles like, “A manifesto for single people”, hardly appropriate at a wedding, so there was nothing for it but to write something from scratch. I wrote, butchered, trashed, re-wrote, in my head and on the paper, over and over again. There were two unique obstacles:

1. This wasn’t a speech, it was a reading, so I couldn’t joke my way through with a few funny and sentimental stories.

2. I’m a perpetual bachelorette of two (very much) divorced parents. What do I know about love and marriage, other than the kind that is either unrequited or utterly traumatizing?

Everything I had on paper looked desperately cynical, self-conscious, too earnest, too egotistical, too nervous. It was all so wrong.

In the end, it was a conversation I had with her, a mere half day before the actual ceremony, that inspired the bulk of my reading. Which just goes to show that one really must draw from life to write something authentic.

—

In Sydney, there is a girl. She is equal parts nerd, equal parts fabulous. The girl love words. She uses it to not only describe the world she lives in, but also all the aching, sweet and soaring feelings that come pouring out of her. She uses them to ascribe things meaning, and to give things a relationship to one another, in the hope that perhaps she can make sense of a world that is too often senseless.

In Melbourne, there is a boy. His mind is filled with big ideas, his heart full of feeling. Girl and boy, they are in love.

At first this love inspires the girl to do what she always has. She writes. Allow me to correct myself, she doesn’t write - she blogs. The perfect medium for the self-reflective type. She writes furiously and without abandon about her new love. The words are natural and free, tumbling and fumbling thoughts that veer wildly between ecstasy and angst.

Allow me to read you an excerpt. [Read a hilarious and sweet excerpt from her blog describing the first time she told her then-crush-now-husband she liked him.]

Alas, like any good love story, it was not all smooth sailing. But any time spent apart was to be but a pit stop, and in the second time around, something had changed. The girl no longer wrote cascading sentences of adoration for her love. And yet she still adored her love. Her blogs no longer danced between false bravado and nervous second-guessing. And yet she still had a piercing sense of analysis, still had moments of doubt. Her blog - though now excellent in a different way - was no longer her best friend to which she would confess all. Because this time, she had found that best friend. And his name is [my friend’s husband].

The girl loves words, but in love, words fail. They don’t deserve to capture love, because words are bodies, and love rises above the weakness of mere mortals. Love is an energy, a movement. Each of us can sense it when we’re standing in this room. When we’re with this boy and girl.