Destruction of young girls and romanticism

As I walked out of the show last night my heart felt raw and exposed.  It was the day before new years eve and Times Square was jammed with people.  I felt the armor pop on and more defensive, frustrated and angry than I do on a normal day.  As I walked I became aware of the dichotomy I felt between the open hearted tenderness I felt and the cold loneliness I was allowing to consume me.  It reminded me of my theory that the arts really destroyed most little girls version of love and romance.  I used to hold this theory to blame for my own failed ability to find love and be happy with it.

I was not allowed to watch "normal" TV as I grew up - PBS or nothing  - unless as I often did was able to pull off sneaking some "real" TV.   PBS like MTV used to have a very different programming 20 years ago, it was filled with the entertain like the old Fred Astair movies, or musicals like Brigadoon and shows like The Thin Man.  My world was filled with these pieces of a "better" time and many many books.  My family was not emotional or loving so my entire vocabulary around love and communication came from these stories.  I took from these stories while they had loss and disappointment, in the end it always worked out some how, forgiveness, hope and love always seemed to prevail.  I remember reading Anna Karenina as a young girl and thinking more about the passion and the love than the desperate ending that ended up destroying her life.  I saw only the things I wanted to see which was something I had never felt which were passion, and undying love.

As I grew up I start to realize that I longed for a love, a friend, a relationship, a family that I had seen or read about while growing up.  I thought a good life was full of happy endings and that if you were good enough everything would work out for the best in the end.  This statement is crazy if you know anything about my life as happy endings rarely came and yet I hung to the hope perhaps clung to it to survive that some day I would find my own place where happy endings and love would flow.  I just needed to be good enough to deserve it even though in the movies and books that was never a requirement.  Fortunately (or not) life never provided me with a space or people that showed me this dreamy type of love and feeling and that it can only happened when you were able to write your own ending and you can ignore parts of the story you do not like.

What I noticed in the plays I saw over this weekend is that there were no happy endings but yet the characters and stories were still raw with emotion.   For the first time I was able to see not only the passion and the love but the heartbreak and the pain.  I had room in my mind and heart for both to exist without it destroying the story.  I was moved in both plays by how these characters shared and talked and wore their hearts on their sleeves without fear.  I saw that this was my new ideal, my new hope to cling to as I long for that life where the people around you are open, generous, loving and comfortable to share how they really feel.  For me it is no longer about happy endings but the desire to have open hearts and open minds.  The real romantic is able to face their fears, throw down the armor and just feel.