It takes a little while
May. 14th, 2001 11:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reynardoA friend has just posted a journal entry about her trip to Venice, and I tasted the wine and felt the evening breeze as I read it. And I remembered being 14 years old and wondering when all the good things were going to happen.
Where were all the gorgeous men suddenly asking me out to dinner and taking me to expensive restaurants and exciting nightclubs? Where were the impulsive bunches of flowers? The pick-ups at parties that would lead to balcony breakfasts and waterside picnics?
By twenty, I was getting quite frustrated with looking out for them. I had gone searching for them, kissing frogs (and finding no princes), doing the asking and inviting and enticing myself. And getting horribly disappointed.
And then, slowly, things started to happen. And I discovered that you can get a lot of these things happening to you, just like in the movies and the stories and the ads.
Your friend's boss will ask you for an expensive lunch just because he answered your friend's phone first. (He talked for three hours and two bottles of wine about himself).
Someone you looked at twice at work will take you for a date and be utterly charming (and then it will turn out that his wife works with friends of your parents).
A new love will bring you flowers and chocolates and adore you and worship you - and then leave you no space, and insist on coming to movies with you when it's a girls' night out and you know he'll hate the movie and sulk through the entire thing, ruining it for everyone else. And he'll claim to be in perfect harmony with you, so that you're not even allowed to disagree with him or be thinking differently to him - he can't conceive that it might be the case.
And you will learn, slowly, that sometimes things work out wonderfully, and often they don't. That the best moments come along unexpectedly, like a slow rumba with a total stranger that you both suddenly realise has become the act it mimics. Like a breakfast with good friends and along come three others and two more and the day becomes a party.
And that there's very little unalloyed good. Or bad.
And that the divisions between devoted and possessive and obsessive are incredibly thin.
And that "happily ever after" doesn't mean in blind perfection, but in genuine working partnership, which has its pitfalls and its sorrows and its arguments but is still stunningly amazingly wonderful.
And that what you wished for isn't necessarily what you wanted.
And that sometimes you imagine and pretend everything is perfect because that's what you want, so that when everything really is, it scares you that you might be terribly wrong again.
And that it might take you 34 years to grow up and learn enough so that when the soulmate you once thought was a fairytale wrought by the movies walks in, you still have the courage to wait and see what this new person is like.
And that even then, it can still take another four years before the story gets to "And they lived happily ever after."
Where were all the gorgeous men suddenly asking me out to dinner and taking me to expensive restaurants and exciting nightclubs? Where were the impulsive bunches of flowers? The pick-ups at parties that would lead to balcony breakfasts and waterside picnics?
By twenty, I was getting quite frustrated with looking out for them. I had gone searching for them, kissing frogs (and finding no princes), doing the asking and inviting and enticing myself. And getting horribly disappointed.
And then, slowly, things started to happen. And I discovered that you can get a lot of these things happening to you, just like in the movies and the stories and the ads.
Your friend's boss will ask you for an expensive lunch just because he answered your friend's phone first. (He talked for three hours and two bottles of wine about himself).
Someone you looked at twice at work will take you for a date and be utterly charming (and then it will turn out that his wife works with friends of your parents).
A new love will bring you flowers and chocolates and adore you and worship you - and then leave you no space, and insist on coming to movies with you when it's a girls' night out and you know he'll hate the movie and sulk through the entire thing, ruining it for everyone else. And he'll claim to be in perfect harmony with you, so that you're not even allowed to disagree with him or be thinking differently to him - he can't conceive that it might be the case.
And you will learn, slowly, that sometimes things work out wonderfully, and often they don't. That the best moments come along unexpectedly, like a slow rumba with a total stranger that you both suddenly realise has become the act it mimics. Like a breakfast with good friends and along come three others and two more and the day becomes a party.
And that there's very little unalloyed good. Or bad.
And that the divisions between devoted and possessive and obsessive are incredibly thin.
And that "happily ever after" doesn't mean in blind perfection, but in genuine working partnership, which has its pitfalls and its sorrows and its arguments but is still stunningly amazingly wonderful.
And that what you wished for isn't necessarily what you wanted.
And that sometimes you imagine and pretend everything is perfect because that's what you want, so that when everything really is, it scares you that you might be terribly wrong again.
And that it might take you 34 years to grow up and learn enough so that when the soulmate you once thought was a fairytale wrought by the movies walks in, you still have the courage to wait and see what this new person is like.
And that even then, it can still take another four years before the story gets to "And they lived happily ever after."
