Romantic Ideals

I know this is a long entry (as usual). Please bear with me, as I have something important to address. Well, I think it’s important, anyway.

I’ve been meaning to blog for a while and I haven’t. But that’s a good thing. A couple of days ago I just got really frustrated, and I was going to blog about that frustration, but now things have cooled down on my part and I’m seeing the other side of it—the unfortunate cause of my discontentedness.

You see, I was going to blog about how I think every guy on the planet should be like Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice, and how, not meaning to be a diva, I get quite frustrated when I constantly encounter “men” these days who aren’t chivalrous, or who are but only when their friends are not present to…what? Ridicule them? Is it silly, then, to be a gentleman? I hope not. My rant which was scheduled to be written was much more heated than this little summary, and I really don’t think it’s best that I get into it.

However, I will talk about my thoughts about why I have been sulking in misery for the past…well, ever since Monday or so. The whole speculation that every man in this world should be like Mr. Darcy is derived from lust, I guess you could say. Most guys lust about sex a lot, right? Girls really aren’t so partial to those types of thoughts, but they do have emotional lusts. Our lusts usually involve romance, the type of which that is usually idealized in our lovely chick-flicks we love to watch. I am surely making a generalization, but it is true that in most cases, women love to watch and read romance. It gives us little butterflies inside our stomachs, makes our hearts flutter, makes us sigh about “how sweet” it all is and…as a result…makes us severely discontent.

This is not to say men are not romantic. However, if anybody out there wants some tips on winning ladies over, just read or watch some Jane Austin stuff, and then do what the guys in the movies/books do! It’s really that simple. You see, when men try to write romance, it just doesn’t give girls butterflies. So, in Nicholas Nickleby, Nicholas falls in love with Madeline Bray and…well, somehow they are very shy and get set up by the twins and everything falls into place and perhaps they have one philosophical discussion. Never once during that whole book did I react in the ways I described earlier as the ways women respond to romanticism. Wherefore, while Charles Dickens was romantic enough to include the part where Nicholas courts a girl, he was not romantic enough to write it romantically.

Jane Austen, on the other hand, is very skilled at making sure that a woman’s heart is most certainly palpitating nearly the entirety of a novel, or movie of her novel(s). Why is she? Because, like most women, she idealizes romance. Women have this strange little skill of analyzing situations involving lovers (either themselves or other people which they pretend are themselves), and imagine millions of possibilities of directions that the relationship could go, and the most romantic way for it to get there. I suppose guys don’t really do that, which is sad…but completely OKAY [!!!] because I’ve stopped complaining about guys and how uncivilized and inconsiderate they can be! Anyhooness (just for the record, they can be magnificent and wonderful as well), if guys thought the same way as girls, we’d all probably blow up or something because we’d all think the same thing, and then we’d all be the same and so really, why would we all need to be here? So we’d all blow up and leave one person all alone to…well, enough right now about all my many theories about how everyone will blow up, and what will happen directly thereafter.

Girls and women and ladies, when they idealize romance, wish for it to happen to them. Hence the fantasizing about how romantic encounters might progress (even if those girls know *gulp* quite well that they are not supposed to be thinking about boys or going out with them right now…). This makes them very discontent, and then they don’t realize it when real love stares them right in the face. Like Anne in Anne of Green Gables. She read all the time about nights and fair maidens and the like, and always had her fantasies of a tall, dark, handsome, and possibly rich knight in shining armor to come to Green Gables in a valiant manner and ask her to marry him, and then they would go live in his castle, where she would roam the grounds all day reading and writing. Gosh darn it, don’t we all want that? Anyway, when Gilbert proposes for the first time, she refuses him, saying they cannot possibly be more than friends. Gilbert’s not…well, refer to the description of Anne’s ideal earlier in this paragraph. He’s just not. But Anne finally comes to her senses and they get married and live happily ever after.

Even that’s fiction, and an idealized view of romance. OH BOTHERATION. O spite!

So it seems as if these fictional accounts of romance are forever stuck in my brain, ready for me to refer myself to if I ever want to construct my own ideal love story. Hooray (*waves wilted party favor around in the air*). I just think it’s so sweet (yes, here we go again with the sighing) that Mr. Darcy loved Elizabeth like he does, and still loved her even though she seemed to hate him, and then she started to love him, and then in the new version she goes outside in the beautiful English countryside and stands on the bridge, and it is dawn and she sees Mr. Darcy walking through the wet green grass as the sun begins to pour a couple rays over the layer of mist, and as the beautiful music that lets you know that this is the big romantic scene plays, Mr. Darcy’s long coat flaps behind him in the early morning breeze like a cape, and his shirt is unbuttoned at the top so he is just the vision of the perfect romantic suitor! And, even though he knows they are entirely alone, he stays at a respectful distance and explains and apologizes and re-declares his love and proposes again in the sweetest way where you just get tears in your eyes as he struggles over his timidity and says, “I love…love…I love you, and never wish to be parted from you from this day forward.” You start trembling with excitement because THIS IS IT!!! SHE’S GOING TO SAY YES!!! And then she walks over to him and they don’t even kiss, but instead just stand there as she warms his hands in his and they stare deep into one another’s eyes and you know they both cannot be thinking anything except how happy they are, and the sun spills through between them in what I think it is a really cool shot…*BIG SIGH* Oh-My-Goodness, it is just the most tempting thing to think that falling in love is always like that, and that in order for it to be truly romantic the scenery and costumes has to be exactly as it is in that movie (not the boring black-and-white garden like in the old one), etc, etc, etc.

Well, it’s not. And that’s not to say that falling in love isn’t extremely wonderful, because God made love and romance for a reason. But not everyone, as a matter-of-fact, no one, gets to be a character in a Jane Austen book (unless they are an actor, but that doesn’t count). It is hard not to give into fantasies, because it is not only hindering to the soul, but a very big waste of time. Anyway, God will bring about my own beautiful romance (that He’s written for me already!) when the time is right (please—at least not until after I graduate highschool—can’t…hold…one…more…thing!! *collapses as she realizes that she’s working on a blog instead of working on school*), and I should not even bother myself, distract myself, or anything-else myself with romantic notions till that time is here. Does that mean holding off on my indulgence in romantic movies and books? Possibly. I do enjoy other things, you know. It’s not as if I will be at a real loss. Especially at a loss of things to do. Speaking of which, I really must go now…ta ta!

~Jessica