Never Seen Anyone As Cold As You...

I hate to think of myself as bitter or unwilling to open up to the subject of love, marriage and everything that comes with the topic. I honestly do not even enjoy entertaining the idea of love because it is a scary one to think about. How can anyone feel something without knowing what it is, especially if you have a skewed image of it in the first place? Honestly, my idea of love comes mostly from the opening monologue in the movie High Fidelity. In it the main character speaks of the pop culture image of love and how it has redefined the way generations of people view the subject. Are we all hopeless romantics with fairy tale ideas of love because we want to be, or is it because we have been feed endless amounts of hopeless love songs and movies that we just do not know any better? We all grow up listening to hundreds of songs about heart break, love, pain and loss, and yet, many can still is the silver lining and still believe that the right person is out there. Most people still want nothing more than to live their own love songs and define their own happily ever after.
I know I am overly cynical but maybe the problem with love is not how hard it is to find it, but how as a culture we all grow up with overly romantic ideas of prince charming coming and sweeping us all off our feet, and, of course, living happily ever after. In reality not many people experience this without going through a lot of pain and heart break as well. That is the part of love that people are not willing to accept. People refuse to believe that they will fight with a significant other, they will disagree and that happily ever after may include a few days of not being able to stand one other.
I am not going to blame pop culture for my views on love because they are not fully to blame. I admit it, I bare just as much guilt as Meg Ryan does for making me obsess over late night talk radio after she made Sleepless In Seattle. Who knows maybe I was truly in love with my first crush, Josh, in the first grade. I remember how unbelievably cute I thought he was back then, and how upset I was when I had to move at the end of the school year. I never told him that I liked but looking back I still find it hard to believe that a first grader can be that infatuated by another person. The again I could have been in love years latter when I graduated high school. I cannot begin to explain how infatuated I was by my first boyfriend and how I did fall into the fairy tale idea for a small amount of time, because I truly believed that it was my happily ever after. Then we broke up about a year latter, and I was left with the side of love I avoided my whole life, the pain and heartbreak. Maybe wallowing over someone is just another step in the road to finding love.
Even with my own experiences, there is one thing that always stops me from being one of those heartless people who are closed to everyone in their lives. That is this note that I found on the bus ride home my sophomore year of high school. It was from a boy who drew a picture of himself and the girl the liked playing on a playground with the words, ‘I love you, call me,’ written on top of the page. Judging my the drawing I assumed that the little boy who wrote this was in elementary school, and probably in the third grade at the oldest. I felt that the bottom of a school bus was no place for a note that sweet so I decided not to do the honorable thing and return it to the bus driver. Instead I took the drawing home where it has a new home in the top right hand drawer of my desk.
The reason why I was drawn to the drawing made by that little boy, and still am to this day, is because it shows romantic love at its most perfect stage. Untouched by media ideas of heartbreak and unknowing of the pain that having strong emotions towards another person can cause. There was little or no pop culture influence that made that little boy draw that picture. It was simply because he acted on his emotions and decided to tell the girl he liked how he felt, something that I was never able to do with that little boy from my childhood.
I continue to believe that romantic comedies and pop songs about love and pain have a lot to do with the feelings that people have about love and the way they view it. I continue to think that girls will forever look for their prince charming and boys will forever try to play that role. Yet, I also think that admits of this fabrication love can be a powerful experience of the lessons from those movies and songs are taken to heart. If the lessons of forgiveness and moving on are understood by the viewer then maybe a person like me who runs away from the idea of love, can think about the subject long enough to embrace it and bring it into practice.