I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine a few weeks ago that struck a fascinating chord. Somehow we got on the topic of dating and first dates and the awkwardness of the last moments. At one point after a sip of margarita he said, "I don't know - I'm just not the kind of person to kiss someone on the first date." Curious, I asked why. Very frankly, the shrugged slightly and looked me square in the eyes and said, "That's just not how the story goes." A few weeks earlier I had a drink with an old female friend from college who mentioned that she doesn't enjoy romantic comedies at all. Why? "Because they're so unrealistic."
Over the last few weeks it led to more introspection over a topic I've thought much about over the years - how much we fall in love and chase after ideals we've found in movies and fairy tales. To be totally curt on relationships: do you fall in love with the girl or with the story? The story varies by person but usually goes something like this: work hard in school, find love, graduate, find the job of your dreams, get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, a dog and a few kids, and they lived happily ever after. The steps may be slightly different and include other steps or in a different order, but I bet you've heard the story at least once before.
It's interesting to see how many people (including myself) have fallen into that - falling in love with the story they hope they can achieve in their current situation and letting that infatuation totally overpower the realities that are present. I think in a lot of cases it's what causes you to do things for seemingly unexplained reasons. Why do so many people work towards being an engineer or a pharmacist when they really wanted to be an artist or a photographer? Or date people that don't match them at all because one quality is exactly how they imagined? Usually because they cling onto the fairy tales they want out of their lives so much that they're not willing to do the hard work to mold the hands they've been dealt into something they may love even more.
I realize I'm not being as astute as I would want, but sitting here in my perfect little house with a perfect little Christmas tree and a perfect fire roaring in the fireplace, it all makes sense in my head how much this is just half of my fairy tale. So I'll go ahead and stop trying to articulate and end on the final words that came out of my tv from an episode of How I Met Your Mother:
Robin: How do you do this Ted? How do you sit out here all night, in the cold, and still have faith that your pumpkin's going to show up?
Ted: Well, I'm pretty drunk. Look I know the odds are, the love of my life isn't going to magically walk through that door in a pumpkin costume at 2:43 in the morning. But it just seems as nice a spot as any to just ... you know, sit and wait.
