I am that merry wanderer of the night
A scattered, indiscriminate collection of thoughts, inspirations, and personal creations.
An artistic experiment and an outlet.
A blog....sort of.
A scattered, indiscriminate collection of thoughts, inspirations, and personal creations.
An artistic experiment and an outlet.
A blog....sort of.
Let’s talk about this for a moment because I’m feeling scrappy and Nicholas Sparks hits a sharp note with me on everything. Isn’t there something unabashedly lame about the sentiment above? I mean this is clearly something that a lot of people yearn for, that finding the one thing you’ve always dreamed of and being able to hold on to that thing. But no, that isn’t what I read in the paragraph above.
I see resignation. I see codependency. In the context of the movie, I see sexism. At best I see naivety. At worst I see a lie. I see pandering to a lonely demographic who has been convinced by marketers and storytellers for the past 100 years that reality is not what you actually see around you. Boosterism in an extreme.
Maybe I’m cynical or jaded or whatever, but that thing you love so much isn’t everything you’ve dreamed and quite frankly, it shouldn’t be. I don’t want someone else to be Paris on a crisp May evening AND an afternoon fishing on the boat AND that studio behind the farmhouse where I work on my installation for the restaurant. I want that someone that I love to be there when I need them, not constantly, not forever, but when I come home from work and just want to sit with a cup of tea and read that new Clinton biography that I found last week. I want my dreams to be alongside that other person, coinciding, collaborating, occasionally intersecting, but not reliant on them. I don’t want the quality of my day to be solely dependent on the fact that the person in my life was my everything. People are tiresome.
And please, “no matter what happens to us in the future…” is bullshit. Everything that happens matters and will affect the relationship, whether you want it to or not.
<big fat rant>
I think the paragraphs above are more grossly jaded and hurt than the quote from “The Notebook” is grossly idealistic. Everything that the quote says is perfectly capable of being true. It is the people who feel that they are entitled to this type of relationship, and the people who feel it is impossible, who make this impossible. Love like in this quote takes work. It takes self-sacrifice. It takes compromise and communication that most people just aren’t willing to put in. It takes confidence in who you are on your own to admit how someone who has been able to effect you.
Yes, you can read this as a quote of co-dependency, but, no co-dependent, wimpy, unsure person can make a love like this happen. No person like that can promise “no matter what happens” they will stand by you. Only a person mature, strong, and unafraid of change can completely give themselves to someone.
It is possible. Most people just don’t like what it takes.
And apart from that, what a beautiful sentiment to put above a headboard, so that every time you fight, when you storm off into your room, you remember why you want to make this work and can return to a fight with an attitude of wanting to resolve rather than just argue.
It also should be noted that I have never seen or read “The Notebook” so I don’t know the context of the quote. I am merely responding to what I read.
(via nikolasalexander)