Red-and-Pink

"Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same." -Helen Keller

In the light of the red-and-pink season we're in: my thoughts on romance. Currently, anyway.

Let's see. It's been... oh... four or five years since I had a Valentine. 2007 definitely. 2008 technically, although we had been on different continents for months and broke it off a month later, so I don't even know if that counts.

I generally try to avoid the topic of romance. I don't like to think about it, I don't like to talk about it, I don't like to dwell on it. And when it comes to how I see marriage right now, Cathy Hyatt (The Last Five Years) probably comes as close as anyone:

I will not be the girl in the sensible shoes
Pushing burgers and beer nuts and missing the clues
I will not be the girl stuck at home in the 'burbs
With the baby, the dog, and the garden of herbs
I will not be the girl who gets asked how it feels
To be trotting along at the the genius's heels
I will not be the girl who requires a man to get by

Yep. That about sums it up.

I'm watching The Young Victoria at the moment and, one of the first times Prince Albert comes to see Victoria, they're playing chess. Victoria tells Albert that she feels like a chess piece every day as her mother, her regent, and her uncles drag her from square to square. He advises her to learn the rules of the game so well that she can play better than any of them. She raises an eyebrow and asks, "You don't recommend I find a husband to play it for me?" Prince Albert answers, "I should find one to play it with you, not for you."

Or, I sometimes wonder if I'll end up like Heidi. When I read The Heidi Chronicles, I saw myself very much in her. I liked the play a great deal. Heidi falls in love with a guy named Scoop who eventually becomes her best friend. He marries several times and has a slew of affairs. There's a time when she's also interested in Peter, another of her best friends who becomes a pediatrician and who we actually find out is gay a little later on in the play. The play starts when Heidi is in high school in the 60s and follows her through 20 years or so. She becomes an active feminist in the 70s and has a successful career as an art historian. The play ends with Heidi rocking to sleep the baby girl she's just adopted on her own. It was just funny because, as I read the play, it was almost like you could have covered up Heidi's next line, asked me what I would say, and that turned out to be what Wendy Wasserstein had written.

I keep referring to bits of movies and plays and stories. And I suppose it won't be anything like a movie or a play or a story of any kind. I think I often expect pieces of life to be like something I've seen or read and, not surprisingly, it never is.