let everything happen to you
Wanting and Not Wanting
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Meg hits the nail on the head in her recent post where her good friend Julie explicates that it is okay to want love. While I am truly not at that place in my life, if the universe were to throw love into my path, I absolutely would not deny it-- inner feminist commentary and all.
It's strange, though; from the time we are young girls we are told to aspire to marry and create a life with someone (Hello Beauvoir and The Second Sex). A man. I think that's beautiful in a good-intention-tradition-prevails kind of way and also destructive at the same time. So now, where feminism is the most "mainstream" (Hi, Beyonce) it has ever been in history, many women believe wanting a partner (a baby, a position as home caretaker) is blasphemous and so very archaic. Well, I don't believe it is so black and white as that.
Julie explains that wanting love means you are open-- with yourself, your life, and your inner most desires. What is more real and true than that? Within that same sentiment, wanting and longing in suffering like oh-my-god-I've-been-dating-since-I-was-fifteen-where-is-he are very different. Our desires should never cause us to suffer, for if they do, we are not fully present with our lives and in our truest nature (Buddhism 101). Again, balance. Again, not black or white.
My favorite thing any woman has ever said about the fairy-tale love syndrome is this:
"Act I: The independent feminist heartbreaker swashbuckles through early youth, kissing frogs and reading the Russians and riding dirtbikes.
Act II: As her friends begin to “settle down,” our heroine consults her inner calendar. “Not yet!” she thinks. “A career in international war correspondence beckons!”
Act III: Back in New York City, Pulitzer Prize in her pocket, our heroine swans into a coffee shop. Thirty has arrived on the distant horizon, and as she daydreams of tiny socks, she stumbles over an errant foot. Oh! It belongs to a bearded musician with a trust fund and baby fever.
*fade to black*
I would love to see this movie. It is not life.
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