The Romeo and Juliet Question

  a 14 minute short film “ The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face ” by Roberta Flack , “ Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye Heart ” by Ricky Nelson, “ Just One Look ” by Doris Troy. “ Serendipity ”, “ Les Miserables ”, “ Scott Pilgrim VS The World ”, “ Sleepless In Seattle ”, even “ The Godfather ” and “ Taxi Driver ” have it. So many songs and books and films are either about it or include it as a major plot point. That electrical, elusive phenomenon known as “love at first sight". Yeah right, but maybe... My mom who was a hardcore realist and would have told you if asked that “love at first sight” was only for the very pretty or very delusional (probably both), loved musicals. A lot of them, I would say 99%, were romantic musicals. “ The King and I ” (1951), “ West Side Story ” (1961), “ The Music Man ” (1962”) “ Hello Dolly ” (1969). One of her all-time favorites was “South Pacific” (1958). I’m not going to go into the plot because it’s strangely complicated for a 50’s musical and ...

Love And Other Feverish Things My husband and I recently got COVID together. So romantic, right? We can laugh about it because we’re both fully vaccinated and boostered so we weathered it like a bout of the flu—well I did, he got off with a head cold that lasted 24 hours the bastard. Anyway, this was not a sweet bonding experience where we tenderly cared for each other. This was about discovering just how small your house really is when you can’t get away from each other. Seriously, I defy anyone to spend 7 days straight in lock-down with a loved one when you are miserably ill and they have only the mildest of symptoms. Unless they’re a canonized saint it’s not going to feel like a vacation for two. Ah “Love In The Time Of COVID”. Gabriel Garcia Marquez wrote this book... Has anyone actually read “ Love In The Time Of Cholera ”? It’s one of those romance novels that gets name-dropped in movies and other books because it somehow qualifies as literature so it makes the character w...

  Snow White 1937, Cinderella 1950 , Sleeping Beauty 1959 , The Little Mermaid 1989 , Beauty and the Beast 1991 , Tangled 2010 ....these are the fairytales I grew up with, well the earlier ones anyway. Disney just keeps on pumping them out so I can't really keep up. The heroines get a little pluckier with time but the story's still the same. I'm wishing... Once upon a time there was going to be this person who would find me or I would find them and it would be magical. Somehow, they would totally understand me and I would of course totally understand them. They would look at me and see something utterly beautiful inside and out and I would see every secret special thing they hid from the world and treasure them. The first animated movies I saw as a kid, the stories my grandmother read to me, they all painted the same cotton candy picture. Fluffy, pink, spun from sugar and air. Fairytale love. A dream is a wish your heart makes... Between the time I was 6 to the time I wa...

Gone With The Wind has always been described as this love triangle, right? Scarlet loved Ashely, Rhet loved Scarlet, Ashely sort of loved Scarlet but would never marry her and then Scarlet finally tragically figures out that she only ever really loved Rhet. But here's the thing--it all starts out with this massive crush she has on Ashley. Is there anything more breathlessly exquisite or exquisitely painful as a crush? How many did I have as a teenager and single adult? Mostly on celebrities but also, more terribly on boys and then men who were friends. Always just friends. The dictionary defines a crush as being brief intense unexpressed love. Which makes it sound like a firework exploding in a Ziploc bag. I don’t know about yours but mine were never brief. At least not the ones I had on real people (not that celebrities aren’t real people, what I mean is tangible as opposed to celluloid—er that’s not right either, I apologize to every movie/TV star I’ve ever crushed on, I ...

  Fiddler on the Roof  1971, Hello Dolly  1969, The Matchmaker (1958), CrossingDelancey (1988), Emma ( 1996 , 2020 ), The Matchmaker (1997), The Deviants TV series (2004), Hitch (2005) Anyone ever gone to a matchmaker?   Raise your hands.   Right, it’s all dating apps these days.   Swipe left or right.   Put your picture up on social media and see who bites. I went to one. And in the interest of full transparency here, I was raised Irish Catholic, so it wasn’t really on the menu growing up.   Meeting some nice Catholic boy at church or choir practice maybe.   But not a matchmaker.   That was exotic, and kind of…desperate. My Dating Scene 1900's So, I am old enough to have been pre apps in my dating hey-day. I know, shock and horror.   The wild west days when Facebook was new and cell phones weren’t smart. Back then it was going to clubs where you mostly gyrated in the flashing dark with strange men that you occasionally sc...

  I have questions, well probably just one burning one. Are there answers out there? I mean real answers, not intellectual ponderings. The people I know personally don’t tell me stories about Romeo and Juliet experiences. So I have to ask, is it a real thing? Is it the Big Foot of relationships? Everyone sort of secretly believes it’s out there but doesn’t own up to it in rational discussions. I’ve lived with it since I was old enough to grow crushes on boys and only recently in mid-life, happily married, has it risen like Nessie to the surface unbidden but unavoidable. I did not marry a man I fell in love with passionately. I have never fallen in love passionately in my entire life. Unless sad one-sided crushes count. So I am left with so many questions. But mostly one, is Romeo and Juliet real or a pretty lie?  

  I find myself at 51 married to a good man (not without flaws of course—but neither am I) I have been with for 10 years, 5 of them married.  I love this man deeply but I was never “in love” with him.  Not that fireworks kind of passionate love they write novels about or I even read about in Tweets from people who swear that they did marry their one true love rather than settle for a comfortable or sensible match. So now, maybe clichédly at midlife, questions have begun to seep in at the edges of my days, usually louder when I’m driving alone or doing household chores.  But I find it more disturbing that they are showing up in the silences between my husband and me lately.  Questions like, “What would happen if I suddenly, finally met a man who fell passionately in love with me and it was mutual?” “Would I leave my husband for a chance at a real passionate love affair?” “Is that kind of love worth giving up good, solid, lasting love that is not passi...