Of Real Life

I had a thought the other day, underlined only by the fact that I just finished watching "Letters to Juliet" which ends (spoiler alert) with a man confessing: "I am madly, passionately (yada yada yada) in love with you."  The thought was - movies are not at all like real life. 

Now I know this may not seem like a ground-breaking revelation to anyone here, and, yet, it's something we (and I mean I) so often forget. 

Instead, we watch a movie - romances are most likely to bring these feelings about - particularly in women - and feel like we're missing something.  If we just had that tiny spark.  If our man would just be as open, passionate, creative, etc. as that man on the screen, well then, then we would have that life of which we dream.  Then ours would be a love worth writing about.  Instead I'm stuck with a man who forgets to take out the trash, often puts his foot in his mouth and hasn't bought me flowers since . . . well, who knows, really? 

But surely somewhere there must be someone who knows this kind of life - they're the ones who wrote the script, right?

This is where I feel a light came on for me.  No.  This isn't real life - someone, somewhere, wishes it were and so, instead of writing what they know, they wrote what they wished they knew.  And, again, we, as the audience are duped into thinking our life is lacking - surely we're missing the boat.

When, in reality, we're on the boat - we simply need to stop watching the ones passing by and enjoy the ride we're on.

And that guy who doesn't bring me flowers, likes eating his words and leaves the trash in the can?  Well, he also does the dishes when he knows I'm stressed, makes a tuna casserole better than my own (from the same recipe!), gets the biggest kick out of playing hide-and-seek with our daughter and watches chick flicks like the one above and snuggles with me while he does so.

And he's mine.

And I really like him.

And that's real life.