"I've never been in love...it all feels more like fiction to me."

Will: Emily, will you, uh, marry me?
April: No.
Will: Goddd.
April: What do you mean, “Will you, uh, marry me?”?! I haven’t seen you in weeks. You don’t look happy or excited about the prospect of our marriage. You’re asking me to give up my . . . my freedom, my joie de vivre, for an institution that fails as often as it succeeds? And why should I marry you, anyway? I mean, why do you want to marry me? Besides some bourgeois desire to fulfill an ideal that society embeds in us from an early age to promote a consumer capitalist agenda.
Will: Oh! Ohhh my god.
April: You should have got on your knee.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that it seems so easy to fall into the trappings of social norms, because they set the status quo on so many things that we don't even think about. Like, as April points out, marriage.

[Long excerpt coming up]

Celine: I was thinking, for me it’s better I don’t romanticize things as much any more. I was suffering so much all the time. I still have lots of dreams, but they’re not in regard to my love life. It doesn’t make me sad; it’s just the way it is.
Jesse: Is that why you’re in a relationship with someone who’s never around?
Celine: [laughing] Yes, obviously I can’t deal with the day-to-day life of a relationship. [seriously] Yeah, we, you know, have this exciting time together, and then he leaves, and I miss him, but at least I’m not dying inside. When somebody is always around me, I’m like, suffocating.
Jesse: No wait, you just said that you need to love, and to be loved.
Celine: Yeah, but when I do, it quickly makes me nauseous! It’s a disaster. I mean, I’m really happy only when I’m on my own. Even being alone—it’s better than sitting next to a lover and feeling lonely. It’s not so easy for me to be all romantic. …I’ve just had too many . . . blah relationships. They were mean, they cared for me, but there was no real connection or excitement. At least, not from my side.
Jesse: I’m—I’m sorry, is it really that bad? It’s not, right?
Celine: You know, it’s not even that. I was fine. Until I read your fucking book. It stirred shit up, you know? It reminded me of how genuinely romantic I was, how I had so much hope in things, and now, now it’s like, I don’t believe in anything that relates to love, I don’t feel things for people any more. In a way, I put all my romanticism into that one night and I was never able to feel all this again...
Jesse: I—I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that.
Celine: You know what, reality and love are almost contradictory for me. It’s funny. Every single of my ex’s, they are now married. Men go out with me, we break up, and then they get married. And later they call me to thank me for teaching them what love is, and that I taught them to care and respect women—
Jesse: I think I’m one of those guys.
Celine: —You know, I want to kill them! Why didn’t they ask me to marry them! I would have said no, but then at least they could have asked! But it’s my fault, I know it’s my fault, because I never felt it was the right man, never. But what does it mean, “the right man”? The “love of your life”? The concept is absurd, that we can only be complete with another person is evil, right?!

Also, the more I watch Before Sunset - well, first of all, the more I realize it's absolutely brilliant, especially when paired with Before Sunrise, then you realize Jesse and Celine as characters and performances are that much more beautifully, beautifully subtle and nuanced and real and detailed and perfect than when the movie stands alone - but really, the more I watch it, the more I identify with Celine. Take out the ultra-liberal activism and I'm basically her. But it always makes me think that marriage is just an institution that makes you take something irrational and impermanent and constantly changing, and force it into a mold of practicality and pragmatism and sensibility. It just doesn't work like that in my mind. Yet I think there's this constant pressure on most people I know to want to marry. Beyond that, even - in high school, we're practically forced to take the SAT's and apply to college, and it's implied to us that it's impossible to succeed otherwise. From there, we have to choose a degree. One line of study. Then we graduate and we have to get jobs. But not just a job - we have to choose a career, a practical line of work to which we can devote ourselves and from which we can make a comfortable living. And obviously after that we have to get married and start a family. Because that's the thing to do. It's like the whole '80s yuppie thing only evolved, so it doesn't necessarily mean a life of luxury but one of financial success, if only on a middle class level.

And my problem with that is that not everyone wants the same thing. In fact, most people don't want the same thing. Or else, they really don't want the same thing but they think they do because they've been tricked and trapped into it. But really, this whole life doesn't apply to everyone. It's one of the things I like about St. Elmo's Fire. Kevin starts off as this crazy cynic about love and marriage, even though he changes by the end, and Lesley accuses Alec of not wanting to get married, but of wanting to be able to send out a Christmas card with a picture of them on it, and Billy ends up realizing that the "after college life" isn't for him and he has to stop trying to be Alec. They all start off with these ideas of how life is supposed to be and they eventually realize that they just have to do their own thing. Well, to some extent.

It's funny because I just got back from my Theater & Society class, in which we're watching a bunch of documentaries on the 1950s. Today's was called "Let's Play House" and it was about how after World War II, there was this huge marriage and consequently baby boom, and the consequences. Men felt their masculinity was being threatened when they had to go back to civilian life and enter the corporate world - thus Sloan Wilson's book The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Women, on the other hand, were feeling pressured to find a husband - after the war, the numbers said that 1 in 7 women would have to be single because of the death toll. So, they were pushed into this lifestyle of hyper-femininity in which they couldn't work, had to be housewives and mothers, and had to literally fit this physical mold of the American woman. She had to be the June Cleaver figure. And then all these men were unhappy because their lives were dull and corporate life was dissatisfying, and all these women were unhappy because they weren't allowed to do anything but cook and clean and basically not have a personality. Everything in the media was supporting this - movies, books, magazines - until a few people broke out and rebelled, like Wilson, and Betty Friedan (who wrote The Feminine Mystique).

In comparison, we have so much freedom today, so much choice, yet I feel like the current is still carrying us towards these unfulfilling lifestyles that society mandates are what we should want. I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with wanting that whole packaged lifestyle, either, though, even though it very much sounds like I am, haha. The more I think about it, it's just not for me. While it's liberating to realize what you want is not what everyone else wants, it's also daunting, because in a way, you're preconditioned to fail. Or preconditioned to succeed, I'm not sure which. I mean, you're setting out to do what no one else wants you to be able to do. That's what I meant. What is that quote?

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."

And also, I'm really not totally condemning marriage here or anything. Because in the society we live in, it does make sense. I just don't think it makes sense for humans in general, haha. And I'm not bashing love here, either. It's just...a mystery to me. Which sounds painfully obvious and stupid, but I mean it in a beyond-the-cliched-ways way. Because to me, love is different to everyone. And in some people, I think it's buried deeper than in others.

Jesse: We’re just living in a pretense of a marriage, responsibility, and all these ideas of how people are supposed to live.…and, and I know that there’s something wrong, and I know that I can’t keep living like this, and I think, there’s gotta be more to love than commitment, but then I think that I might have given up on the whole idea of romantic love...

Oh yeah. Romance. That's another thing. One of those Interview segments quoted Pop artist Ronnie Cutrone as saying that Andy Warhol taught him that, "All romantic love is an illusion." I never thought of it like that. All romance in general, though, I think is an illusion. It's all in how you choose (whether consciously or unconsciously) how to perceive things. Romance and cynicism are both just filters. They're films through which you see the world. So it makes sense that romantic love would be an illusion. It's just how you're choosing to see love. Not that I have a problem with that. Romance makes life palatable and easier to digest. That can become problematic, but in general, that rosiness is nice. Romance, in a way, is hope. And while part of me hates hope - because hope, like expectation, often leads to severe disappointment - a character one movie or another that I was watching in a class the other day pointed out, "We all hope. It's what keeps us alive." I think that was during one of the John Cassavetes movies that I didn't really like. Faces maybe. But I digress. Except not really because I think I was done.

No I wasn't. I was about to say that I might have misinterpreted the way Cutrone meant "romantic love", but it still made me think of it the way I did. If he meant "romantic love" not as, being "in love" with romance, but just as, being "in love" in general (did that make ANY sense? Yikes, I need to sleep), then I'm not sure I agree. But like I was saying before, I think it's different for everyone. For some people it's harder to fall in love than for others. "Here's what I know. There are some people who fall in love over and over. And there are others who can only seem to do it once." Haha, that was from the fourth Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book. But I like it. And I like that it says "seems," because I don't think that it's humanly possible for anyone to fall in love only once. I think it's possible to go your whole life being in love with only one person - but that's just because there's no way you'll ever meet all the people you could fall in love with. And then there are those people who are perfectly capable of falling in love with each other but they don't let themselves. But that's something else entirely.

It's like that Jane Austen Book Club bit:

"A person's no more sane falling out of love than falling into it, I guess..."
"What do we know about it, you and I?" Allegra asked. "We're not the sort who fall out of love, are we?"

Oh, and it reminds me of Persuasion. Anne and Capt. Wentworth both try to love other people. They try to resign themselves to the idea of loving another. What is it, eight years, that pass? Anne firmly believes that it's easier for men to fall out of love than women, that they are better at forgetting, and that women suffer more, but then Capt. Wentworth writes her that wonderful, wonderful letter completely contradicting her. "You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope. Tell me not that I am too late, that such precious feelings are gone for ever. I offer myself to you again with a heart even more your own than when you almost broke it, eight years and a half ago. Dare not say that man forgets sooner than woman, that his love has an earlier death. I have loved none but you. Unjust I may have been, weak and resentful I have been, but never inconstant." Oh, that's also like in Before Sunset. Nine years pass and Celine pretends to have forgotten because Jesse waltzes in all romantic and married and she thinks he's moved on, so she has that breakdown in the car, but then he reveals that he hasn't, and that he's still suffering just as much, if not more, than she is. Most amazing scene in the whole movie.

Ack, think I wrote enough? Too much overlap right now. None of this even makes sense any more. Sorry about that.

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Now playing: Feist - So Sorry