Romance

This Thanksgiving week I was lucky enough to get to meet up for dinner and a movie with one of my oldest friends that lives out of town but was home for the holiday.

Here we are:  Me and Miss Eden (again, this is just one of my favorite pics of us--- it wasn't from this weekend though)

We were talking about the movie Brave and I stated that I liked the direction Disney was going in with their female characters.  Eden told me that she missed the classic Disney characters.  I quickly went on a rant about what was Disney teaching little girls back then... that your life is miserable and that you are doomed until your Prince Charming comes along and then at last all is perfect and right with the world?

Eden being the eternal romantic that she is quickly called my rant out for what it was:  "Karstee, you sound so jaded right now!"

We had a laugh and then we left it at that.

The next night I was cozying up in bed reading Les Miserables when I came upon this little jem:

"The power of a glance has been so much abused in love stories, that it has come to be disbelieved in.  Few people dare now to say that two beings have fallen in love because they have looked at each other.  Yet it is in this way that love begins, and in this way only.  The rest is the rest, and comes afterwards."

I love this... and this is how I know that I am not as jaded as I sometimes come across.  Just as I made the argument last February with an old co-worker about what constitutes romance, I believe I am a student of the most old fashioned kind of romance, but with a modern idea of self.  You will never find me looking for love on a dating website, I will never think that a husband helping with the dishes is romantic (isn't that just common courtesy?); but I also don't think that a man comes along and everything is complete and you drive off into the sunset with birds chirping happily up in their branches and the sun setting on the previous life that you leave behind just because you've found your guy!

I do however believe in romance.  I also believe in myself.  I believe that I will find a man that complements me not completes me.

The point of this post is just to simply serve as a reminder:  You are looking for something rare, and those things take time and work!  In the meanwhile, keep believing in and cultivating your romantic side, tone down the jaded cynicism, but keep a healthy dose of realism!