Tuesday, 30 December 2008

• The Holocaust love story is a lie: Why we shouldn't need it anyway

   

  I like to think that for each year of our lives, we learn an important lesson.  Sometimes more.

  As I've been working on my writing (it would surprise everyone to know that I've actually gotten very far into the one that I started writing over a month ago...maybe it's about a concept I'm not bored with), I got to this scene where one character is talking about love.  See, I reached a dilemma when trying to write about this couple in my story.  They are post-courtship, post-wedding...and well, as all the movies and books in the world will tell you - that equals BORING.  Has anyone else ever noticed how all love stories end with 'happily ever after' when that's usually very far from the truth?

  There aren't many movies or books out there that really cover the period after marriage, before the babies come and the particular brand of humor that comes with being a parent.  Trust me.  If you are a parent, you know all too well that if you don't have a sense of humor, parenthood will not be an easy ride for you.  You must develop one or lose your mind.  What else can you do when your kid takes off his diaper, smears poop everywhere, dumps a canister of raisins on the floor, breaks the remote control, etc. all in one day?  Laugh.  Laugh or lose your mind.  There is a lot to write about when you are talking about the childbearing years, but nobody likes to read about the newlywed couple.  Nobody likes already-committed love.  Nobody cares.  It's not a particularly funny period.  The romance is lost on anyone who marries.  There is no 'Will he get the girl?' or 'Can she win him back?'....There just is.  Boring.

  Then, I started realizing how temporary "love" is.  Love is a device and only that.  Love is what brings a man and woman together and after that, it fades away to leave you with something a thousand times more potent and scary than love - reality.  You marry for love and then it wears off.  It does for everyone.  All of a sudden, you are left with a man, a woman, a lot of really bad habits, and the chaos of trying to cope with all the bad habits and make it all make sense again.  We spend our lives trying to fall back into love with the person we marry and realize that it doesn't come back.

  Wait a minute...before you bludgeon me as a horrible, bitter person, hear me out!

  I'm not saying that all married people are unhappy and bitter.  What I'm saying is that there is something more profound than "love".  At some point in your marriage, the "love" is going to wear off and you go through this stage where the person you live with drives you absolutely crazy...and not in a good way.  Just about every married person I've ever asked has admitted this.  Just about.  Not everyone.  I still know people who have some weird fascination with having all their friends know them as the perfect couple.  You know - the ones who never fight, the ones who never go to bed angry, the ones who will be together forever.  Blah, blah.  I much more admire the couples I know who have had problems - sometimes BIG ones - and have made it work despite the odds.

  In any case, there always seems to be this period where you realize you hate the fact that you can put a laundry basket exactly where your spouse throws their socks down on the floor...and somehow, his socks will still find their way to the floor around the basket.  You will start looking at him through goggles of annoyance.  Suddenly, you will realize he has let himself get fat.  He chews too loud.  He snores.  He grabs the remote control with no consideration to the fact that maybe there was something on YOU wanted to watch.  He will leave dishes all over the place.  He spends money on stupid crap.  He won't take you dancing because HE doesn't dance.  He doesn't like some of your friends.  He hates your mother.  He invites people over only giving you fifteen minutes notice.  He's a nerd.  All he ever does is sit on the computer.  He has really disgusting eating habits...

  When one flaw comes out, they all come out in some giant flaw avalanche.  And you are screwed.  You find yourself waking up, one night, in the middle of the night thinking, "Oh my God - what have I done?"

  Immediately, you start wondering if you've married the right person.  What if you passed up Mister Right and you settled too soon?  What if this is the totally wrong person for you?  What if you took the wrong path...like you were on one of those miner's cars in Snow White or one of those movies...and the track you are going down is just going to smack right into a brick wall?  What if?

  This is the point where a lot of couples run into big trouble.  Some can't even get around it and say words so ugly to each other that there is no choice but to divorce.  Then, there are those who stick through it - the ones with kids, very serious religious ties in which they believe divorce is not an option, they can't afford to be on their own, etc. etc.  When you are forced to stay put in a relationship and backed against the wall, you can either fall over and die or face your enemy and engage in peace talks.  Many couples work it out...and it's like a second awakening.  It's not "love" all over again because it's different.

  This is the stage people start referring to as being "comfortable".  It's like that feeling you had when you were sick at school and were waiting in the nurse's office for your mom to come pick you up.  You would stare at the door until your mom or dad came through...and then, they came through the door.  Just the familiarity of your parent's face would make you perk up.  They were "home" to you, to be terribly clichéd.

  It's kind of the same with your spouse.  After a long day without them, you are happy to see their face - the familiarness of it.  It is comfortable.  Sometimes being "comfortable" isn't so bad, even though those who still believe in Disney princesses and fairy tales will wrinkle their noses up at that and say, "Ew!  When I fall in love, it will never be like that!"  Those are the ones who are usually most disappointed when their relationship settles into the "comfort" stage.

  The problem is, the "I-hate-you-everything-you-do" annoys me stage never totally goes away.  It comes back in cycles.  The more times you make it through it without divorcing, the better your chances of survival become.  You either realize there is a fatal flaw that is never going to be overcome or you find ways to overcome it each time a new flaw magnifies and annoys the shit out of you about the other person.

  I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know.  Unless they are a fresh-faced idiot like I was years ago who thinks they are going to marry forever and that it's all going to be perfect.

  There is another huge, huge factor involved that anyone who has ever been through all this will completely understand.  Marriage means committing yourself to another human being.  Do you realize just how unpredictable human beings are?  I was married, once, before I married my husband.  My then-husband was my high school sweetheart, I guess you could say.  I met him when I was fifteen, he was nineteen.  My parents thought he was too old for me.  We were off and on those first two years because I wouldn't sleep with him.  I was a good Catholic girl.

  When I was eighteen, my parents and I had a fight and they kicked me out.  I moved in with him because I had no other place to go.  When I was nineteen, he proposed and we bought a house together.  I guess we just thought, naturally, that was what was supposed to come next.  We married.  Six months later, I found out he was this huge closet pothead.  I seriously had no idea.  A year later, I found out he had been cheating on me.  What happened to the guy I thought was a safe bet?  The one I married because of love?

  Getting married is making a huge gamble.  You are gambling that the person you are marrying is never going to change.  Even more dangerous, a lot of people marry hoping the person they marry will change...and they propose to be the one who will bring them through this miraculous transformation.  They imagine their spouse to someday dedicate 'The Reason' by Hoobastank to them, claiming that they are so wonderful that they actually wanted to change their ways.  It doesn't always work that way...in fact, it very rarely works that way.  Everyone thinks they are rare, though.  Instead of fantasizing about having songs dedicated to us for our martyrdom, what if we had just put After 7's 'Til U Do Me Right' on repeat?  Would we end up lonely forever because someone would always be disappointing us?

  In essence, when you settle down, what makes sense but is often ignored because of this whole fairy-tale romance charade we have stuffed down our throats from the age of three...Marry the least screwed-up person you can find.  Marry the stable person.  The one that has their stuff straight.  The one with dreams, goals, and ambitions that don't change every week.  Marry the one without $136,000 in debt (yeah, I saw that Momma's Boys episode, last night...holy crap!).  Marry the one that has all of these and that you also have some sexual chemistry with.  Seriously.  I put that to the back of the list before.  Some say it's not important.  It IS important.  You can't marry someone that you are physically repulsed by and think, "God, did anyone ever tell him that at a certain angle, he can look just like <insert highly unattractive person here>?"

  Our society has the most ridiculous concepts of "love" fueled by these romantic comedies that talk about fate, destiny, etc.  You can make ANYTHING out to be fate or destiny.

  "So I was at Yankee Stadium...and this guy comes through the crowd, right?  Yelling 'hooooootdooooooogs!!!' and I turned to my friend, okay, and I said, 'Gee, I wonder if he sounds like that during sex' and we both laughed.  So he was handing me a hot dog, right?  And he acted like he couldn't figure out my change and asked if I had a pen.  I totally thought he was an idiot, so I gave it to him.  He wrote his number on my hotdog napkin and that's how it all began...and I got to tell everyone that the first words my Gabe ever said to me was, 'Would you like a hotdog?'  It was fate!  If he hadn't been working that day...and if I had gone to Shelly's party instead...We would never have met!  And no, he doesn't yell 'hoooootdoooooogs!!!' in bed!"

  Fate.  Destiny.  Sure.

  How about societal teachings?  How can people believe in fate, destiny and stuff but call those who are religious naive idiots?  It doesn't make sense.  Maybe there is fate, destiny, etc.  But I don't think it necessarily means you were meant to be with any one person.  Your life could take a different course for every man or woman alive out there that you can marry.  You choose your own destiny, really.

  We invent a lot of things because our lives need order and a sense of purpose, otherwise the state of being is too unbearable to comprehend.  If we take away love and marriage, then we become a baseless society of animals running around, sleeping with whomever.  Common sense tells us that one man and one woman are supposed to be together simply because we have emotions like jealousy.  I believe we were meant to be mated for life, but I think we have far complicated these feelings of "love" that are supposed to tell us we have found some pre-destined soul mate.

  It doesn't help when we hear stories about people like Herman and Roma Rosenblat.  This was a story I read years and years ago from a 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' book.  It really, really touched me when I read it.  Apparently, it touched Oprah, too...Guess what her newest book club selection was going to be?  The memoir of this couple, of course.  Some well-meaning softie typed this story up and set it loose in e-mail forwards years ago.  When people read the story, they immediately had to look it up and see if it was real.  To everyone's astonishment, there was a guy named Herman Rosenblat who was kept in a Jewish concentration camp under deplorable conditions.  He did say that he was fed an apple every day by a beautiful young girl named Roma.  They were set up on a blind date many years later and re-discovered each other.  The story is here.

  The story, after many years of circulation, has just been admitted to be false.  I'll bet Oprah must be devastated.  James Frey and now this.  Oprah has a knack for finding liars, I guess.  Here is what Rosenblat had to say:  "Why did I do that and write the story with the girl and the apple, because I wanted to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people, and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world."

  Isn't it insane that people will go to these kinds of lengths to find true love in this world?  And when they can't find it, they fabricate it through movies, books, and tall tales like this one?  I've had many people tell me that 'The Notebook' is the greatest love story ever.  I thought it was a flimsy, transparent piece of cinematic fluffy crap, for the most part.  The reason why is because it glamourized love between young people in the heady beginnings of infatuation.  It skipped through the real years...the stuff real relationships are made of...and then glossed to the very end of it all.  I can't blame them, though.  Those years are the boring ones...but they're the ones that count most of all.  It's the moments too boring for the cinematic camera that create profound bonds that stretch further than love could ever hope to go.

  A couple learns to bond through tragedies - the death of parents, friends, loved ones.  They learn strength through hardships - financial, normal temptations that face a marriage, etc.  They learn endurance from being together through 9 months of pregnancy, up to eighteen hours of labor, and the parenting of children.  They learn patience and compromise through making a home together, merging two lives...and children - the ultimate test of patience.  They learn tenacity from their separations and in growing as individuals.  They learn compassion and kindness through giving and hoping to receive in return, but eventually giving comes so naturally they forget to wait for the payback and learn to give for the joy of giving.  They learn trust through all these things and the knowledge that their partner is true to their word, their feelings, dependable, and true to the marriage.  They learn independence from learning not to look at themselves as a "unit" but realizing that they are two separate hearts, two separate bodies, with separate interests and can be just as comfortable being alone as being together.  They don't need each other, they choose each other.  They don't exclude the rest of the world because they are a part of it, not a part of each other.

  Should the word "love" stop being used so lightly...or should there be a new word for the bond that brings a man and woman together and makes them stay together for the rest of their lives?  When it comes to making a marriage work, love actually has very little to do with it.  It has more to do with bonding, strength, endurance, patience, tenacity, compromise, compassion, kindness, trust, and independence.  These things are fundamentals.  "Love" is a fabrication, a blanket word used to cruelly cover up realities which lead people to have unrealistic expectations.

  There is something so much more beautiful about seeing two old people, hand-in-hand, and realizing that they aren't together because they love each other, but because they are bonded through tests of life.  They have been through the fire and they have survived.  Yet, our society glamourizes the finding of "love" and initial infatuations as the be all, end all.  When that part is over, a lot of people become suddenly bored and realized they are not en vogue with society anymore.  They miss the rush of falling in love.  Our society is so youth-centric...and why?  Other cultures respect their elders so much more than this society does...and they also have healthier rates of marriage versus divorce.  I wonder why!  In our society, you might as well be dead after marriage when those are the most formulative, trying years of your life.

  We don't need holocaust love stories.  We need reality.  When I say reality, I don't mean the type of reality prescribed by reality TV shows.  I mean level-headed, down-to-earth, clear-cut reality.  The type of reality that comes about when people get their heads out of the clouds and realize that being realistic doesn't have to be bitter, pessimistic or depressing.  Reality is beautiful.

  Love is cheap and arrogant.  Divorces happen because of this.  Marriage is a crapshoot.  Sometimes you get lucky and are attached to a human being that won't disappoint you, sometimes you will be.  You can work through it...or you can't.  Thank you Mr. Rosenblat for a lovely lie...but what I find far more fascinating is how you maintained a marriage to the same woman for over fifty years.  Forget the first meeting stories...it's all the years in between that are truly magical. 

  What a shame his "love" story could have been told without a lie...but would have gone unnoticed and forgotten simply because:  A) Most of it didn't involve young people, B) It didn't involve a strange or unusual meeting, or C) Because fate and destiny weren't really involved.

  I'm not mad at Mr. Rosenblat.  I just think he may still have one of the greatest love stories of all time...only he hasn't told the true story, yet.

   

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