hopeless romantic

 The phase ‘my heart skipped a beat’ is wildly unrealistic. I read once that if your heart were to ever really skip a beat something was seriously wrong and you could die. A heart skipping in reality isn’t some beautiful romantic sentiment, it’s tragic. The idea that you could love someone so much that you heart could’t handle it isn’t beautiful, it’s sad and maybe a little too close to sacrifice. I also have read that heart strings are real strings in your heart that can in fact break; You know like the saying ‘tugging on my heart strings.’ It also said that extreme emotion could snap the strings and it would kill a person. Once again it’s not beautiful it’s tragic.

I don’t know if any of this is scientifically true, it’s been years since I happened upon this information. Even if I went back to try and find the study’s I read I wouldn’t know where to look. It’s funny, in a way that isn’t funny, that we equate dysfunctions of the heart to love. Even if both of those things are only partially true it’s one of the many wonders of the human race. That we equate tragedy to romance and to true love. It’s sad, that we can’t think of love without looking at tragedy. The saying ‘didn’t know what you had until you lost it’ becomes a little too real, a little too close to home. 

It’s a perpetuated idea that love is tragedy and if it’s not then it’s not love, just lust. I’m not saying love is easy, often times it isn’t but love doesn’t have to be filled to the brim with tragedy to be real. 

It’s very possible this is all a result of me having too much time to be introspective and I need to get out more. I’ve just stayed hung up on Romeo and Juliet, I never let it go. I had to read the play in ninth grade english class and even after it was over, after the last page was read, after the last assignment was handed in I could’t get over it. And not because I liked it, I hated it. Because how could two people love each other so completely so fast and how could they be so stupid as to not make sure the other was really dead. I couldn’t help but be inconceivably angry and frustrated. I thought it’s so stupid that the only reason you can tell that they are in love is that they die for each other. But it wasn’t even necessarily, they could have lived, they could have found a way. And yet the ending is that they die and that’s it. 

Once again it’s possible I’m just feeling cynical and it’s possible that I’m just a little more lonely than I let on. But I don’t think I will ever be able to look as Romeo and Juliet and think it is anything other than a wasteful tragedy. Their death was wasteful and I will never be over that. 

I think I am incredible lucky to have the parents I do. I can remember looking up at them as a kid and thinking one day I want to have a love like that. I still think that. It’s because of that that I think most of literatures tells of love irritate me. Not because it’s unrealistic but because it’s unhealthy and panic culture. The whole butterflies in you stomach thing sounds an awful lot like anxiety. Why would you fall for someone who makes you anxious? It doesn’t make sense. Why not fall for someone who makes you feel safe, who makes you feel protected and who takes care of you? Maybe that makes me a hopeless romantic I’m fine with that, I just hope it’s not hopeless.