We love to love love
We love to love love! Deny it all you like, bitter cynics, but here is my utterly unscientific, unresearched, assumption-based thesis to support the assertion that LOVE IS KING (or queen, depending on your preference).IT’S EVIDENT that, out there, love stories rule because:
- Romance books sell even though I don’t know anyone who admits to reading them (come on, FESS UP)
- You can’t avoid the endless parade of romantic-comedies on the big screen and sudsy romantic dramas on telly (especially ones involving people in surgical scrubs — what IS that about? Have they thought about the hygiene risks?)
- Movies with moronic vampires slavishly labouring through earnest, deathless dialogue SELL when, truly, they shouldn’t. Save. Me.
All this PATHETIC romantic hysteria could make a person want to run a mile from any proper discussion of love. Well, this person anyway.But I’ve had a wake up call lately. Sure, we all like a bit of fantasy love. Love with its Sunday clothes on. Love with a bit of doe-eyed moping and good, honest pashing. But out there in the world, despite the overload of soppy, unrealistic romance, good people have been CHANGING THE GAME when it comes to redefining marriages and long-term partnerships.You probably know this already.I know this because I’ve been asking people. And I’ve heard story after story of people inventing their own ways to love, commit and celebrate being together. These are the folk who have given me a refreshing and new understanding of romance. Slowly and surely, I’m beginning to see that notions of love and partnership haven’t been utterly hijacked by the soap-dramas. Good timing, really. Because yep, you guessed it — I’m getting hitched.Here’s the thing. If you go to Amazon.com and search for books about marriage you can find a million trillion books on:
- how to score a marriage (especially if you are a young women and you’re looking for a gazillionaire-oligarch-football-club-owning single playboy)
- how to fix a failing marriage (oh spare me the endless diatribes — you could build a six-level divorce court from the stack of books devoted to mending marriages).
Heck, there’s probably a book out there on how to:
- Make a wedding partner out of macramé and VOODOO it to dance a bridal polka
- Craft a wedding dress entirely from Australian outback bar coasters
- Teach your dog to play the wedding march on the banjolele.
Really, there’s a whole lot of junk out there. Who reads it? Who NEEDS IT? And most importantly: er, where are the real stories?So, dear friends I am making A BIT OF A PLAN. I’d like to make some kind of record of real, modern love and partnership. Forget about vampires holding hands and staring into each other’s yellowy eyes. I want the stories of the real ties that bind and the rituals that brought them into being.My plan is germinal and fragile so, people, be kind. Please. I plan to create a diary of my own weird journey towards marriage. More importantly, I want to record my excellent friends and their excellent views on the subject.To make this happen, I’ve started a Facebook page called ‘We do’. If we’re Face-friends, I’ll invite you to join it. If not, you can search for it via the community pages.I’m looking for people who’ll tell me their romance, wedding, partnership stories. I’m eager to know what modern love means — in all its weird, glorious, hetero, homo, married, unmarried, eager, reluctant, cynical, romantic glory. Heck, apparently a friend of a friend just married a bridge. Seriously.Do you think marriage is RELEVANT? Are you married? Are you in a partnership? Are you single but look forward to committing to someone through marriage? Are you prevented by law from marrying?Do you see the ritual itself as important?Do you see marriage as a community celebration of your love? What is the community’s role in supporting a marriage, once a commitment is made? Do you regard the ceremony as utterly personal?Please share the love and let’s make a massive REAL LOVE PICTURE of our magnificent lovely love.Every couple of weeks I’ll send out a pithy question VIA THE BLOG. You can answer publicly via the blog and join the chatter or respond privately — just let me know if you want me to leave your comments hidden. The Facebook page will keep you up to date on what's happening in the project, with interviews and stuff. The plan for this is some kind of glorious publication … a book, an ebook. Something.Ah, love. Have I made you sick yet? Visit me at ‘We do’ and I promise to stop spamming you with love slush.Love youse. No, really.