Welcome to AVDA - 2

Well, this is AVDA’s second meeting called to order. 

The media is now hot and heavy about V-Day… with advertisements of promotions by eateries and jewelers. Heck, Uncle even received an sms from a restaurant asking if he wanted them to reserve a place for him and his life partner for a romantic dinner for two. Actually, to be fair, he received the sms way before Feb 1 even came along... but still lah! I am sure by now they are even more aggressive with their promotions.

So anyway, yes… even TV stations are promoting their lurve movies accompanied with some soppy lurve song. 

Now, let me remind you again, I am not a cold heartless person… I do like the occasional dose of romance but I am a practical person. Which means, I don’t really believe in happy ever after. I believe that happy ever after is a state of mind in which only we can give ourselves and not someone. And it is something that doesn’t come to us; we need to work towards it. 

Fairy tales, romance movies, love songs and novels all end with the hero sweeping the heroin off her feet and riding into the sunset. Seriously… ask anyone, any long surviving relationship and they will tell you, the sunset thing… doesn’t happen all the time. In fact there are a lot of storms, be it rain or sand, or drought and the occasional tornadoes BEFORE they even reach the sunset! Kinda like the song – Rose Garden by Lynn Anderson. There’s gotta be a little rain sometimes!

The problem is our young girls and boys… especially girls are inundated with all the mumbo jumbo of happy ever after in all them stoopid Hollywood and Bollywood movies and it is distorting their view of romance, love and relationship. 

A friend of mine used to get so upset when her boyfriend occasionally had to help out in his dad’s business over the weekend and therefore had less an hour or two to spend with her. She thought I would get all “How dare he!?” and was expecting him to drop everything for her. But instead, I saw where he was coming from. Parents paid him to study and this was a business he was going to inherit. So the one two hours is ok. It is not the end of the world. Needless to say she was shocked I was not on her side. 

Then, another gf got the most painful lecture from me when after one month of marriage and a slight bump in her relationship with her in-laws, she said, “I wish I didn’t get married lah… feel like giving up.” Seriously… who on gawds green earth said that after the wedding the trying to make the relationship work stops? If anything, this is where the intensity of the relationship has moved one notch. I can no longer walk away from the person when I am angry and retreat into my corner to calm down and then call him later to sort it out because he is there! We now share the bed, the roof, the sofa and all. And I can no longer say, “Oh, I don’t want to see him today and go hang with my gfs because my home is now his too. So as bored as I am of seeing him every day, I can’t really get rid of him.”

And he doesn’t come without baggage. Just like how I don’t. Because of our distorted perception of relationships, we now walk into one with expectations and a list of dos and don’ts that he or she must oblige. I had a conversation with a male friend who said it was ok for him to go out drinking every night but it was a different set of rules for her. He also went on to say that his rules were this and that and if she couldn’t deal with it, she can leave. I told him with all honesty that he should not under any circumstance consider getting married till he has learnt the definition of the word – Compromise. 

We seem to keep forgetting, a relationship is between 2 ppl, and therefore, if we can have our own set of expectations, surely we can't be that stoopid to not realise that the other person would also have theirs right? And if we want to change that person according to our specifications, then are we willing to change to suit theirs? Hmm, food for thought huh? 

Anyway… yes… no such thing as happy every after. It is a state of mind that requires a lot of working towards… and it isn’t one party’s responsibility but both. Which goes back to my point of why should only the guy make all the effort during V-Day and the woman wait to be wined and dined!? 

So… back to happy every after. Now, although I am not a fan of romance movies (read: YAWN!), there are a few that rate very high for me – one such movie is The Story of Us starring Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer. This to me is a very real movie. A lot of everything else is fluff. 

So... er.. thus endeth the second meeting... 

^__^