My best friend is a former supermodel. No, seriously. Fee (Felicia) was born in Sweden, grew up in Maine, modeled all over Europe, then settled in the Midwest when her modeling jobs started drying up.
Those jobs started drying up when she hit twenty-eight. Now, five years later, she runs a spa and is a single mom to a three-year-old who can't stand me. Her name is Gia.
Gia hides when I show up. She looks at me as if I'm a second away from murdering her. Our other friends have great ways of reaching small children. And in their presence, Gia is fun-loving, free, and adorable. The two times Fee has asked me to babysit, Gia hides under her bed, convinced that I'm Satan.
I'm hoping that by high school I can buy her love with underage drinks and tattoos.
Fee and I bond over our lackluster love lives. Her child is a product of a one-night stand with a gay cabaret dancer after her ten-year relationship ended. And yes, the circumstances are funny now. Fred and Fee are also two of the best parents any kid could ask for.
From my own romantic front, I fell in love with an unattainable man when I was just eighteen. He had a girlfriend. Looking back at it now, there were warning signs everywhere. But I was too young, too naive, and too romantic to see them.
It wasn't a situation like you see in soap operas where the horny teenager tries to break the happy couple apart. It was nothing like that. It was simply me, after observing too many painful couple fights at barbecues (and only seeing HIS suffering), deciding to grab a pen and sheet of stationary and write down all those grandiose feelings of love.
This man was a good decade older than me, but I was never a very good judge with that sort of thing.
And so there was the letter to the one I thought was my soulmate. I used words like "heartquake" and "fever-bliss" (which, regretfully, does sound like a fever blister). It was my own inner Shakespeare, and I was canvassing a future for both of us through words. The catalyst was it was all pouring out of my heart.
That he barely knew my name never entered my mind as an obstacle.
Hey, all of us have been there. All of us. I just don't know that too many of us are dumb enough to put everything on the line -- dignity, respect, decorum, and dreams -- but I did.
And what happened wasn't what you see in the PG-13 movies. What happened was he glanced at my letter, roared with laughter, then through it in the fire pit. My eighteen-year-old heart was shattered. My views of love in what I already knew could be a cold, lonely world were shattered.
Why did it work in the movies? Why did Molly Ringwald get Jake Ryan in the end?
It doesn't happen like that in real life.
And despite the deep scar that encounter left, I went on to college. I grew up a little. I dated someone I began to care about deeply. The problem was he was still pining for his ex-girlfriend. I just didn't want to see it.
Do you remember the definition of insanity? You know -- the whole repeating the same action over and over again and expecting a different result? ...Let me introduce myself.
He and I came to a crossroads. I asked him to choose. I poured out my heart again.
I lost again.
This isn't a pity party post. It's a realization post. We're indoctrinated at a young age (girls, anyway) to believe in magic, in dreams, in love... But those are stories. And some stories should probably stop being told. I don't mean about the not dreaming, but about risking all for everything. All for that illusion of love.
After all, why was I in a mindset that only a man was worth risking every ounce of who I am? Shouldn't that energy be put into something else?
Fee is convinced I'm the eternal 'scorned' woman. But Fee was always a realist. When little girls are put on this earth and taught to dream, someone ought to also teach them how to save themselves.
After all, "evil queens are the princesses who were never saved."
