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This morning I was watching Jane Fonda on Good Morning America. I’m not a huge fan of hers. I barely know her controversial political stance from the Vietnam era. I never watched her workout video tapes from the Reagan era.
Regardless, as I was sipping my coffee and nursing my seemingly omnipresent hangover, I heard her say something interesting. She didn’t want to fall in love. She wanted to walk into love.
Falling in love sounds dangerous. Whenever I’ve fallen, I’ve hurt myself and gained nothing from it. Walking into love sounds lame. I’d rather just be in love.
Someone on Twitter once asked how you know you are in love. I told him that it’s like any other emotion. You just realize that you are…like when you realize you are happy or sad. Not that I’ve ever really been in love. At least, I don’t think so. Maybe I have, but I was too young and stupid to realize it. But, I know for a fact, no man has ever been in love with me.
Then again, I have a screwed up idea about what it is to be in love. Like my sister said (and I’ve thought in the past) romantic comedies have ruined women’s notions about what a good relationship or love is supposed to look like…much like men are messed up about sex because of porn.
The reason I think I’ve never been in love is because no guy has ever loved me back. In romantic comedies (and various novels), if the heroine loves a man, he loves her back…always. In real life, this almost never happens. If it did, we’d be stuck with the first person we felt the stirrings of interest for back in 4th grade.