My readers know my genre is romance. I love love. And write about Prince Charming and Princess Smarty. I like to think that the characters I create are realistic to readers, but they also reflect my some of my more pessimistic tendencies. My cautious approach to relationships and the belief that there is always someone in the relationship that has to work a little more to be comfortable being the recipient of that much love and be okay with the connection you are now sharing with this person.
The other day I attended an early thanksgiving dinner and somehow, in someway, we got into the conversation of relationships, love, prenups, and marriage. I was in a room full of people in various stages of life and was the only one singing praises of the prenup.
I titled this blog pose "The Ever Hopeful Pessimist" because I am hopeful in all things, but through it all I can be slightly pessimistic.
I am like most girls, I think. Well... Maybe like a few girls.
More and more millennial are not interested in marriage, at least according to the statistic. I am of the marry in the "passion of love" variety.
For me the governmental reasons of marriage are not the reasons to do it. Marriage comes in two parts. There is the legal part and the spiritual part.
The legal part is the very cut and dry part most people suffer through to go through the spiritual part. To go before your family and friends and declare your present and future love for that other person.
The spiritual part can happened without the legal part. Your union can be blessed by whatever religious figure you hold in high esteem without the legal side.
But people do the legal side because they want the legal benefits that go along with marriage. Yet when someone brings up the idea of a prenup, you have offended someone to their deepest core. As if by mention it you are planning for the upcoming divorce.
I swear the entire room was in an uproar. The more I dug in my heels the more animated the conversation became. It was like I had announced to the room I wanted to host a divorce before the actual marriage.
We are taught to prepare for eventualities in life and to take precautions. Before you have sex get tested. (Though this is rarely ever sexy.)
When you become an adult?
Pay your bills. Have medical, dental, and car insurance. We do this not in the hopes we will become sick, need a filling or dentures, and will crash our cars. We do it because it is responsible planning.
But extend that to a prenup and suddenly you are planning a war against love and pushing away true romantic happiness.
Yet I believe love to be accepting and enduring. I think those vows spoken during that ceremony means we have done the work before hand. We know each other. We trust each other and the thing that breaks this ever lasting love will not be an agreement that is only enacted if we actually do divorce?
Traditionally I always enter into parties with the same game plan. Smile wide. Everyone kisses each other's cheek in greeting. Little bit of small talk. Collect my plate and go.
But that night I was dragged into the conversation because I have still not perfected the art of leaving. When I am interested in a topic. I have diarrhea of the mouth. I won't give up and I can't give in.
Especially when I am told that the only way I could think this way is if I have not experienced enough love in my life.
Even discounting my own personal experience in love. Romance and marriage take up large blocks of my mind. It rules over me and pushes me. From an intellectual level. An imaginative one.
Romance, love, connection, sex, sacrifice, and marriage. All of it is in my writing. I dream about it, I write about it. I talk about it and I try to live the really good bits of it.
I am in love with love and yet still this "ever hopeful pessimist" wants a prenup. As poor as we may be.
Completed Works:
The Secrets, Lies, and Betrayal Series:
The Virgins Club:
Lipstick Diaries
The Young and The Powerful
