Life in a De-Constructed Reality

Tonight my mother was talking about her boss/co-worker, about how she says the most awful thing about her husband. How this woman, let's call her Sharon, talks TO her husband, how she talks ABOUT her husband. Let's call him Adam. He asks her if she wants to go out for dinner, and she turns it into a marital brawl. How could Adam possibly think she would WANT to waste 100 bucks, how could he think she would want to eat when she's already full? How dare he. What an awful husband.

Is anyone else enraged? Probably not--it's an all-too common scenario in America: an unhappy couple. We expect to be happy, probably because of what we see in the movies. And whenever life moves past our Happily Ever After and turns into the dullness of routine and easy familiarity breeds contempt, we assume things must not have been fated to work (wherever we got THAT idea from--Fate, not personal responsibility, controlling our life).

The most frustrating part of this, aside from our inability to live in our reality and not a constructed one, is that Sharon isn't really grateful for her status. Does she even KNOW how many women sit at home, ALONE? Doesn't she understand that SHE'S one of the lucky ones, to have found love at some point in her life? She won't sit at home every night, wondering why she wasn't enough, what was so wrong with her. No, instead, she yells. She vents every frustration from work, lets her menopausal hormones wreak havoc on something so fragile as Life and Love and their intertwining. Does she even remember how they met, how it felt to kiss him for the first time? Does she care about why she married him in the first place?

I hate to sound like an embittered, single woman. But in fact, I'm just getting pretty damn tired of everyone acting like Love isn't worth the time it took to spell. I want to believe that Love can conquer all things, that at the end of my life, I will be grateful for the time that my world wasn't broadcast in black and white, but in color, in sound. And not the Hollywood version of it all, but the real kind, where our sacrifices aren't the noisy bits, aren't the big productions but are instead the daily routines we endure for one another.