Perspective

Someone asked me last night what makes a love story great. And it's not the first time I have been asked this on my journey. And I'm sure not the last. I ask myself that question every day.

Obviously it's a matter of perspective and opinion. For me, my perspective and opinion have been shaped by my own experiences and observations in the love department. I look at my parents, who were married for forty-four years until my dad died. And I remember when I was a teenager, and I was at the age when one is always embarrassed by one's parents, no matter what they do. My friends would come over and say "It's so cool. Your parents are still in love with each other." It would make me stop, and step out of my teenage self-consciousness and look and see what was right in front of me. And I remember later, a few years before my dad died that I saw the same thing my friends had when I was younger. And even though they had a normal marriage with fights and periods of not being "in love", I always wanted to find what they had. To me, what they had was extraordinary.

After my dad died, a few years later my mom fell in love again and got married at seventy-eight. They are so in love it's annoying. (Get a room!) But also charming and beautiful. And I know how lucky my mother is to have found two great loves in her life. We should all be so lucky.

My own experiences in love have made the hopeless romantic in me wonder about whether the kind of love we dream about is real. Whether it's attainable. And so, this journey. I must remember my mother. And I am reminded of a line from Romancing the Stone. Kathleen Turner says "Hopeful...Hopeful romantic".

That's what I want to be. Hopeful.