You know, after watching Unter the Tuscan Sun (no laughing!) tonight, I am experiencing the conflicting sentiments I always have regarding love stories. These often leave me feeling completely torn apart, so I thought I'd just bum your world with them, while I'm down here.

On one hand, a part of me firmly believes that the notions these stories support are real, true, and the only possible way to believe. Undying love. Fate. Happily ever after.

On the other, they portray relationships in a way that it seems impossible for the real thing to ever mirror. At least not in any permanent way. Or can it? I just can't help thinking that if we scrap one love after another, looking for the great romance that will last a lifetime, and it turns out to be something that exists only in movies and books, well, we've really screwed ourselves, haven't we?

And I resent the idea that the only way to a happy ending is by meeting the right man and finding true love. I resent that women who are portrayed as intelligent, talented, and exceptional, 1)learn a painful lesson about love and loss, but grow and heal all the same, 2)move on after realizing that they don't need love to be whole...but then 3)have to meet that magical man before the credits can roll. Isn't it unhealthy to believe that the only thing that completes us is another person? Couldn't these stories end, just once in a while, with a heroine on her own, sipping a cup of coffee and standing on her balcony, looking out over the city as a promising new day begins--without an implication that what she is really redeemed by will be the affair that ultimately fulfills her? Just, you know, for times when I don't want to feel like I'm not really a complete person if I'm not with a man.

But it just wraps up the tale so nicely, doesn't it? It leaves us with that sense of satisfaction. If something is missing from our lives, standing between us and happiness, it's easy to believe that we'll meet him in a supermarket one day, when we both reach for the same carton of eggs.

For this reason, I consider these stories my enemies. They have created such impossibly unrealistic standards in my mind. But I want, like nothing else, to be a part of one, to have my own story great enough for the screen. I guess I'm just struggling with the same things we all do when we are looking for happiness, or trying to understand relationships. I want to buy into the whole package, the fairy tale. But there is always a part of me saying that I'd be better off sticking with tragedy and grief, because those things are reliably dispensed in heaping helpings, and affordable.