The Only One

This is Kenshin week here on Wild Moon Swings. I am posting nothing but Kenshin art this week. This post is named for a fantastic Kenshin amv called "The Only One" by yellowcard. If you're not an amv fan - join up and download this vid. Way too lazy to look up the creator, but it's a great video and it's an excellent way for me to introduce the topic I plan on hashing today.

Lately, it has come to my attention that there is a certain conversation that takes place in most romantic movies. They ask something like, "Do you believe that there's only one man for one woman?" I have been trying to figure out if this is a question that people really ask themselves well into their thirties or if it's just a generic intimate sort of conversation that a couple can have in a romantic movie to accustom the audience to the idea that they are going to fall in love. There are other generic conversations they have too, like whether or not love and lust are the same thing, and whether or not love lasts forever. That sort of thing.

Well, I have only been asked this 'one person' question once, and though I had never really considered it a possibility my answer popped out immediately - NO WAY! And since that day, I have thought about it more and more until I have finally cut out my answer. I think how many people you're compatible with is in direct relation to how nice a person you are. If you're a nice person then there are probably about a million people on the planet that you could get along with, fall in love with, and have a pretty happy life with. If you're extremely grouchy ... than yeah ... there might just be one. This theory includes all sorts of things:

• Are you the kind of person who needs your partner to be 100% hot?
• Do you need your partner to be kind?
  
• Do you need your partner to successful?
• Your same religion?
• Exactly how picky are you?
  
• Are you all of these things so you have a lot to offer a partner?

I'm not saying that being picky is a bad thing, but obviously the less picky you are, the more options you have. Then there's the last question asking how desirable you are. This doesn't apply to women as far as I'm concerned. I've never heard of a woman who didn't have tons to offer a man. I find that the problem here mostly lies with men -- not all men -- so no one jump down my throat, okay? But it seems to me that some (repeat ... some) men have this thing in their head that tells them that if they don't get a woman hot like Catherine Zeta Jones then they're settling for less. In that guy's case, yes, there is only one woman for you ... and oops - she's married to Michael Douglas (at least last time I checked).

Anyway, onto my question about these generic conversations in movies. I have to, I just have to comment on the love vs. lust question. Lust is easy. Lust takes no work. It's natural and the feelings are easy. Love, on the other hand is a lot of work. But even though it's hard, it has it's good days - charging the castle on a white steed. And it's bad days - changing an extremely dirty diaper for a woman after eight hours of work and two long commutes. Yeah, that's not glamorous to anyone and I think people may expect their relationships to be glamorous.

Love does last forever. It really does, or rather, it really can, but that does mean that you might end up spoonfeeding your husband after he has a stroke and you might not end up on that vacation in Mexico. Yeah, resting for a few minutes beside a noisy vending machine in an uncomfortable hospital chair may not seem like much to you. It might not seem like a grand romantic guesture, but to the person who's been wheeled out into the hallway on a hospital bed that is more like serving tray - it's everything in the world. I've sort of got a little personal here ... but I have to say that I don't speak from the perspective of the person helping. I'm always the person in the bed, who needs the help. I always adore my husband more after I've been through a bad spell. There's no dress ripping, no elaborate scene designed to manipulate an audience's emotions, just him reassuring me that things will be all right, that he's worried about me and cares that I'm feeling bad. That's all there is to it.

So, saying something like that, you'd think that I would believe that he is the only man in the world for me, right? He's only the only man in the world for me because I have DECIDED that he is. There's the clincher.