Mystic Complexities

While getting dressed for work this evening I turned on the TV to provide myself some background noise as I ran from room to room. It's been over a month now that I'm in the new house, and only 2 of those 6 weeks having a fully operating television. I somehow let the cable guy talk me into signing up for a movie package which allows me access to more movie channels than I can count.

I have a classical movie channel, multiple action movie channels, a latin movie channel, a love movie channel, and about 4 or 5 HBO channels, all with their own special name. It just so happens that when I turned on the TV today that I had been watching the love movie channel, which really is quite fitting once you consider who all was watching TV in the first place.

Encore Love was playing Mystic Pizza, one of Julia Roberts' older movies. I'd heard of it before and started watching it once way back when, yet never got into it enough to finish. Unfortunately this occasion was much like the last and I was far too busy to pay attention to the plot. Nevertheless as I ran between the kitchen and living room I feverishly tried to play catch-up and understand what was happening with the characters.

I never was able to figure out her name, yet there was one character who when compared to the others stood out in my mind. The few scenes that I saw in their entirety consisted of this character, a young girl, who had fallen in love with an older man whose child she was helping care for while the mother was away on business. Of course as the story goes, she spent so much time caring for the child that she also found herself spending more and more time with this older gentleman whom she came to love.

In one particular scene this young girl was being grilled and guilted by a friend, for loving someone who was already married, as if she chose to throw herself into the middle of a love triangle. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that because someone falls in love with another person who's married, that that justifies any wrongdoing that might happen between the two parties. But surely this girl did not sit down and plot her affair with this man, much less plan to fall in love with him in the first place! Without question, we could save ourselves a lot of grief and heartache in this lifetime if we had the ability to choose whom we fall in love with. But perhaps that's why we call it "falling" in love in the first place.

Relationships are complicated. Even the best relationships are complicated due in part to the unavoidable fact that matters of the heart are complicated. Despite this fact we seem to get by just fine for the most part, although it is not surprising that there are individuals who do indeed become restless with this idea of a healthy relationship, and feel compelled to make drama for themselves, oftentimes worsening an already complicated situation. Generally though, the majority of people don't sit around scheming about how they'll meet some random person with whom at first they feel no attraction, only later to realize they've fallen madly in love with them. This is life. We aren't dealing the cards. We just take what we get.

I suppose this movie character struck such a chord with me because I have experienced her pain. We're kindred spirits. That's not to say that I have had an affair with a married man, because I assure you I have not. But, I have fallen in love with someone who is in a serious, committed relationship. I never asked to love someone so much, and I have often thought that maybe I would be better off having never felt anything for this person, only then to bite my tongue. Yet when I revealed my feelings to another close friend, the first thing they reminded me was that this person was in a relationship, and for all intensive purposes, practically married.

They repremanded me as if I had already put myself in a compromising position. They treated me as if I was a stranger to them, and they had completely forgotten the fact that there are few things that I value more than marriage and honesty. I was being punished because I woke up one morning and felt like I might suffocate if I never saw this person again. I never chose to love them. It just happened.

So you see, it's easy to jump to conclusions, but really it's anything but easy. It would be easier if we could choose who we fall in love with instead of wishing to fall into their arms and stay there forever. . . .