Romance, Perfected?

Today marks the advent of our perfect romance presentations, and I wanted to throw a blog in here before we began in order to capture my ideas on romance unmarked by the genius and originality of my fellow classmate's presentations.

Brainstorming for our group's perfect romance began almost the second week of the semester. We all met at Wild Joe's coffee on a Sunday morning, some of us clear-headed, others rather hungover from the previous night's festivities and each of us was asked what our idea of a perfect romance was. I remember my naive and uneducated answer all to clearly: "the perfect romance is a relationship that is utterly realistic, for what is more perfect than the materialization of love in our everyday lives." After stating this to the group, I found myself thinking, "Damn Nicole, that was a great answer." How very wrong I was became clarified to me the next day in class when Professor Sexson basically debunked every idea I had previously held on the perfect romance. I was convinced that romance should reflect real life relationships, which were messy, brutal, and in my experience, devoid of the happy endings that permeated throughout the stories we had been reading. The materials we learned in class were stressing almost the opposite of this, and I remember becoming increasingly frustrated when I would blog about my next "genius" insight into romance only to have it completely shattered by Sexson's lecture the following day. "That isn't realistic!" I would scream internally during class, but I kept my mouth closed because my fellow students seemed to buy into the ideas we were discussing. After my initial rejection of the concepts being taught, I began to open my mind to the idyllic and formulaic romances we were reading about and conceded that they did have value. Perhaps these depictions of romance, while not realistic nor accurate mirrors of real life relationships, were a heightened exaggeration of what does go into a relationship. The apparent death echoes the feeling of loss when you break up with someone you love. The kidnapping of the damsel mirrors the point in the relationship when a couple becomes separated for one another. The love triangle could be a depiction of the jealousy that plagues any relationship when one feels threatened by another man or woman, and so on. These formulas, regurgitated throughout romantic tales, do indeed have merit, and I certainly hope our final presentation reflects this. I won't pretend to know what truly constitutes as a perfect romance, but I like to think that my stubborn mind has been pried open to the subject by the sturdy hands of Professor Sexson.