I, Woman

Finding a soulmate before sunset
    
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  I, Woman
  Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy and Director Richard Linklater's movie sequel "Before Sunset" stirs the hornet's nest and makes couples ask, "Should I ditch my partner and seek the love of my life?"
       
        She was usually bubbly and flighty, the temperament of the air-brained blonde 'Melody' from the cartoon 'Josie and the Pussycats.' That day though, she was troubled. Her brows were knit and her mouth pouting. "I just watched 'Before Sunset'!" she explained. "Wasn't it great?" I asked, but she shook her head. "Yes...no," she muttered looking down, "I'm...I don't know what I should do!"
        Fascinated that she, Miss Super-beautiful-sexy-and-rich-and-educated (I'll call her 'M' to protect her identity) would actually have something to trouble her, I salivated with curiosity to hear her tale: she had been going with this handsome up-and-coming TV host for almost two years now and they were thinking of getting married...but then...the movie happened. After she saw Hawke and Delpy anguish over not having pursued their love-of-their-life and paying for it with deep regrets, it suddenly dawned on her that she may be heading for the same boat. Her guy was young and handsome and famous and earning big bucks, what any girl would gladly kill for in other words, but he didn't stir her. He did not illicit the passion and quantum joy she admitted she would've felt if she was actually madly in love with him. Was she even mildly in love? Even this she was no longer sure of.
        The message of the movie though was, "Don't settle." Don't settle for second-best, or "just okay" or "why not?" when it comes to choosing who you'll be spending the rest of your life with. Insist on without-a-doubt, passion-pounding, no-hesitation, sure-as-can-be, he/she IS THE ONE. Insist on being madly, deeply, crazily in love or nothing at all. This, M, was fretting over. For she realised she was happy in the relationship, but it didn't stir her soul. The words, "I want to spend the rest of my life with you," didn't well up inside her whenever she was with him. It was more like, "This is a good deal, why not?" In other words, she was settling, and she was afraid that years from now, she'll find herself crying in a dark, locked room, wishing, pining that she had done things differently. The movie shook her enough to realise, marriage was a big step. It made her start asking, "Was she going into it voluntarily taking every step or was she just being swept away by the on-paper perfection of their relationship?"
        I didn't take her pleas seriously then because it's pretty difficult looking at someone so gorgeous and in the latest expensive designer outfit to actually have feelings of concern. I mean, "she has it all," can anything trouble her? But after I stumbled upon the Yahoo groups dedicated to fans of the movie (http://movies.groups.yahoo.com/group/sunriseandsunset/) and read pages and pages of women and men posting poignant messages saying they regret "settling" and being married, that they longed for finding that person again who they had a short but sweet love affair with, I then realised M wasn't alone. The movie did make some people re-evaluate their relationships. The movie did make some people wish they hadn't settled. Case in point is 'Sal' (again, ain't her real name) who said she'd been married for over a decade, and her husband was okay, and he was clearly in love with her, but he didn't do anything for her. They had married young and she felt then that he was "good enough" so she married him. But having seen the movie, she now asks, "is 'good enough' no longer 'good enough'?" She wanted to know why she had to settle for "okay"? Why couldn't she leave him and search for someone who would actually sweep her off her feet?
        Her husband is a decent man though, and he's tried everything to please her, like reading more books to excite her intellectually, going to symposiums even though he was more of a sports-on-TV kind of guy, so Sal was torn. It would make her so guilty and feel so selfish if she'd just leave him without him ever having done anything but to love her. Still, she said firmly, "If they had met today, she wouldn't go with him."
        Another member of the site reacted to Sal's musings by talking about her friend who had the opposite problem. Her friend, let's call him 'J,' would meet a woman, be smitten by her, and he'd charm her and they'd be like magnets, inseparable, getting together afterwards, talking on the phone into the wee hours of the night. He'd surprise her with mushy love notes and flowers, showering her with tenderness and attention. Then, as if he'd exhausted all he could get out of their relationship, he'd get bored, then stop seeing her, and she'd be totally confused, wondering if she'd done anything wrong. More often than not, this woman would then meet someone else and she'd be happy with the new partner and even end up marrying that person and J would be shocked, as if he cannot believe she could be happy settling for anything other than the passionate relationship they had. J also could not understand why he always ended up alone.
        Others on the site all chimed in that "walking on clouds" during a relationship is just a phase and doesn't last and can't be the basis of a long-term commitment. I added this to the discussion:
        I think the question is really about...is there a "soul mate" out there for us? or do we just "work" at the relationship to make it great? Or it could also be a combination of the two: passion in the beginning because of super-compatibility. Then, with a mature attitude, grounded and realistic in one's expectations, the relationship becomes less "passionate" but deeper.
        The passion--it's there at the start, and it can still surge again now and then, but all things have a cycle, even passion. Like that Zen quote about "if even the rain will eventually cease, is it not also so with your [emotions]?" The danger is in artificially prolonging something past the time it should die or fade, whether it be passion, or pleasure or enjoyment.
        I, for one, just enjoy the moment. A chance encounter that brought great joy, though it lasted only a minute or two, is enough. I don't need to experience it again. It would be nice, but I don't crave that it happen again. Why? because I think every moment is forever. Instead of defining heaven as a place where we'll live in a perfect state for eternity after we die, I think of heaven as the small pockets of joy we experience in our life. These pockets of joy, whether it be with our sweetheart, children, friend, or work, will last forever. Once they've happened, they're forever etched in time--no longer erasable: like the line in the poem, "The Moving Finger writes and having writ, moves on; not all our piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all our tears wash out a word of it." So whenever you've just experienced something fantastic with someone, you no longer anguish and wish it would last forever--because it will. It's happened and so it's THERE, for all eternity. That's heaven. For me.
        Reacting to Sal's story, I posted this:
        Someone once defined 'art' as "if it reveals or improves on the human condition then it is art." The movie's effect on many people like Sal, it seems, is to stir up dissatisfaction because it reveals a very common problem in our life: settling for mediocrity in relationships. Instead of striving, waiting for that "soul-mate" who'll bring out the best in us and us in them, we settle for what's at hand, the familiar. Our loneliness and tiredness at waiting makes us say, "What the heck. Maybe this is as good as it gets."
        But the movie, and maybe some incidents later on, tug at our sleeves and remind us of what could've been if we had only persevered or been unwilling to compromise.
        I just don't know what the right action now would be: do we leave our long-term partners in search for a "dream", or, if we've found someone who we think is "it" for us, do we risk everything and go with that person?
        It all boils down to happiness. Which route will bring it? And what about its effect on others--is it worth hurting our children, our partner? Can we not find happiness in our current state without taking the plunge outside of it?
        I don't know how other people will handle it, but as for me, my feeling is, all the joy and happiness that a "Before Sunrise/Sunset" relationship can bring is already inside of us. If it weren't, then it wouldn't come out even if we met our perfect match. All the giddiness and overflowing joy that Jessie and Celine (Hawke's and Delpy's characters in the movie) felt being in each other's arms again, I think, is in each of us and is not dependent on outside factors (such as meeting our perfect match) for it to come out. We can experience it watching a beautiful dawn, or seeing our children playing. It doesn't have to come only through a soul-mate--that joy can be found everywhere.
        Maybe this'll help: A student went to his teacher and said, "Master, why do I feel that my life is meaningless and not worthwhile." Teacher: "Your life has meaning and it has worth, it's just that you don't think it so." Student: "Why do I not think it so?" Teacher: "You watch too many advertisements."
        Seriously, I think that's the main root of our unhappiness: "advertisements" or more seriously, "ignorance"--societal influence that keeps telling us what things make us happy and what things shouldn't. You can be ecstatically happy just sitting under a tree at the park but society keeps telling us that that's crazy, that you must first get a raise or a good review or have your novel published or find your Mr. Right or Ms. Right. But it's not crazy. It's perfectly natural to just be spontaneously happy at the "little things"--things that might even be free or worthless in societal terms, but moving to your unique humanity.
        So my advice, if you're unhappy or lonely or dissatisfied, look for happiness within you. It's not out there, it's in us.
        This elicited a reaction from a member who said, if a relationship was unhealthy, then it was wrong to stay in it and just bear the unhappiness. I agreed with this and wrote...
        I agree. There are times when two people just bring out the worst in each other and it just slowly eats them up--they definitely should part ways rather than incurring permanent damage.
        Like you say, it's all about not settling for "mediocrity" in life. I think the source of meaningfulness and happiness is "passion." Being passionate about something, whether it be a relationship, a cause, a job, a project, whatever. What's pitiful is someone who has given up on passion and just goes through life like a zombie, just going through the motions.
        Being passionate though doesn't mean living a roller-coaster life of ups and downs and mood swings. It just means having total energy devoted to something you feel worth doing--something only YOU can bring to this world. For example, the Dalai Lama, it seems to me, has a lot of passion for freeing Tibet or at least bringing freedom to his people, yet his attitude is relaxed, he doesn't get into wild ebbs and flows.
        Someone reacted to this saying she was about to disagree, but after she read the part about not "living a roller-coaster life" she saw my point. Still, she insisted I shouldn't use the word "passion" since it implied something temporary, like a candle burning at both ends.
        I guess most on the site, though they saw the point of "Before Sunset," also saw the danger of saying "to hell with everything" and blindly following our heart, especially if one were already in a long-term relationship that had a lot of responsibilities. This doesn't lessen in any way the value of the movie though, which is to wake us up and remember a special time in our life: when all that mattered in the world was the sound of a voice, the accidental touching of fingers, the smell of their hair as we were wrapped in a deep embrace.

By Vip Malixi
Illustrated by Paul Eric Roca

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