All about Love, Life, Relationships

Call it coincidence or serendipity but just a week before the start of February, my close friend, Myra, lent me her daughter’s current favorite books – Twilight and New Moon. These are the first two books in the Bella-Edward saga. The thick volumes made me reluctant to read them, but I was unwilling to pass up on such a timely topic to write about. So I read the books and I’m glad I did. In fact it’s rather mortifying to admit that despite my age, I still got terribly hooked on a teenage romance that was “out of this world.” But it’s true. I got so carried away that I burned the midnight candle five nights in a row just so I could finish reading the books fast. Now I can hardly wait to get my hands on the last two books.

The movie Twilight was a huge box office success worldwide. But before I watched it last December, I thought it sounded overrated given the hype surrounding it. I guess the skepticism probably came from the disillusionment that experience sometimes brings. I’ve seen too many failed relationships to be excited about yet another love story. They’ve made me somewhat cynical towards the “myth” that somewhere out there is a “hero” who can love truly, madly, deeply, greatly, the way I dream of and the way I know I can. Yet, there’s a part of me that will glory in proving this cynic wrong – the hopeless romantic that reasserts herself whenever I let my guard down.

It was my niece, Mariel, barely 12, who stirred my curiosity to see Twilight. For someone who doesn’t like books much, she finished reading the four Bella-Edward books in record time. I was impressed! This must be one great love story to have moved her that much. My sister, Mariel’s mom, also couldn’t stop talking about the books and the movie so I finally decided to watch it. When I did, I was taken aback by the screams that rent the air repeatedly as teenage girls gushed and swooned over the eerie (ghostly?) perfection of the movie’s hero, Edward. I thought only Filipino love stories elicited this kind of reaction from their audience. Was I wrong! The lovers only had to stare into each others eyes and the crowd would go wild. And when the lovers touched? Hysteria! The mood was contagious. Somehow, it felt good and refreshing to let go and be thrilled over something so juvenile – an experience I haven’t had in a long while. It was like being a teenager again and coming alive! Boy, I must be regressing. I probably need therapy. To think that the movie’s theme wasn’t even very original. It was just another love story except for a twist in the plot that made it unusual and interesting: Bella is human and Edward is a vampire. Talk about love coming from the most unexpected places. This one surely fits the bill.

So what do we do with these love stories that make us hope in better things like Prince Charming or Edward the Vampire and happily ever-after? Or with movies that make us dream of things that are just a little beyond reach and that appear too good to be true? Many psychologists assert that when it comes to love, we, as a generation committed our greatest blunder when we believed the myth of romantic love. This, they say, gave rise to most of the dysfunction in our relationships today because most women suffer from the delusion that like Cinderella, Snow White, and all those damsels in distress, we, too will have our happy endings when our Princes finally find us. Psychologists add that the fairytales and the romance books that delighted us like Mills and Boons and Barbra Cartlands did us a great injustice by making us yearn for something that doesn’t happen in real life. Thus, they only set us up for the greatest of life’s disappointments.

If all these are true, what do we do then with today’s younger generation who, although their heroes may have taken on different shapes and forms from ours, still cling to the same myth, the same hopes and dreams that we had? How do we spare them from pain and disillusionment? Do we shatter their illusion now and tell them that all this mushy stuff will just spoil them for real life? Or do we tell them instead that they can do better than we did by knowing what it is they really want, going after it and not settling for second best? Right now, I honestly don’t know the answer. I suppose I’ll have to finish reading the final two books of the Bella-Edward saga first. Or maybe, I’ll have my answers much later when my Edward finally finds me. Until then, your guess is as good as mine.