WHERE DO OLD ROMANTICS GO?

When I was a kid, my parents largely associated with people they had known since they were young newlyweds.

There was frequently talk about the early courting days for all of them, the funny ways they had met, and sometimes, in loud whispers about the aberrant types who had not followed the straight lines they had.

One such type was a fellow who was an executive with the Sherritt Gordon mining company who had left a marriage with a perfectly good wife his mother made him marry. He traveled the world with a woman named Francois who wore a plastic belt. A plastic belt!

His respectable and elegant wife would never have worn a belt made out of polymers.

The second man was a fellow who had been the surgeon at an Ottawa Valley Hospital.  He left his wife and two children for a woman who, by all accounts looked like his mother. Twenty years older, down at the heels and who really needed a makeover from her dust bowl, “Grapes of Wrath” appearance.

Thirdly, the stage whispers addressed the  plight of Eddie, the construction guy, whose wife took courses, stopped caring properly for him and then got a job. The “got a job” part they believed,  had inevitably led to her tryst with her boss, and the eventual dissolution of she and Eddie’s marriage. The real infamy for the wife was that he built her a whole new kitchen just before she left.

Today, standards have changed a lot. All three characters aforementioned would, according to popular thought, end up in trouble, moral dyspepsia or some kind of purgatory visited upon them for their rejection of traditional values. In the end it only happened to one of the three, and that was because Mr. Sherritt Gordon’s plastic belt-wearing paramour was still legally married to someone else she had failed to mention.

Today we think much more highly of romantics because they are exciting, self-indulgent and somehow in our minds, connected to high culture and left wing politics.  Romantics are generally romantics for short periods of time. When reality sets in and there is a realization that relationships formed for facile reasons, or with incendiary desire as their only drivers are bound to be the Andy Warhol version of real life.  Romantics, as I knew them in my youth were always spouting off about tragedy, perfect love, urgency and whatever person had caught their interest.  Amazingly enough, those people went on in two ways. A perfect half of them settled down and became acquisitive concretists, married in a very business-like way. Not a lot of passion, not a lot of emotion. Safe. The other half went on to become cynical, great or wretched in their chosen professions, and typically, like a poet named Robert, looking for perfect love. This search was always conducted without any hard and fast criteria. He has made his way through thirty years of living, always questing for a person who will never say a word that snaps him back into reality. He has to love someone back.

Old romantics are no longer romantics, but egocentrics.  Romantics like the form and the idea of love more than love. A woman who is tired and fraight or a man worn down from a daily routine in a high pressure environment find love in a partner who strives each day to stay with them, and support them. True romance is someone who thinks you look great in sweat pants and knows your favourite song..