guardedness not love is my folly: elizabeth meets bonita

i woke up at 3am the other morning for no reason at all. after trying to go back to sleep with no success i decided to finish reading Pride and Prejudice. now that it's over, i can't stop talking about it. just be glad you aren't reading my REAL journal. then you'd really be annoyed. i'll spare you too many details. as for Jane Austen, here is one of my favorite parts:

“It may perhaps be pleasant,” replied Charlotte, “to be able to impose on the public in such a case; but it is sometimes a disadvantage to be so very guarded. If a woman conceals her affection with the same skill from the object of it, she may lose the opportunity of fixing him; and it will then be but poor consolation to believe the world equally in the dark. There is so much of gratitude or vanity in almost every attachment, that it is not safe to leave any to itself. We can all begin freely-a slight preference is natural enough; but there are very few of us who have heart enough to be really in love without encouragement. In nine cases out of ten, a woman had better shew more affection than she feels. Bingley likes your sister undoubtedly; but he may never do more than like her, if she does not help him on.”

i've never been one for romantic books or movies. once you've seen one you've read them all. but now that i'm in my second quarter of life (!! tee hee he) i'm suppose to grow out of certain patterns right? so i'm trying to expand my horizons. but jane austen is classic, so i'm not exactly moving anywhere near Danielle Steele.

I can’t stop thinking about how roles mess people up. I have this theory that people fit into some kind of role in our lives and outside of this role we don’t know how to make sense of them. So typically we assume people to fill a certain set of behaviors, and outside of that we have little permission for them to roam. These behaviors evoke specific feelings and thoughts in us that we become comfortable with and thus are established to be the norm for how we view and perceive this person.

So your “best girl friend” is always just “one of the guys” she’s never date-able, that guy from church who sets up the chairs is just the-boring-shy-mechanic who never has much to say, your family friend’s daughter is the girl you’ve always had family vacations with so she’s too familiar to be interesting, the new guy at dance swing night is just the typical polo/khaki/loafers w/tassels guy who couldn’t be very exciting or adventurous, etc. It’s endless, for one reason or another we don’t give love a chance. . .

I think it would be a good exercise for us all to consider allowing people to change. To give people the chance to be something different from time to time and maybe we’d be a bit surprised by what we'd discover.

The thing about Mr. Darcy is that Elizabeth thought he was an ass. She kept convincing herself that he was and doing her best NOT to fall in love with him. Why is it that we're so afraid of the things we want the most??