Back in 1984, I was a 23 year young man. I remember the first time I saw the movie Splash. I fell head over heals for Daryl Hannah. And I wasn't alone. She was so sweet, unassuming, innocent and beautiful, and very, very sexy. She was the 'kind of girl' that I had always wanted to find.
My feelings for her changed 3 years later when I saw her in Roxanne. Where had my sweet, beautiful, innocent sexy love gone? She'd become a somewhat cynical and self centered woman who couldn't see love right in front of her eyes. Now, don't get me wrong, I still thought she was a really good actress and I liked the movie, Steve Martin was hillarious. But my secret love affair with Daryl was over.
I still refer to that movie from time to time, with this person or that, because I've found that just about everyone in the world I talk to has seen it, and there are scenes that we can use to describe mutual life experiences and whatnot.
As I was sitting here flipping through the channels, I happen on Splash. It's the scene where she's sitting watching a western on tv, and crying that the actor gets shot. Tom Hanks explains to her what an actor is, and that he'll 'get shot on another show next week', and then gives her a gift. I watched that scene, watching how she expressed the emotion of an unassuming woman who never received one before, and I remembered how it had caused me to fall in love all those years ago.
And suddenly it occurred to me. Something I figured out a long time ago.
I hadn't actually fallen in love with Daryl Hannah, I don't even know Daryl Hannah. What I had fallen in love with was the character Maddison, a person some writer had invented to represent their idea of what a modern mermaid might be like.
I never really thought about it before, why I'd fallen in love with this woman, and then a few years later why I'd fallen out of love, but I understand it now.
I also understand that in allot of my relationships in the past, it has not been the actual person I fell in love with, it was the ideal I had made up for myself of who they were. Who I wanted them to be. I think that's maybe why I've had so many online relationships in my past, it's easier to hold that ideal when the person isn't actually a part of your every day life. I stopped doing that awhile ago, and won't have another.
I also stopped looking at people as one dimensional charactures like Maddison, stopped only seeing this or that part of them, their looks, their humor, their whatever it is that appealed to me, and ignoring the rest.
If I ever fall in love again, it's going to be with a woman who I see the whole package, the whole person, all the beauty and sensativity and flaws and love, all of it. I'm afraid that person is going to be hard to find, she'll have to be one very special lady. And I'm sure it'll take a long time before I see all of those things in her.
But I think the search just might be worth it.
