Someone sent me one of those Saturday morning quizzes via email where I had to rate myself and it would tell me which movie star I was.  I ended up being Doris Day.  This just made me laugh out loud.  I LOVED Doris Day movies.  It didn’t even disturb me when we learned Rock Hudson was gay.  It didn’t matter. He was an excellent actor.  I believed him when he finally got to kiss Doris, and her amazing eyes sparkled without the benefit of digital enhancement.  

The way I have always figured it, every neurosis I have regarding man/woman relationships can be traced back to either Cinderella or Doris Day movies.  I even went through a period in my early married life when I refused to watch romantic comedies at all because they had previously ruined my life by giving me a false sense of reality and made me desperately sad that my fantasies were all proven to be total nonsense.  As much as I loved the chemistry between Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in the 1980’s, I had to stop watching them – such exhilirating scenes would never happen again post marriage.  That final scene in You’ve Got Mail was enough for me.  I started watching The Terminator and never looked back.

Before I got married,  I really did believe in happily ever after.  I really did believe in romance.  I really did believe that the magic of the first kiss could last forever.  Then Iwent ahead and got married.  Nothing against Al, we’re solid, and it really did start out that way – making love on the beach in New Hampshire, for example,  but marriage is no magic of the first kiss under the moonlight on a lake in a canoe for all eternity.  It’s more like do you actually expect me to resume kissing you when the kid has just awakened me after puking in his bed and then continued to puke as he cried all the way down the hall on the way to our room, and the only way there would be a happily ever after is to get in the car and not stop driving until I hit the Atlantic Ocean – and I live in California. 

I can remember watching those movies on TV when I’d stay home from school when I was sick.  I loved every minute of it.  She was pretty (I wanted to be pretty.)   The handsome guy liked her (I wanted the handsome guy to like me).  She would bumble in front of him, drop packages, get flustered and he would love her even more (I was very shy as a girl, blushed like crazy, flustered around the boys, would want to die if I ever did something clumsy in front of a boy.  That part actually was true I eventually realized – they DID love me even more the more I blushed and flustered.)

Oh, those movies, always the same.  She would resist his advances.  He would back off but always “run into” her again and again.  She would get irritated by this.  Finally there would be some fiasco that would cause him to come to her rescue, be on her side, save the day.  No matter how hard she would try, the sparkles would start flying out of her eyes and maybe she’d even get a little teary eyed.  How did she do that – cry and sparkle at the same time? 

My other friend emailed back that she is Katherine Hepburn.  This reminded me that somewhere along the line I started watching Tracy/Hepburn movies and I started to identify with her a bit more.  Apparently not enough to take the hopeless romantic out of me, but let’s face it, she had her own brand of wussiness when Spencer Tracy would walk into the room, but she was much more openly hard headed than Doris.  I never quite quit being Doris, but Katherine modeled a sort of assertiveness that I eventually was at least capable of emulating when I wanted to.   No blushing, no flustering. 

I’ve started to watch romantic comedies again.  Now that the kids are grown and the marriage is morphing into something beyond romance and loss of the same, something eternal, something grounded in friendship and unspoken committment to a greater good, it is nice to just sit back and watch something like “27 Dresses” and find that some things haven’t really changed – the bridesmaid wishes she were the bride, the guy who she thought was a jerk is really the one who will rescue her, who will save the day, who will be on her side.  Now that I think of it, perhaps the message wasn’t all that off base, that can pretty much describe marriage in a nutshell.