Book Tour: The Love Shelf
A couple of nights ago my partner and I were in the dairy aisle of the grocery store shopping for ingredients for dinner when the lady in front of us turned around, took us in from head to toe and exclaimed, "Oh my god, you guys have amazing energy. You're going to grow old together. I can see it. I'm psychic." She didn't make the usual disclaimers like someone accustomed to warding off looks of skepticism, and I'm sure she didn't detect any such reaction in our faces. If anything, our expressions probably reflected agreement and a touch of amusement. I acknowledged her observation by saying, "Well, we've already been together for 26 years, so thank you!" She commented that she had just broken up with her long-term partner, but that we were awesome and then she left us to the dairy aisle, smiling at each other and going about our evening. I wouldn't say this kind of thing is commonplace but we've had similar encounters more than a few times over the last 26 years.
A life of love
I think I always knew that love was going to be an important part of my life. Not that it isn't important to everyone, on some level, but for a lot of people, their ambitions take precedence, or their independence, career goals or family obligations, devotion to a life of solitary creative output, or becoming set in their ways and never finding the right person to fit into the structured life they've carved out for themselves. As a teenager, when people asked me what I wanted to "be" or do with my life, I often said I just want to be happy. Career choices and creative pursuits were fluid, and good thing too, because I grew up on the cusp of a technological revolution that would have transformed any concrete plans I made before college.
Even in kindergarten, I had a "boyfriend." I was the little blonde girl holding hands with the little boy in the striped shirt at recess. After school, his mother babysat the neighborhood kids until our parents came home from work. Before my dad would arrive to pick me up, we would quickly kiss each other on the cheek before parting for the evening, eager to see each other the next day at school.
When I was 11, I had a palm reading at a local fair and the only thing I remember is the lady studying my "lines of marriage," the ones etched between your pinky and the edge of your palm, and saying, "I see many little loves and one big love right in the middle of your life." I doubt she would have hazarded at guess at just how big that one love would turn out to be, but even that optimistic proclamation has given me moments of anxiety over the years, when I wondered at her syntax. What did she mean by the middle? Was it an indication of the duration of my life or of the love itself or just an easy shorthand when speaking to a preteen girl; yes, there would be true love in her future, but she would have to wait a few years to meet him... That cute boy in 6th grade homeroom was not "the one."
By this point in my life I was already addicted to New Wave and Gothic music and angsty, lovesick poetry like John Donne and Baudelaire. I watched General Hospital and One Life to Live after school, and I loved romantic movies, everything from the black and white Sunday matinee classics I watched with my mother, like Bringing up Baby and To Have and Have Not, to tragic epics like Shogun and Gone With the Wind, to my generation's teen classics like Sixteen Candles and Some Kind of Wonderful.
Romance novels
It was around that time that I began voraciously reading romance novels, not teenage fare like Sweet Valley High or lurid coming of age stories like Forever and Tiger Eyes, but the thinly veiled literary smut of historical romance novels, with their garish pastel cover paintings of Fabio-looking model heroes grasping flowing-haired damsels around the waist, her shapely bare legs emerging from layered skirts, cleavage bursting from lace bodices.
These books are not hard to read; in fact, they go down like buttered popcorn and Junior Mints. At the peak of my obsession, I was plowing through one a day... 400 pages, big type face, probably because the audience tended towards middle-aged women, which made me a comic anomaly among the patrons of the used bookstores I frequented. I visited once a week and scoured the shelves for any new covers I hadn't already read or passed over after scanning the back cover for keywords, discarding them if they didn't line up with my weirdly specific preferences for certain historical eras, which were obviously more romantic than others.
The Civil War versus colonial era, for example, and nothing set after 1900, obviously. Anything with pirate ships was a definite favorite; castles and medieval knights were good too. Westerns were okay, but there were certain pitfalls to be avoided; anything too reminiscent of Little House on the Prairie or an old John Wayne movie was unappealing, but the young daughter of a down-on-his-luck gold prospector who has to solve the mystery of his disappearance and enlists the reluctant help of a gruff yet ruggedly handsome bounty hunter? Yes, please! I don't want to throw American Middle School history classes under the bus, but I probably learned more about American history from those books then I did in my Social Studies class.
Love signs
I began studying astrology in my early teens as well, my first book being, of course, Linda Goodman's Love Signs. I'm sure it was the same for many girls my age, and those a little older and a little younger. I wouldn't say I read it cover to cover because it's a classic, cookbook-style astrology book going through every combination of signs, Aries male with Taurus female, and so on, and every chapter begins with an appropriately poignant quote from Peter Pan. I would read my sun sign, Virgo, combined with that of any boy I had a passing crush on to glean insights into our potential match. I also have Scorpio Rising, so I would read the Scorpio female combinations as well, fixating on the differences between my Virgo identity and the Scorpio overtones to my personality, and how they would combine with that of my male counterpart.
Listen to our Starzology podcast episode about Relationship Books
The bookshelf tour continues...
Bookshelf Tour: The Violet Shelf
Kings and Queens of England by Brenda Ralph Lewis
Venus and Jupiter by Erin Sullivan
Through the Looking Glass by Richard Idemon
Astrology for Lovers by Liz Greene
Relationship Analysis by Robert P. Blaschke
Skymates by Jodie and Steven Forrest
Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos by Dennis Overbye
1,000 Sculptures of Genius
Karmic Astrology by Martin Schulman
Synastry by Ronald Davison
Spiritual Astrology by Spiller and McCoy
Planets in Composite by Robert Hand
The Gen X Reader edited by Douglas Rushkoff
The Secret Language of the Mind by David Cohen
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My astrology books have diversified considerably and grown exponentially over the years, but it's astonishing how many of them center around relationships; synastry comparisons and composite charts, explorations of Venus and Mars, North Node and South Node placements in the other person's chart and their karmic meanings, and numerous books on the outer planets and what they mean for your fate, which often means relationships because that seems to be one of the few fates we're willing to entertain the possibility of ahead of time; well, love and money. No one wants to contemplate their fate in terms of health a long way down the line, or how the luck of the draw may impact our best laid plans. Not in western astrology anyway. Other traditions are more predictive, or deterministic. I recently read somewhere that in traditional Chinese astrology, you would only tell someone you really trusted your date of birth because it gave them too much information, and information was power. If they could see your fate, that meant they could control you.
What Forever Looks Like
Now that we've been together longer than almost anyone we know, we sometimes get questions like, what's your secret, or what do you guys argue about? Do you even fight? I can assure you that we argue, but not like assholes flinging insults at each other, trying to find each other's weak spots. That's a red flag, but I suppose it works for some people... We bicker like two strong-willed adults, mostly over silly things. I think I can safely say our big disputes are behind us, ironed out in those first fraught years, where our relationship styles were not yet enmeshed and it still seemed possible that it could all end with one cataclysmic blowout, one person storming out, never to return. But the last time that happened was a very long time ago, when we still had a second apartment for one of us to flee to. We decided that very night that we would make it work, that we were better together. We would only grow stronger and closer with time, far greater than the sum of our parts.
Since then, we've occasionally mediated disputes between other couples, acting as translators between the very disparate love languages of friends trying to make it work. Although it seemed to do wonders at the time, none of those relationships lasted very long. We've never tried our hand at matchmaking, preferring to let our single friends remain single or figure it out on their own. The less meddling from know-it-alls like us, the better. The only advice we could really give, that it's a combination of hard work, trust, unrelenting honesty, magical true love and unbelievably good fortune, hardly seems adequate to addressing the issues in other people's relationships. Especially now that there are matchmaking apps that allow people to constantly browse for the perfect mate or momentary diversion, an ever-present temptation to upgrade your situation, like striving for the next level in an addictively mindless yet soul-eroding game.
I'd be lying if I didn't admit that it sometimes feels like we're a couple of vampires, watching mortal relationships spark to life around us with such fragile beauty and potential only to flame out and die at the change of a season.
But then, maybe because I have Scorpio rising, I'm reminded that no love story ever really has a happy ending. Everything eventually comes to an end, and endings are rarely happy. And we almost never get to choose the manner of the ending. Even if you do everything right, in the very best case scenario, there's always death, a 100% failure rate. The most you can hope for is to grow old together, somehow maintaining similar levels of health and wellness, praying or whatever the secular equivalent is, for the good fortune to die as near in time to each other as possible... or for the courage and conviction to take matters into your own hands, at the last possible lucid moment, at a mutually agreed upon time and method of your choosing.
Wow, that got really dark awfully fast... Maybe this is why I don't give romantic advice. But to show I'm not a complete monster, I'll end this with another list, highly incomplete and in no particular order... I usually prefer sci-fi, documentaries or existential dramas, but these are some of my favorite love stories of all time, across a variety of genres. (Happy 26th anniversary, baby!)
True Romance
Run Lola Run
Fight Club
Only Lovers Left Alive
Lost In Translation
The Princess Bride
When Harry Met Sally
Eternal Sunshine at the Spotless Mind
Bound
Leon: The Professional
Before Sunrise
Punch Drunk Love
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World
