NOVEMBER 2024 SULLYGRAM:  One of the compelling reasons I fell in love with my inamorata was because she could blush. Sounds frivolous, and maybe it is, but you can measure romantic idealism in a person that way. Also by the way they catch their breath, or the way their eyes brighten. Artifacts of teen limerence? True enough, but returning to the first “tells” of passion can be savored at any age, and the most potent vintage comes with adult-strength romantic idealism.

There is something half-smothered by life’s disappointments in each of us that never grows up, never grows old. Call it a blueprint or an imprint from before we entered the world. It lingers like spiritual afterbirth from the mists of Avalon, craving resurrection. We become progressively blinded to it in the tawdry glare of maturation; but it endures like a nagging quest for something lost, a shiny thing, a heart-stopping echo that can prod the most world-weary mind with almost forgotten dreams. It seems to linger closest to the surface in minds that are penetrating, analytical, and perceptive of patterns. And in my experience, it is rarest in those who can have anything they want from the world on looks alone. But so it was with my blushing, alluring inamorata. All of it there and incandescent. Stunning beauty; passion; coherent mind. The longer the leap to sudden hope, the greater the tell of what’s inside. 

Childhood synonyms for that state of idealism include innocence, trust and faith – purities that intensify with puberty but are much more than the urge to merge. And duck soup for the real world. We trip over our hormones while the gods of irony laugh because they know what we do not know: that the thing we yearn for is exponentially greater than biological relief. I personally believe that those charlatan deities place bets among themselves over what we’ll value and hold out for. Their trick is like the short story “The Gift of the Magi,” where a woman cuts off her cherished hair to buy a gold chain for her lover’s treasured watch at the same time that he sells his watch to buy tortoise shell combs for her hair. Do we trade away the token of love, only to find that we’ve thrown away its greatest enhancement? Purity vs defilement. A laugher in modernity. Mistakenly branded a moral conflict, and pretty damn useless in the messy reality of being human…unless you never found your way completely out of those mists of Avalon. I relate.

For those lost questers, passion ages well. Any intimate bonds they form metamorphose, rendering them capable of adapting romantically ever after. Nothing in nature demands this. But for the many who live our current cultural norms, passion dies slowly of attrition, and nature couldn’t care less. All of which is easier for the average man to navigate than for the average woman. A few wrinkles, a few pounds. Eh. But the female knows from childhood that her emotional security is inescapably linked to physical attraction. And even if she seals the deal and sacrifices her body to the rigors of child-bearing, nursing, and decades of monthly menstrual repairs, her allure must be re-negotiated with her chosen mate as they age. Else, she may twist in the breeze, outraged at life’s deceptions, smarting with indignation. Meanwhile, the man may find his frustrations easier to bear. As he physically declines, he may desire the charms and grace of a younger woman with the wisdom of an older one. And given the law of supply and demand, he may find he still attracts them.

So, what would happiness look like for each of the following pairings: one non-romantic idealist wedded to another; one romantic idealist espoused to a non-romantic; or two romantic idealists married to each other? Permit me three guesses and three generalities based solely on their romantic compatibility. For the first couple (two non-romantics), I imagine that habit and shared context might carry them through with moments of love not unlike gratitude. Could be that the second pairing (romantic married to non-romantic) will have the most difficulty. Two people unlikely to grow together, consigned to living appearances while one if not both escape behind separate partitions. And the paired romantic idealists? Scant evidence. But we’ve all seen it in our early dreams, on roads we should have taken that made our hearts surge and our throats go dry when we glimpsed a face or heard a voice that brought it all rushing back, that thing we’d almost forgotten. It’s a childlike return, if only in fantasy, to what we abandoned at puberty…the rara avis soaring in quantum arcs across spangled galaxies to nest in white-feathered inner sanctums. Thank you, John Greenleaf Whittier for putting it best: “For All Sad Words Of Tongue And Pen, The Saddest Are What Might Have Been.”

Is there a postscript? There is for that god of irony who bet on romantic idealism holding out. Pedestrian lives run their course, but blushes are forever.

Here’s a photo along with a comment I posted a few weeks ago: “One way to look at my life is to see that it’s all about symmetry. Sometimes I call that balance, but it’s a very complicated balance. To most people it doesn’t even look like balance. It looks like rush hour on I-5 out of L.A. But I’m actually quite shy. There’s a moat filled with piranhas around my castle, a drawbridge, battlements, walls twenty feet thick, and just to keep the world guessing, I actually live in a tar-paper shack far away from the castle. Like I said, symmetry.There’s not much difference between what we call reality and illusion, I’ve found. And to escape from one into the other, you have to be really, really grounded. Else, you can end up marooned on the wrong side of the mirror. I’m very good at that. Staying grounded, I mean. Most of the time, I think at a different frequency than the world around me. I don’t know if that’s good or bad, but it can be inconvenient. In any case, I can’t change it. Sometimes the world seems to be stuck in slo-mo. I dither around in my thoughts while cause and effect take their sweet time linking up, and people open their mouths to speak as slowly as garage doors rising.

“Anyway, my daughter Colleen posted this photo of my grandlad Seamus, and it perfectly captures what I’ve just written about symmetry between two worlds. Can’t stop admiring it. There he is right at the border, drawing oxygen from the one, afloat amorphously in the other. Light skitters around him like guardian angels and he is weightless. He is an island, unique but part of an archipelago…aren’t we all?”

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan