Life of an eternal romantic

I spent a lot of time by myself this past week. Got me doing a lot of reading, a lot of thinking. Something I so rarely get a chance to do. I was listening to a lot of music, but music bugs me at times. Reminds me of days past and the phase of life that that piece influenced. Something incredibly romantic about the pangs of sadness nostalgia brings. One of the few things that tops it, is the phenomenon of falling in love. Getting to know a new person, a new presence, and getting washed all over. In the age where hand-written love letters have been replaced with electronic media and electronic media alone, this usually translates to waiting for that email notification to pop-up, that phone to buzz with the incoming text or call - definitely less romantic but having the potential to set the heart racing just as much.

That got me thinking - man (err pardon me, woman too), is so in love with the idea of being in love, that there is that eternal need to feel like a teenager having a massive crush. Well, maybe not all men (yes, and women). But there is a certain percentage of the human race (present company included), who are such die-hard romantics that, this drama and the sense of being weak-in-the-knees is almost like a life supply. At the risk of coming across as a maniac, I will continue to present the train of my thought.

I realize that one of my biggest fears in life, is the idea of falling out of love. If asked to portray a mental image of myself, it would be so. A certain character in a certain movie who is totally in love with the idea of being in love, causing her to sprint across vast expanses of green, dressed in white, trusting that He would give her a sign when she found her love. Sounds pretty corny, doesn't it? But that's me. When I saw that on screen, me, along with my co-inhabiters of the "being-foolishly-in-love" world, established a picture of themselves in their heads.

Leads me to think - what happened to that dreamer when she found her soul mate (dang it, I am setting myself up to be considered a totally crazy person today, aren't I? My take on soul mates needs a whole other  blog)?  Did she settle down to have a family of 2 kids, a dog and a house in the burbs? Or did she yearn for that romance to be alive and kicking for years to come, despite the blah of everyday life?

I leave you, dearest reader, with this thought - When the magic of it all fizzles out, how do romantics survive? What keeps them going? My take? - A romantic is never ever really out of that state of being in love, never really out of that state of having a muse. That, and only that, keeps them smiling, keeps them floating, keeps them sprinting across imaginary greens.