A dangerous killer
Clichés. Popular sayings. They show clever thoughts about life. But graphite is better. Indeed it tells us about real life. Another day, at the bus, I was going to my class when I saw this good sentence: romantic love kills. So true. Graphite is a piece of wisdom. What is a romantic thing? An illusion of our minds. According to the dictionary, romantic is an adjective. It’s something unrealistic. Impractical. An idealization of love and one’s beloved. Love for itself means empathy. Affection. Profoundly tender. But romantic and love together are a deadly weapon.
Think about Romeo and Juliet for a moment. “If love is blind, never hit the target”, wrote Shakespeare on his play – an universal story about romantic love. The result: romantic love never ends well. About the famous Shakespeare’s story: a couple that loves each other, but their families are enemies. After a lot of confusion and adventure, they died tragically. Romeo thought Juliet was dead. So he drank poison. He couldn’t live without her. When she woke up and saw her lover dead, she also had thought that she had to die. Romeo drank all the poison. So selfish! Juliet didn’t have a choice. She killed herself with a dagger. That’s a literary (and literal) example that romantic love is a loaded gun.
And also the romantic movies don’t help at all. The stories are all about perfect matches. You know this plot: a girl and a boy that one day met and in that moment they fell in love for the rest of their lives. After some misfortunes and misunderstandings, they ended together because that’s how it was supposed to be. They are soul mates. Come on! This plot is old. Exceeded. We can’t accept stories so far from reality.
And this subject gets worse when we thought about fairy tales. The adaptations of the old tales and Disney’s movies usually utilize the same strategy of romantic movies. Good guys and villains. The good ones have to save the girl. And at the end they get married or stay together. Well, the worst part is… they lied to us! The books and Disney’s movies are the villains now. The original fairy tales aren’t how we imagined. Some months ago a book with the original tales of Grimm was released at the market.
It wasn’t the stepmother of Snow White that wanted to kill her. Indeed it was her mother. And the woman not just wanted her daughter’s heart. She also wanted her liver and her lungs to eat with salt. She had just wanted to guarantee that Snow White was really dead. And what about Sleeping Beauty and the Prince’s visit at the tower? She got pregnant of twins. The witch discovered because her clothes were getting very tight.
And, the last story: The Frog Prince. That one in which the girl kissed the frog and she broke the spell: he was transformed in a prince. She promised to kiss the frog, to let him eat of her food and to let him sleep on her bed if he took her a golden ball that had felt in a well. The frog did what she had asked. But, with her ball on her hands, she didn’t keep the promise. The frog was too ugly. She preferred to go home. The frog had followed her. He knocked at door. The girl told her father who it was and why he was there. The father obligated his daughter to keep her promise. So, after the Frog ate of the girl’s food, slept on her bed and was kissed, he became a prince. But it was a hard way till there!
At the end, the original fairy tales are as wise as graphite. Live is hard. People died because of wickedness. People get pregnant. And people manipulate others (like the Frog Prince) to solve their own problems. So, forget about soul mates. Forget about destiny. Don’t idealize. Don’t imagine the others how you want they should be. See people how they really are, with their insanity. With their craziness of living day after day. Remember: romantic love kills. Real love saves.
Gigi Eco ama aprender e faz muitas coisas ao mesmo tempo - é jornalista, fotógrafa, professora, rata de biblioteca e musicista por acidente. Ama viajar e é viciada em chás. É a escritora oficial dos cartões de Natal da família. É Doutora em Comunicação e Linguagens pela Universidade Tuiuti do Paraná (UTP) e atualmente trabalha no seu primeiro livro de poesias.