Expectations

It humiliates me to admit this, but almost everything I know about love and relationships, I’ve gleaned off of 80s hair metal videos. Falling in love during long nights stretched out on fur in front of a marble-fronted fireplace. Passionate moments framed through blurry, mist-blotted windows. A painful breakup silhouetted in the headlights of a car parked in the rain. Making up over long, steamy kisses with the fog (machine) swirling around you.

In the end, does it mean anything at all if he’s not chasing after you, falling to his knees screaming your name while he rips off his shirt in the rain? And how will he know what love is if you’re not dancing for him on the hoods of your two jaguars parked in the driveway outside your English country home, which by the by, is being renovated on during the day by a troop of solidly built, long-haired and desperately woman-hungry musicians?

I never doubted for a moment that by this age, everything I knew would come into play and that I would be in love someone who looked startlingly like David Coverdale. A man who can bend that far back whilst yowling and wearing skintight leather pants BUT still laugh about it is surely the man of my dreams. All that hair and teeth and loudly declared adoration.

So why is it then, that nothing has lived up to the smoke and glitter of those early images? Instead of arguments that can be instantaneously resolved by my provocatively dancing around the room in stilettos and hot makeout sessions atop british luxury automobiles, I’m forced into endless conversations about trust and future and crap.

Someone hand me some scarves and an Aerosmith album, please. Seriously, I want my MTV.