Royal Happily Ever Afters?

Perhaps the lives of those in nobility/royalty are the reason we have fairy tales today. I watched the Duchess tonight. It was not a happy movie. I've also just spent some time reading a little about her on wikipedia.

Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire was an ancestor of Princess Diana and Sarah, Duchess of York. Interestingly, the tagline for the movie in the UK was, "There were three people in her marriage..." Apparently it is a reference to a Princess Diana quote.

And so we see that many of these royal marriages were unhappy, filled with infidelity and abuse on a variety of levels. Being forced to share a home with your husband and his mistress (who had at one point been your best friend) does not seem like happily ever after to me. It's no wonder that Jane Austen wrote often about marrying for love. Fortunately for her heroines, they not only married for love but in most cases the men with whom they loved also had money.

One of the topics that I'd tossed around in my head during my most recent bout of blog-silence was the fact that there are SO many love songs out there - that must mean that there are people in the world that have truly experienced it!! I thought of this when listening to the song, Lucky, by Jason Mraz featuring Colbie Caillet. I love that song. I'm also really digging Push by Sarah McLachlan right now (among a great many other ones).

It's kind of interesting really... We all want this magical kind of love - the stuff that dreams are made of. But in our quest and obsession with it, we try to force it from the first person that comes along that seems to be at least willing [to settle along with you]. I think that far too often we settle for less than what we deserve. We become so obsessed with finding a quick route to this magic that we look blindly past the truth that glares us in the eye - that a love like that - of our dreams - is worth waiting for.

In the [awesome] movie, The Holiday, Iris is told that she is behaving like the best friend when she's really the leading lady. When we start acting like the amazing leading lady, perhaps our hero, even a knight in shining armor, will gallop up and bring to fruition the hopes and dreams of all the love songs we've ever loved.