So I started this book for English (that I read four years ago and forgot about… but don’t mind that!) and I finished it in the same night. I thought it needed a post.
The book, which I thought was going to be whiny feminism, was about an African American woman who married very young.
All her life, she fantasized and idealized love. It was something that swept her away; it was something that was sacred in nature and, frankly, perfect in every way, shape, and form. And then, she got to the marrying age. Her grandmother (mother figure) in the book married her off to some financially stable bloke and she was treated like a pack mule. Always complaining, she did not notice the good he was providing. The shelter, the food, the water were all ignored because she didn’t love him. But a love like that doesn’t exist. The perfect relationship doesn’t exist.
She ran away from husband number one for husband number two. He was a dreamer who treated her like a princess. But that wasn’t good enough for her. She needed to be respected, to be a part of everything, to be the center of attention. She stayed in her self-inflicted misery for twenty years until husband number two, a rather prosperous man, died. Then she went to husband number three.
It was the story of a woman who dreamed too much as a child and whose unrealistic ideals screwed up the rest of her life. This is the classic situation I bitch about daily. Is we aren’t realists, if we are optimists or even idealists, we will be screwed up. We will never be happy; we will never have the ability to be happy. The world will not become that fairy tale we’ve always hoped for because life actually sucks. Idealists are the worst.
