The Chicken, perhaps

I watched Sex in the City: The Movie tonight. When I heard that it was out (via Netflix, natch) I immediately added it to my queue and moved it to the top. All this happened within about a three day period.

While watching it, I realized that this was the type of movie that-several years ago-friends of mine would have never have let me view (see also: Closer, which I finally saw and loved. Actually, I bought it). Excuses ran the gamut of, "We're seeing it opening night, if you want to join" which is nice, but I work Wednesday nights was perfunctory at best to, "I saw it opening night, sorry!". It seemed none of my friends wanted to be the ones to let me see this relationship heavy movie.

It was five years ago all over again-except I was not a shut in likely never to expect a friend to offer an invite to a cinema outing like I was then.

Can you believe that Closer has been out that long? What ever happened to Damian Rice after that movie?

I was just overwhelmed again at the complexities of relationships. Is the work involved the chicken or the egg of my desire? This was my thought. My amazing deep thought during these movies.

I haven't a clue.

Yet, as I watched this movie, I was filled with a sense of...hope? That doesn't seem like the right word, but it's along those lines. Watching Candy Bergen tell Carrie that she was going to be Vogue's "40 Woman" made me realize that the hope for success in the realm of relationships that I seek is normal and not the aberration I sometimes feel it is when my friends make their statements of support for my romantic side, no matter how much my looking for love may resemble the Bush Administration's search for WMD in Iraq. Yeah, yeah...we're both sure we've found it. Doesn't make either of us right, right?

Nonetheless, here I drink my 7th beer of the night thinking about this.

Tonight aside, since I know that it's not the first beer or the seventh of the night that makes my mind wander to the topic of love...I think it's hardwired into my heart...I find myself in varying depths of reflection on the matter.

Something has been bugging me on this issue for some time.

Was it awakened by an article I read in Out magazine a few months ago about Phil and Dean, the mildly celebrated gay couple married in Palm Springs shortly after the California Supreme Court legalized gay marriage?

*BTW, please...if you are a California registered voter, vote no on Prop 8!

Was it my pending trip to Long Beach, CA to visit my parents and my parents' remarriage earlier this year that demonstrated the strength of true love to endure nearly two decades of "worse"? If this wasn't a clear demonstration of the power of wedding vows, please, someone show me what is. Neither had remarried, nor embarked on a relationship that would be considered serious by both principles in the situation. Does the heart's want for what the heart wants supersede anything the mind might tell us is good for us?

Was it my random attendance at an informal family reunion in August where four generations found themselves gathered at my sister's family home and I found myself standing in the middle of the night on the landing of her home in front of a family portrait (her, her husband and their 9 year old child) thinking, "This is a family. Not the man, the woman or their offspring, but rather the love that broadcast out from that photograph that makes the family"? Good god, that love fairly beamed out of the photo. I didn't see so much the stress that I knew existed in getting the family to the photo studio looking "just right" in that photo as much as I saw the inherent love that made the photo itself important.

Who is to say, definitively?

As I watched the relationship scales tip back and forth in the Sex and the City movie this evening, I knew on an intellectual level that the results were formulaic. Still, I admired that the writers had been true to the characters.

Instead of taking the easy way out and letting Samantha resume her sex-indulgent ways and let her rekindle her single gal/sex positive happiness, there was a conversation where she stated to her lover, the formerly-sexy-as-hell-cum-I'm-looking-like-I-stole-Kevin-Bacon's-look Jason Lewis, that the relationship wasn't working for her and that she would always remember him...even if the "fondly" had to be inferred by the viewer.

Instead of giving Miranda the perfect suburban woman that has it all storyline, they gave her the frigid working wife dealing with a husband's infidelity storyline to play out. I'm glad they ended up together instead of bitterly separated.

Even on the side of girlfriends, they created a wrinkle. Miranda and Carrie having to work through Miranda's careless remark to Big the day before his marriage to Carrie that caused him enough distress to make him second-guess his nuptials and leave Carrie standing at the altar. But the message of honesty above all else...having that respect for the other in the relationship...carrying the day-and the heart-had me misty on more than one occasion during the movie and wondering if I would send this movie back tomorrow or wait and watch it again when I returned from my trip to SoCal to see the 'rents before I sent it back or even just pick up my own copy when it was part of the never ending 2 for $20 sale at Blockbuster.

Could this be my new Under the Tuscan Sun? The new When Harry Met Sally? It seems nothing will ever replace those movies and their message of hope for the ever romantic.

At the same time, I wonder if the message I should take away from this movie is along the lines of "40 is not an age where lasting love is impossible".

Sure, after 40 I could never wear a wedding dress without irony, but I never wanted to wear one anyway. What was, and always will be, important to me is the message my potential relationship sends out to the rest of the world. A message that brooks no disrespect from the jaded masses, but one that must simply must be acknowledged and respected for it's purity of intent: two hearts, joined as one unit, for a lifetime.

Barf, I know. Still, there it is: a big lump of hope where the lump of coal representing my heart should be.

God help me-and all the poor bastards that intent is misfired at.