In "Shall we dance", starring Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon (Oh how I love both), a phrase said by Susan Sarandon's character pops up to compete with Meryl Streep's phrase in "The bridges of Madison county". Again, a simple plot outline is in order to understand the phrase context. The movie is about a lawyer who's caught up in a boring life style inspite of his love for his family. One day he sees a woman standing in the window of a dance school and decides to take dancing lessons to stirr his life a bit. He decides to hide his activity from his wife because he doesn't want to admit that he's bored of their life, he's ashamed of the fact that he's not grateful for their life and that he's seeking fullfillment elsewhere. His wife gets suspecious about his behavior and hires a PI to investigate her husband and finds out the truth. And the husband finally tells his wife why he kept to himself and teaches her how to dance (a symbol that partners should share whatever they enjoy). After the wife finds out about what her husband is doing, she meets with the PI and a discussion about why people get married takes place. She says this unbelievably well-put phrase:
"We need a witness to our lives. There's a billion people on the planet... I mean, what does any one life really mean? But in a marriage, you're promising to care about everything. The good things, the bad things, the terrible things, the mundane things... all of it, all of the time, every day. You're saying 'Your life will not go unnoticed because I will notice it. Your life will not go un-witnessed because I will be your witness' "
That's why people should get married, and that's why a person should marry a partner who enjoys being his or her witness, enjoys all the simple and trivial details of his or her partner, and basks in the mere existance of his or her partner.
I've always heard statements from my mom, my aunts, even some of my friends, that marriage is "3eesha welsalam", that I shouldn't be so picky in my scrutiny of men who wanted to get married, and I have seen men who want to get married "welsalam". I heard the statements that no matter how much you love a man "or a man love a woman", life will end up being the same as if you married anybody else. But that's not what I want to believe, I want to believe that I'll find a man who will appreciate my desire to move forward and do something important in life, and who will rejoyce in every detail of our life together, I want to enjoy every detail of our life together, his hopes, my hopes, his weaknesses, my weaknesses, our good moments as our bad moments. I want to be a good "witness" to his life and I want him to be a good witness to mine. And I want our ambitions to melt together and form one goal, as our separate lives will melt together and form one life. No matter what the people around me say, I'll keep believing in this hope, because I do not want to live "3eesha welsalam"!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment