Jason Robert Brown was right about everything. I want the moon and stars.
Have you ever met somebody who made you see the world differently? Who made the moon seem like a brand new moon, uniting the two of you across time and space? Who made the stars seem beautiful and dear, as though they knew your name and spoke directly to you at night?
Have you ever met somebody who taught you to see the romance that is already present in the world, the beauty that exists inside your body and your heart and always has?
These are the people who are most precious to us. These are the people we will remember to the day we die.
And no. This kind of thing cannot be faked.
Women are taught to crave this. We are taught to live for this, to embed ourselves inside lives that are like castles, built by our fathers and their fathers and so on, all the way back to the foundation of patriarchy. We are taught to hope these castles fall someday, to live like if we are good enough, sweet enough, timid and dear enough, someday a man will love us enough to save us from these walls.
Usually, that’s what happens. We meet some man who loves us enough to break out emotional walls down, to shatter our lives and replace them with his own. We meet some man who wants to take us away from the twin inheritances of both security and ancestral trauma that have made us who we are. We want to be taken away from who we are. We want the moon and stars, with no filters. We want a life lived with no need for filters, for narrative.
We want the freedom to be whole and soul-deep, in the wilderness, beneath that moon that is shining only for us, and those stars that know us by name.
But here’s the kicker: men don’t want that.
Y’all don’t want the moon and stars. You want to give us this experience, while remaining casually distant and safe from the roiling emotions and coils of creativity that define the experience of real love. You want love that looks real, love that can fool an Instagram audience or an easily fooled parent. You want love that feels real enough to satisfy, but not real enough to burn your own walls down, to destroy your castle, to inspire you to run away with us.
You don’t want to leave your ancestral past behind, and build a new one. That’s not what you have been taught to do. That’s not how you believe love ought to work. That’s not what a real man ought to want, you believe.
That’s why romance fails. That’s why in spite of both partners trying, in spite of all the love in the world, we cannot stay there, beneath the moon and stars.
Because our men never joined us there to begin with. We fell, and they let us fall, they led us into the dance in which we could fall, but when we awoke, we were alone. We didn’t know how to make them safe to join us, and they didn’t know how to talk about all the reasons why they were afraid to trust a woman. Maybe we didn’t know how to talk about all the reasons why we winced when they touched us, why we flinched away from sex, no matter how very, terribly much we loved them.
If men and women could talk about the things that men and women do to women and to men. If we could find our moon and stars, and live like that, forever. Doing whatever it takes to stay beneath that sky and those stars, that know our names. Beneath that moon, that has never before seen anybody who loves each other as much as we do.
We choose security because we think it will last. We learn through experience that the moon is not real to men, and the stars are only our own fantasies reflected back at us. We get used to falling alone. We get used to love that ends before it has even begun. So we choose certainty because at least then we will end up with something, other than memories of what could have been. But deep down..
Women want the moon and stars. But you know what? I think men do, too.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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