A lot of people look surprised when I tell them that I have been single all my life. I don’t take this as a compliment because I don’t look like the kind of girl who would have boys eating at the palm of her hands. Some attribute it to stereotype, and recently, I have discovered that people have tagged me as the party girl. Party girls apparently juggle boys one after the other. I don’t take offense in that label, but I don’t religiously subscribe to it either. Although I may have passed out drunk one time or another or occasionally indulged in the opportunity of feeling like a rockstar offered by a cigarette stick, I have always drawn a line when it came to boys and the unhappy circumstances when they think you’re an easy A.
In retrospect, I never ran out of crushes. When it came to crushes, I really didn’t put up much of a wall and liked everyone who picked at my hormones. There was the bus conductor, my second cousin, my gay best friend, the class bully, the class weirdo, cute teachers, smart teachers, boys who can read, boys who know how to crack a joke, boys who can sing, boys who can dance, boys my friends teased me with. And yes, I’ve even had a phase when that list included girls. I eventually got past the am-I-gay crisis and can now go back to liking boys 90 percent of the time. (Who says you can’t be 10 percent lesbian?)
But to be truly in love with someone, now that’s a different story. I’ve only been in love twice, and both times had me emptying Kleenex boxes, popping zits, and repeatedly watching Pride and Prejudice. Was it me? Was it them? I honestly can’t answer that. But if I had to psychoanalyze my side of the story, I’d have to inconvenience Mr. Darcy by dropping some of the blame on his lot.
Being an idealist is bad enough, but being both an idealist and a romantic is a curse. I blame it on my surreptitious love affair with young-adult and adult fiction romances. I have outgrown them since high school, but they have left me so scarred with those “heaving bosoms” and “dazzling, out-of-this-world eyes” and “I love yous” and just the whole compendium of those disgustingly clichéd characters and dialogue. They have turned me into a romantic Frankenstein, and it’s too late to turn me back into a realistically sane human being.
Now I look at boys and can’t help but measure them against the debonair gentlemen and Byronic heroes of classic love stories. I can’t help but juxtapose them with Mr. Darcy, the single most perfect man that ever existed on paper. Why can’t they say something that Mr. Darcy would say? Why can’t they be lovingly mysterious like he was? Where is that air of masculine elegance? Where is that sarcastic wit? Where are those courtly mannerisms; those fleeting, meaningful glances? Where is that raw sexual tension cleverly hidden in a disdainful twitch of the lips? The ugly truth is that they have been long gone with the advent of technological progress. They now only exist in fragile pages, in film adaptations, and in the recesses of my brain where they have claimed residence. And when I need to cry, they always come together and materialize into that familiar overcoat and breaches. Mr. Darcy doesn’t come to me; I go to him. Though I can only imagine it, he has always been there for me. And at the end of the day, isn’t that what every girl wants ultimately—a man who will be there for her?
When you’ve fallen desperately and irrevocably in love with a fictional character, it’s hard to put yourself out there in the real world. There are no Mr. Darcys in the real world. Not one even close. There will be no poetic misunderstandings. There will seldom be, if at all, stark but intelligently rewarding verbal duels. There will be no confessions of equal heart and alacrity, no words of such soul and passion. Even in a time and place where Mr. Darcy was real, no one held a candle to him, how much more in a world where he is not? Thus, all romantics are hopeless.
Boys will hate him and say it is unfair to make them measure up to a man of such caliber and who doesn’t even exist. They would be right. The whole point to this Darcy affair, however, is not his breaches, chest hair, or ten thousand pounds. It isn’t even that courtly swagger, that sexy enigma, or those Shakespearean declarations of love. It’s the man that Darcy is—honest, passionate, and kind. It’s his sense of responsibility, his willingness to own up to his misjudgments, and his graciousness in accepting his flaws. These are what make him perfect. These are what make girls like me fall in love with him over and over again.
So why have I remained single? It’s not because I set my standards too high. It’s not because there hasn’t been anyone who showed interest. It’s not because I’m insecure—well, maybe I am, but this is not entirely the reason. It’s simply because I have outgrown the boy that I loved in Peter Pan. It’s not enough to just have fun anymore; it’s time to think about the consequences too. It’s time to grow up. And in this world of computer games, social networking sites, and mass media, you’ll find that there are not a lot of boys whom you can truly call a man. There are not very many who can hold more than just our gazes. So when the unhappy time comes when somebody slaps me with this question again, I’ll probably just shrug and say, “It’s Mr. Darcy’s fault!”
