Blast from the past.  Thursday evening I turned on TV and an old movie was on, one I hadn’t seen for over 30 years.  It wasn’t my usual black and white type choice.  It was Walter Matheau, Ingrid Bergman, and Goldie Hawn in Cactus Flower.  Kind of a ‘modern’ divorce movie from the ’70s where everyone is fooling around (not really) and trying to act sophisticated about it.  I hadn’t even thought about this movie for decades.  The world has changed so much since then and most of the actors in that movie are now deceased.

It’s funny that they would put that particular movie on for Valentine’s Day.  It is romantic and also a farse but mostly it is about the time of change in our US society when we moved from two parent households to divorce being common place to single family homes and people hooking up without commitment.  Don’t get me wrong.  It’s a very funny movie with Walter Matheau lying his way through everything and no one really doing much wrong but pretending they are.  And it has a sweet ending for all concerned.  But it marks a time of change in our society. 

It is hard to believe when romance starts and moves to the point of two people living together or getting married, maybe having children, sharing happy and sometimes unhappy moments, that it can move to the two people deciding they no longer love each other.  Or worse.  One person deciding they no longer love the other one.  We’ve somehow moved from a world of people making lifetime (for better or worse) commitments to people not even seeing a need for a commitment. I like that people have choices now but hate that one of our historical choices has been pushed to the sidelines.
As a person in a long term relationship, I see the value of really knowing someone and riding through the sunshine and storms of life with them. We get to see each other in every aspect of our characters and we have gotten to see how we change as we get older. We are not the same people in many ways as we were when we were in our 20s. In some ways we have become tarnished by life but in so many other ways we have become burnished to a lovely glow because of all the experiences and weathering life together. I would not like to imagine life as a loner although I am sure I could have survived. And I would wish for everyone the growing, learning, sharing, and loving experience we have had over the years because of making a ‘better or worse’ commitment.