Quote:
Originally Posted by niwell
I dunno - is it really any worse than my parents who sit there in silence until their food comes then eat? I know I've been in situations where after spending an entire day doing stuff with someone just don't feel the need to chat.
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You know how so much of what Hollywood does doesn't ring true? They consistently get accents and period hairstyles/fashion ridiculously wrong, and most of the tropes in most of the dreck made in movieland are as untrue to life as you can imagine.
And this is one of them. It's obviously the product of unhappy screenwriters. It shows up over and over again. Single guy/girl thinks about future with partner. Cut to older married couple sitting in restaurant not talking to each other. Presto! One portrayal of existential anguish produced by hell of domestic tedium served right up.
But it's ham-fisted and does no justice to the rich tapestry of shared knowledge, emotions and history that living with someone for a couple decades can produce. Sometimes you talk about stuff. Sometimes you laugh about stuff. Sometimes you sit there quietly, thinking of different things. To the outsider it may look like boredom, and sure, there are indeed moments waiting for the food to arrive that you wish you were somewhere else, but the idea that that moment serves as a blanket characterization of the entirety of a marriage is ridiculous.
I remember the exhilaration and terror of dating. Having conversations like that for years and years would be exhausting. A guy I know in his late forties had a brief marriage when he was younger, but since then he's worked all over Russia in the mining industry while living a nutty bachelor life. The last time I saw him in Toronto he spent our dinner bragging about his crazy romantic exploits in between trying to chat up the waitress with the most excruciatingly cheesy pickup lines. I was embarrassed for him, and embarrassed to be in his company. He was an alright guy in his twenties, but after two decades of "chasing tail" (I think he actually used that term--cringe!) he'd coarsened into a creepy cad.