"I trust more in action, unspoken gesture, and subtle intimacy, over effulgent prose with so many failed promises."
I think people who like to read and write are particularly vulnerable to believing that the self expressed through written words is real and true. It ought to be the other way around -- surely we know how words can be manipulated to create fictional selves? -- yet the importance we place on words seems to cause us, at least when we are young and naive, not to treat words in others' hands as tools that they could be using to build false fronts.
Even worse is if you are the sincere romantic. Everything you write is truthful to you, in that moment. You actually do mean it, and do wish to mean it for forever. Not even this wrongfully optimistic motive may be ascribed to all others though, if they are more manipulative and mendacious with their words.
Everything you write is truthful to you, in that moment. You actually do mean it, and do wish to mean it for forever.
I think that in many cases this is going to turn out to be self-deception, and would be seen as such in others. This is when the ability to take a cool look at one's self is important and useful.
And distance and time usually provide a better perspective.
Again, I do not write like this much anymore. I do really enjoy the greater objective truth of having an economy of words, and in trusting in the implied feelings within the silence.
That said, sometimes, as Sheryl Crow implores, you need someone to "please say honestly, that you won't give up on me, and I shall believe." Most romantic (and many non-romantic) relationships require that kind of suspension of disbelief, that of the 6 billion people in the world, this partnership is special and serendipitous, and regardless of the failure rate, you two will make it. The thing is, you need to train yourself down from needing to be told these lies (or hopes) too often, because that probably speaks to some deeper underlying securities that words can't address. Words are only so powerful as the feelings behind them, rather than the force of the brushstroke.
But words are so goddamn powerful sometimes and while action and gesture are the bedrock and core, I don't know any other way to express the fine-toothed terrain of emotion and the psychic world underneath them.
*huffs* Ok, self-deception, I admit it.
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