Hating Jane Eyre

So it turns out that choosing readings for your wedding can be difficult.  Especially when you are two busy lawyers raising a preschooler and therefore lacking the copious hours apparently necessary to find that “perfect” thing.  You want the right level of sentiment, but not too much.  It needs to be touching, but not cheesy; relevant but not cliché. 

Where does one venture to find something like that?

If only it were that simple... (image from wantist.com)

I thought my best bet was to do some basic research on Google.  When the saccharine level of what I found on the first few pages I read made even this sentimental sap cringe, I decided to simply type in “non-cheesy wedding readings.”  Even that yielded more trite material than I’d already found, but there was a modest degree of improvement.

After choosing a few that I thought were more along the lines of what we were seeking, I emailed them to Heidi.  One of the potential readings was this:

I have for the first time found what I can truly love - I have found you. You are my sympathy - my better self - my good angel; I am bound to you with a strong attachment. I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my center and spring of life, wraps my existence about you - and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.

--From Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte.

Then I received this almost immediate reply:

“Have I ever told you how much I HATED Jane Eyre?!?  Had to read that stupid book twice (high school and college), and thought it sucked each time!”

"Who, me?!" (image from miss-dashwood.blogspot.com)

Okay....tell me how you really feel!  Of course, predictably, I had also read the novel in both high school and college and had liked it back then.  Something tells me Heidi would have dropped my college literature class, “The Victorian Novel,” after one day.

And I can understand that.  In fact, by the end of the class, I myself was becoming exasperated with the degree of symbolism and melodrama rampant in this era of literature. Sometimes a flood is just a flood.  Sometimes a tree is just a tree.  Deal with it. 

But I digress.  I can admit that this selection did not exactly fit the category delineated on the web page, which promised wedding readings that weren't cheesy.  And it wasn't like I was sold on this particular reading anyway.  But, having devoted way too much time to this seemingly futile search already, my standards were beginning to relax a bit.

What really struck me about this, though, was that here we are, planning a wedding ceremony after over eight years together, and (a) we are still learning random things about each other, and (b) we continue to have markedly different tastes or opinions when it comes to some things. I chuckled at the irony.  Here we are, disagreeing on the details as we prepare to celebrate our coming together in marriage.

At the same time, that’s one of the things I enjoy most about our relationship.  We have important things in common – core values and beliefs, devotion to family and friends, a deep and abiding love, and even our careers.  And as much as it gets difficult to avoid talking about law too much, which can border on obnoxious, mostly it is tremendously helpful to have a partner who understands the difficulty and intensity of the work and the demands of law practice that we both experience.

Yet, we differ in significant ways too.  Heidi craves solitude and time for reflection; I crave togetherness and time for interaction.  I always try to see the positive in everything, sometimes to the point of being unrealistic; Heidi is a realist who tends toward seeing the potential negatives in things. Heidi sometimes just needs a listener, and I always want to jump in and problem solve.  Not to mention that she doesn't like what she describes as my "gay boy" dance music and I sometimes bristle at her sarcasm.  

But at the end of the day, here we are, continuing to build a life together, bound by our similarities... and also by our differences.  Because those differences aren't important enough to cause problems, and besides, they make things interesting.  If we were too much alike, life would be boring.

So I can handle it that she hates Jane Eyre.  If she can handle it that I love my gay boy dance music, that is.

Image from rarebookschool.org