Real Love

I just have to share this quote because I don’t think I have ever heard more beautiful words ever written about love. Real love, not stupid fairy tale, chick flick, fake, perfect love.

I have been doing a lot of research on F. Scott Fitzgerald, frankly because he writes words like this. The background is that F. Scott Fitzgerald met Zelda, his future wife, while stationed in Alabama with the ARMY. She was a wealthy debutante but did not act like one; She was wild and behaved in ways that women of her day just didn’t. They became engaged and he moved to New York to make money for their life together. After a while, Zelda called off the engagement because she was accustomed to a certain lifestyle and his $35/week wouldn’t cut it. He was so distraught over the breakup that he moved back home to live with his parents so he could write a novel that would make him famous. That novel was “This Side of Paradise” and turns out it did make him famous. It sold out in hours and Zelda came crawling back. So basically he loved her so much that he quit his job and wrote a literary masterpiece in order to get her back. I don’t know about you ladies, but no guy has done that for me. I think the most heroic gesture I’ve ever experienced is a guy offering to pick me up from somewhere…

Back to the quote. I did even more digging and turns out he said it during that breakup. A mutual friend wrote him a prying letter because she heard he wasn’t doing so hot. She must have suggested something a little too defamatory of Zelda, because this was his response (and the full reference for the quote above):

No personality as strong as Zelda’s could go without getting criticisms and as you say she is not above reproach. I’ve always known that. Any girl who gets stewed in public, who frankly enjoys and tells shocking stories, who smokes constantly and makes the remark that she has “kissed thousands of men and intends to kiss thousands more,” cannot be considered beyond reproach even if above it. But Isabelle I fell in love with her courage, her sincerity and her flaming self respect and it’s these things I’d believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasn’t all that she should be.

But of course the real reason, Isabelle, is that I love her and that’s the beginning and end of everything. You’re still a Catholic but Zelda’s the only God I have left now.

I just can’t even imagine anyone ever feeling that way about me. I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, I just don’t think that kind of love is something that comes along for most people. Their marriage was messy; they were known to be raging alcoholics who fought often and she even cheated on him once. Turns out Zelda was schizophrenic, and that was why she behaved erratically. In their fairly tale ending, Zelda ended up in an institution and F. Scott Fitzgerald ended up writing scripts in Hollywood, which he hated, as a way to pay for Zelda’s treatments. Still, even knowing that their ending was far from happy, I can’t help but feel like he knew what real love was. She was everything he shouldn’t want, but he did and he didn’t care what society thought about her. That, my friends is real love.