That of Juliet, and her Romeo.

Recalling how I felt while watching Romeo and Juliet, the Leonardo and Claire Danes version, in Bangkok, it's actually kind of well....interesting.

I've actually watched Romeo and Juliet tons of times, be it the 1952 version, the men in tights, the one with the nice song while they were dancing, the black and white version. After approximately 6 - 7 years, its surprising how different I feel when watching the movie. Put them side by side, and you get the before and after picture of me, perspective wise that is.

When I was doing Romeo and Juliet as my literature text in Secondary 3, I'd be in a dreamy state, as though Romeo and Juliet was truly the greatest love story. Ever. The things they do for each other, the buried and textured connotations of Shakespeare, made everything into a lovely package, beautified by my idea of love then.

That was the kind of romance and love story that we longed for, or rather the fairytale, happily ever after kind of romance.

At this time and age, deep down inside of me, I believe I'm still hoping for such romance, not in that elaborate sense, but more of sticking together, working things out together, smoothening the rough road ahead together, without the frills of today's romance, to state it in a more subtle manner, the complications and confusions of principles, beliefs and views in terms of relationships.

The idea of relationships have somewhat become warped and twisted to the extent that there isn't the sense of commitment and sense of desire to keep things strong. Relationships now, aren't what they used to be. Everyone knows this. It's just that no one wants to keep it that way.

Now, not only there isn't "forever", tomorrow is also an uncertainty. It has evolved in such a manner that we live for today. Or rather the moment, cos what's happening now, may not be the same at the end of the day.

My idea of it is after a long day at work, I can't wait to go back and meet my guy. Get a huge smile from him and it melts away the day's fatigue, weariness and "sufferings". He's my source of comfort, my pillar of strength, my fort, basically, I'll need him and I hope it's the same way for him.

It's understood we both have work, we both have other commitments, friends, family whatsoever. We're not connected at the hips, but in our minds, to a certain extent.

Watching Romeo and Juliet now, brings about doubts about the feelings they had for each other. These had been and were issues brought up during Literature lessons then, but it was all for the name of exams then.

Juliet was 13 and Romeo 15. How was it possible that their feelings for each other were strong enough to want to die for each other? Put it in the modern day context, at 13 years of age we'd highly possibly still have beautiful imageries of how love is to be, the "till death do us part" analogy.

I'm dubious how firm the foundation of modern day romances are. As much as I want a simple and heartwarming relationship, I'm caught in the confusion and web of how the perceptions of love is now.

Perhaps, we succumb too much to temptations and are not able to hold our own fort. Perhaps, we're too bogged down by other commitments to be able to commit our hearts.
Perhaps, we're too caught up in wanting the "perfect" partner, we fail to cherish everything else.
Perhaps, with raised expectations the opposite gender has for us, we raise expectations of our partners too. Thus, we can never satisfy our partners the way we would like to, all because we all have an definite idea of how our partners should be. We try too hard to fit our "potential" partners into this mould we have in our heads, and we're coerced by our environment to be perfectionists, we cannot accept the bits of our partners that fall out of the mould.

In the process, we forgot the idea of love, is to love and cherish the person for who he or she is.

We judge others, but we're judged by others too.

Romeo and Juliet isn't anything more than a reflection of how we really want our romances to be. Its the innermost and most innocent idealogy of love when love can change everything and go against all odds.