The Last Unicorn

You may have watched this movie as a child and only remember a scary red bull, but if you’ve watched it as an adult you’d know there is far more to the story and it is relevant to your every waking day.

Schmendrick the magician changes the last unicorn into a woman in an effort to shield her from the red bull while she and they discover a way to find and free the other unicorns. But while she’s a woman she starts to fall in love with the prince who loves her desperately, and she forgets who she is and what she came to do, and though she knows she has a greater destiny, she wants to just love the prince. But Schmendrick pointedly tells her “there can be no happy endings in the middle of the story.”

I had a visit from the XBF last night. We dated and were good friends for a long time so it was fun to see him. It made me feel good too to realize that in most ways, I’m still the same person I was a few years ago. He is really struggling because his girl just got engaged to someone else and he wants to stop her, but is terrified of marriage. It’s hard for me to imagine not being able to move forward (I can’t stand feeling immobile), but I can understand marriage being daunting, which is why I talked about the Last Unicorn. Because I thought I did it right, I thought I wasn’t expecting complete bliss, or things to be happily ever after, but I really underestimated how difficult it can be. So now I have to remember that getting married isn’t the middle of the story and that happy endings really only come at the end.

I love the HB more than he can imagine, but I wonder all the time why I’m married. I have a very intense need for closeness, to constantly be growing closer—if I don’t feel like I’m growing closer to someone, even for a just a matter of days, I feel far away from them and it gets harder and harder to be close each time. And because I’m such a physical person and touch is my number one love language I get easily confused by the lack of it, or by the presumptuousness of it. This makes marriage incredibly painful at times. On top of that, I’m married to a man with an ex-wife and though he’ll tell me that marriage was anything but pleasant, all I can see of it is how wonderfully they get along now and how cooperative they are in their parenting efforts; and on occasion, I’ll accidentally run into some romantic remnant of their relationship together—making the entire thing seem so incredibly beautiful. And sometimes I only see the ugly parts of our marriage, and how it always seems too much to handle. But glimpses of the beautiful parts remind of the meaning of my life and I can’t give that up despite feeling overwhelmed and confused.

I once read that adopted children gain a greater sense of identity because they struggle harder to define themselves. Nothing seems healthier to me than really knowing who you are and what you want, so reading that made me happy for them. I think I have a strong sense of identity because of the struggles in my life and I like to think that struggling to make marriage fulfilling for the HB and I will hopefully someday give us a greater sense of unity than those who haven’t needed to. I like to think that.