Why I love Jane Austen.

**Note: I almost didn't post this after I wrote it, but I'm being brave and truthful on a topic in which I think many can relate. Ok so here goes.**


This is a discourse I have repeated rather frequently, but tonight Steph and I drank tea and watched Sense and Sensibility, so I am again obliged to dote on Jane Austen. Look, it even effects my writing. What a very Jane-Austen-type first sentence.

And yes, I love the way her characters interact and the dialogue they use, but more than that, I love her view on love.

Too often I am frustrated with the way movies and books and tv shows view love. Love sparks into a burning flame and then is extinguished in rapid succession with few consequences. Too many movies attempt to illustrate love between characters by simply a romantic line, a passionate sex scene, and some sweet conversation they have lying next to each other with artfully placed bedsheets. But that's too easy. That's cheapening love into some sappy combination of emotional and physical lust. I describe it that way particularly because I think too many times women lust after emotional connection, no matter how temporary or contrived. But that is not love.

Love is complicated. It is selfless and committed. It seeks the good of another before the good of oneself. Often love is confusing, and frequently it can be crushing. The term "heartache" is very aptly named and doesn't just happen at the end of a relationship. When love cannot be bistowed on whom the heart is attached, whether because of distance or dischord, the heart aches. Just as love is not easily grown, heartache cannot easily be remedied. It is the opposite of the passionate fire and quickly extinguished lust. But the slow, steady attachment is the right kind of love.

Jane Austen's characters must see all sides of the complexity of love before they are able to find real love. Now, it is true that all of her characters always ultimately end in love, but isn't that what we all want in the end? In Sense and Sensibility there are a series of star-crossed lovers who keep their love for one another a secret from the world. It is the loyalty and longing between these separated lovers that is ultimately much more fulfilling than any spontaneous encounter and passionate sex scene.

It's like Jim & Pam in the Office. It's Jim's extended devotion to her even when she was not reciprocating affection that is so engaging and powerful.

Perhaps I am biased toward this kind of love. It is the kind of love I know best; the kind that knows the deep ache of separation and the elation of reunion. And though it seems difficult and complicated and confusing, I would never trade this love for the emotional and physical lust that is advertised in most modern stories.

I think if we spent more time learning to be like Elinor Dashwood and less time learning the lessons of the doctors of Grey's Anatomy, our views of relationships and marriages would be much more sound.