Every year at about this time I teach Romeo and Juliet to a new crop of freshman English students, and every year, I fall in love with the play all over again. As a general rule, I’ve found that my female students are much more forgiving of Romeo’s streak for the melodramatic (this is especially true after I show them clips from Baz Luhrmann’s version of the movie, where Romeo is played by a very young, very sexy Leonardo Di Caprio). The boys, on the other hand, call him “emo”, a loser, a creeper. “If he thinks she has pretty eyes,” they complain, “why not just say she has pretty eyes? Why go on and on about them for, like, an entire soliloquy?” They ask, “So Ms. Morrison, you’re telling me that if a guy who you just met ten minutes ago showed up in your backyard and was spying on you from behind a bush, you would think that was romantic?” This year, they’ve redubbed the famous balcony scene “The Stalker Scene”.
When the question comes up, as it inevitably does, how you could possibly meet someone, fall in love with them, marry them, and be willing to die for them, all in the span of a couple days, I tell them: you have to suspend your disbelief. You have to ignore the cynicism and snarkiness that has become the currency of our modern American language. Just crank your cold twenty-first century hearts into believing in good old fashioned true love. I promise them that one day they’ll understand Juliet when she swears to Romeo, “My bounty is as boundless as the sea/the more I give, the more I have/for both are infinite”. If you’re lucky, I say, one day you’ll experience the paradox of love Juliet speaks of: that the more you give of yourself in a relationship, the happier you’ll be. And then someone—one of the bolder ones, a quarterback or a pretty girl with long, shining hair, will always ask: How about you, Ms. Morrison? Have you ever been in love?
I never know how to respond: if I say yes, they’ll notice my ringless finger and pity me. If I say no, then why should they believe anything I say if I don’t know any more about love than they do? Do I tell them the truth? That at thirty, I have spent years navigating the swirling waters of the big-city bar scene; set-ups and hook-ups, first dates and Facebook flirtations, drunken, sloppy make-outs and bitter disappointment, and still, after having had seventeen more years on the prowl than Juliet ever had, still I haven’t found my Romeo?
Dating in the modern world is about as far from Verona conventions as one could possibly imagine, and I am certainly no Juliet. Juliet never went on a date with a man who drank eight bottles of Miller Lite before we even ordered dinner. She never had to interpret vague, noncommittal text messages, and she definitely never had to run from a dirndl-clad giantess after her true love stole a bratwurst from a sizzling grill at an German street fest (to be fair, he did offer me a bite).
When Juliet thought she’d met The One, she got it right the first time. Me, I spent the morning after my twenty-sixth birthday lying in a shivering heap on my bathroom floor, my tongue feeling like a sea anemone that had washed ashore and my forehead feeling like someone was tapping it methodically with a Wiffle bat, puking up the pitcher of mojitos I’d drank the night before while I recalled in gradual layers of clarity the previous night’s encounter: how I, softened by the mojitos along with several shots of electric blue liqueur served to me from plastic test tube beakers, had found the bartender, Tim, not just charming but also rather attractive; how I’d learned, with an increasing sense of hope, that Tim and I shared a love of Bruce Springsteen, Mexican food, and fox terriers (all of which, I would realize only in the unforgiving sobriety of morning, are not exactly fringe interests. Thousands, if not millions of Americans love Darkness on the Edge of Town, tacos, and small, bearded dogs: did that mean I should hook up with all of them, too?); and how, this evidence being enough to suggest to me that there was a chance that Tim might not just be a slinger of hastily made cosmopolitans but could also be The One, I had stumbled home with him after last call, where we’d half-heartedly groped each other before passing out on opposite sides of the couch.
But I’m not going to tell my students that. And it’s not just because to do so would be inappropriate and pathetic, but because despite their protests and their critiques of the play, that’s not what they want to hear anyway. When I talk about love in Romeo and Juliet, I see their teenage faces turned to me like hopeful sunflowers, a group of kids who, just like their 500-year old counterparts in the play, still want to believe that love at first sight can happen to each of them.
My first year as a teacher, I took my class to a live performance of the play at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. During the climactic final scene, as Romeo lifted the poison to his lips, weeping real tears, fingers trembling and dust motes sifting down around him on the still stage, a student screamed out in anguish, “SHE AIN’T DEAD, MAN!” which echoed through the silent theater, nearly causing Romeo to drop his vial of poison while the play-dead Juliet winced on her bier. I wanted to be mad at that kid, but I couldn’t. After all, who among us, when seeing the play for the first time, doesn’t want to scream out the same thing? This student’s genuine grief at the lovers’ suicides captured for me the fervor of what all teenagers–what all people— hope for: not just the discovery of true love, but also a happy ending once that love is found.
And so, after every breakup, disappointment, and missed chance, my hope always comes blooming back. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I somehow still believe, with a pure, unwaning conviction, that one day true love will come to me, and when it does, it will be just like Shakespeare imagined it: in a room where for two people, the world simply stops moving for long enough for them to see each other’s shared futures, and to move toward those futures, stunned by the possibility of their newly reimagined lives. So, with this in mind, before I go out each weekend I curl my hair, I shave my legs, I coat my lashes in black mascara, and I wonder if this will be the night I’ll meet my Romeo. On dance floors at weddings, in the hallways of crowded parties, I always wait for the touch of a stranger that will change my life. I have not forgotten that Romeo and Juliet’s love affair ended in tragedy. But, I think, as I check myself in the mirror before hurrying out the door, mine doesn’t have to. After all, I’m a grown-up, and they were just a couple of starry-eyed kids.
Jessie Morrison is a Chicago Public School teacher and graduate of the MFA program in fiction writing at Columbia College. Her work has appeared in The Chicago Reader, Word Riot, Writer’s Digest, McSweeney’s, Hair Trigger, Hypertext, and the Great Lakes Cultural Review. Since she wrote this piece, she has, in fact, found her Romeo. They were married on August 17, 2012.
