As You Wish

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of the movie, The Princess Bride.  We watched it for the first time in a very long time this weekend.  I'd forgotten how enjoyable it is. There's no wonder that its popularity has survived, and even flourished, throughout this quarter-century.

Ah, the story of True Love:
True Love, full of promise and hope.
True Love, with devotion and fidelity beyond compare.
True Love, surviving despite desperate odds.
True Love, coming to the rescue, every time, just in time.

Though I do not often subscribe to gender-specific generalizations, I suspect that men do, in fact, secretly want to be heroes, just as women secretly would like to be rescued.  Is it some kind of primitive biological imperative that drives us?  Is it a hidden desire to experience an all-consuming passion in a particular manner?  Or is it a wish for a vital human connection that will somehow magically exist beyond distance and time?

I do not know.  Will I ever understand?  Centuries may be necessary even to begin to parse the mysteries of the human heart.

Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while. - Westley

Picture found among the internets.