Girl Power!

Last time I tried reading The Witch of Portobello by Paulo Coelho, I didn't get past more than twenty pages because it was late at night and all the talk about magic and rituals was making me jumpy. And I should probably be sued for not ever finishing The Alchemist even though I've had it since February.  

But that night, I found a passage in The Witch of Portobello that struck me for its simplicity and truthfulness, and because it expressed in words what I've been trying to say for some time now. It has stayed with me since:

Edda (one of the characters in the novel), talking about women

'If a man we don't know phones us up one day and talks a little, makes no suggestions, says nothing special, but nevertheless pays us the kind of attention we rarely receive, we're quite capable of going to bed with him that same night, feeling relatively in love. That's what we women are like, and there's nothing wrong with that -  it's the nature of the female to open herself to love easily.'

I've never read anything truer. To me, this is why even if you break a woman's heart into tiny little pieces and then ground those pieces under your shiny black shoes into fine powder, in the end, she'll still be able to put those pieces back together and fall in love again. She might trick herself into believing she's smarter this time, that she knows what she's doing, she might promise herself to never rush into anything again, but when faced with the prospect of love, she'll break all her rules and dive in. To me, this is why if a woman's been in an unhealthy relationship, the kind where the bad times outbalance the good ones, more often than not, you'll find her hanging on still, hoping for a miracle. Because no matter how horribly a guy's treated us, we'll keep coming back because 'the small careless kindnesses when he'd had a good day, or a couple of drinks, come back to her now, seem more important than the casual cruelties, the ultimate dismissal' as talked about in Caroline Kizer's poem 'Bitch'.

 To me, this is one way women are stronger than men. It's not about tears, or our affinity for fairy tale endings, in the end, it's simply our ability to love that empowers us.