Picture Perfect

I see photographs of couples I know with smiling faces and confident postures, whether they're happy or not. Do we all do this? How great a divide is there between our mental picture of what our coupledom should be - how it should be presented to the world - and the reality of the relationship?

I vacillate greatly from one extreme to another; between my two natures. At times, I want the exact truth, with all its nuances and contradictions, to be known. It's the stuff of this life. There's beauty and pain in it. It's a blending of our sameness and our differences, of our easy flowing and our conflicts. It's what makes us unique and what makes us the same. It's ugly and it's just what I want it to be, even if it's, at times, difficult.

Other times, I want fewer brush strokes visible. I want the view to be from a distance, where you can't see the imperfections and the overall impression is more simplistic.

Going over this now makes me realize the problem, for me, is you can't control the audience and what they bring away from a piece of artwork. Whether the detailed portrait or the more cartoon-ish picture, the person who is going to see only the imperfections is the same.

I prefer the reality to the lie, since there's no control of what anyone does with the information one way or the other.