December Daily: romantic moments

exceptinsects -- favorite romantic moments...in books, movies, fic, real life?

I make no promises as to accuracy; I'm not looking these up on YouTube or whatever because if I'm misremembering something, I don't want to ruin it. Just accept it the way I retell it. It's like the accidental fanfiction of the mind.

I was in high school when HBO was new, and one of the movies they played over and over was "What's Up, Doc?" with Barbra Streisand and Ryan O'Neal. There's a kiss at a piano that was a formative influence on me. I don't remember what was going on, plotwise, but I do remember minute after minute of almost-kissing, surely-kissing-by-now, barely-not-kissing ...

There's an exchange in the Goldie Hawn/Steve Martin movie "Housesitter" where Goldie says, "... when you asked me to have sex with you," and Steve says, "I didn't ask you to have sex with me. I asked you [if you wanted a Coke, or something like that]," and Goldie says, "No, I distinctly heard you ask me to have sex with you," and Steve says, in this soft, wondering voice, "You said yes."

(I notice these are both screwball comedies. I think I'm a bit of a hard sell for romance in movies that are about romance -- I go in with my resistance high, possibly because the obstacles are personality obstacles and just make the characters look ill-matched. But if you let two people roll around in a completely absurd premise for a while, the romance will sneak up on me the same way it sneaks up on them.)

I fondly remember the ridiculous scene in one of the Indiana Jones movies where the heroine (I can't even remember which one) says, "Well, tell me where you don't hurt, and I'll kiss you there."

In books it's hard to do better than Peter Wimsey's "Placetne, Magistra?" marriage proposal in Gaudy Night, especially when contrasted with the first time he proposed marriage to Harriet Vane, which was more like, "I just thought you'd be an attractive sort of person to marry, that's all." The placetne proposal proves how well he knows her.

In real life I'm not much for standard romantic gestures. One time when the kidlet was about two, all three of us had rotovirus, one right after the other, over the course of about twelve hours, and then the spouse got up the next morning and cleaned both bathrooms and mopped both floors -- I always say that's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for me.



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