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A valentine to gloriously imperfect women
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Real women, one smitten man decides, are not perfect nymphs but compelling because of their flaws.
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By Joe Kertes
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Above my desk in my study hangs a print of a painting by W.A. Bouguereau, the 19th-century French Romantic. The painting is called The Nymphs. It depicts 13 bare young women in a glade. They are lounging in the grass or standing in the cool pool of water or swinging from an impossible rope suspended from the branches above. Ripely developed though they are, none has a single hair on her body below the nose. They are white as angels, unblemished, untroubled, perfect. Gawking at them from the dark bushes at the side are two men, satyrs possibly. These women are as pure as a fair weather cloud. They are untouched by experience, untouched possibly even by yearning. They look too serene in their glade to be perturbed by yearning. And they will never be so touched. They are locked eternally in their pale purity just as the lechers in the shadows are locked eternally in imagining the nymhs' fall. These women live forever in this about-to state just as the men in the bush do. The world, for them, is always becoming when it is perfect and always blissful.
Yet do I love these women or are they mere curiosities? Are these the women of my dreams? Are they the women of all men's dreams? Let me now praise the women that I love.
But first, here's what I know about the naked nymphs in the glade. They do not suffer from PMS. They do not feel shame. They do not battle for supremacy in the schoolyard or the office or the gym. They do not compete for Mensa or the cheerleading squad or the right to the channel changer.
Life with three women
I live in a chemical laboratory. My three women, a lovely wife and two lovely daughters, rise and fall at different times of the month. Salvos are fired from bedroom to bedroom, kitchen to bathroom, den to vestibule, some of them zinging past my head on their way to other heads, some aimed at my head. This is no glade, and we are not serene. But we are also not bored or unhappy.
How can an untroubled, predictable, perfect life be compelling? The women I have known and loved don't come from such a world -- the glade of the white and pink nymphs have possibly never even visited it. Their world is untidy and troubled. It is part of the mess we call life, and it is where love is found.
Mommy dearest
The first woman I met was less eager to meet me than I was to meet her. I slipped out into this messy world on the elevator on the way up to the maternity ward. This woman turned out to be my mother. She was the bright North Star in the constellation of women in my life.
The sun was my grandmother. She nourished and raised me in the early years of my life, whispered family secrets to me, baked pastries in the Austro Hungarian tradition and told me stories late into my sleepless nights. I always asked her who was going to fall asleep first, and she always said, "You, naturally," so I could be reassured she would guard the house while I slept.
Looking for more Valentine's Day resources? Check out our special Valentine's Day feature page for the best tips and last-minute ideas.
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