It’s a brand new year and naturally, I’ve made a resolution to continue with self-indulgence. So to start off on the right Louboutin-clad foot, I booked a night at the opera with wonderful company. It was the opening of the opera season, which gave me reason (not that I needed any) to sieve a tiered flowing gown from my wardrobe.

Unfortunately, the opera was Puccini’s Madame Butterfly (not quite befitting the New Year theme) and by the first intermission, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Butterfly was fifteen when she married Pinkerton and statutory legal issues aside, it saddened me that she was merely eighteen when she ended her life.

I may be a romantic at heart, but the tragic heroine thing is just a bit extreme. How many of us would live and die for love? And is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? Judging by Butterfly’s tragic ending, I wasn’t quite so sure.

As I exited the opera, my thoughts turned to the last time I attended a performance of Madame Butterfly. It was with Mr. G in Milan and the urbane sophisticated man had pronounced the tragic ending as overly dramatic and unrealistic. I remembered countering with a quote from the song ‘Nature Boy’ (I had just seen Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge then). Tonight, Ewan McGregor’s haunting refrain echoed in my ears again: The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.

Mr. G thought I was too much of a romantic and unlike Madame Butterfly, we didn’t have to approach love in an end-all-be-all manner. I.e. if you fall in love and it isn’t returned, you plunge to your death but should someone catch you, you land safely.

It’s all so confusing. Why can’t the line simply be: The greatest thing you’ll ever learn is just to love?

Image courtesy of Allposters.com