"Stage-y" Love

Julius (see last post) is a hard nut. After I sent him the letter, he posted on Facebook:

I would rather travel alone than have a stagey [sic] travel buddy.


I knew he was hitting me. He thinks I'm too dramatic for him, because of the pure Tagalog letter I sent. He'd rather travel life alone than with me, the dramatic one. I was annoyed. I just posted on my own wall:

I'm already long gone, baby. In vain do you kick against the goad. Travel light. :D

I can't get over this, for the following reasons:
1) It's not only Julius who thinks I'm "dramatic". My aunt does, too. Some of my friends think that, too. And I do not like it.
2) It's a rather bad way to end a courtship. I tried to have goodwill, but no, Julius comes and tears up the document.
3) Formal Tagalog is not only used for love letters of great mushiness. It's also used to state facts. Julius seems to confuse mushiness with facts. I guess writing the letter in pure Tagalog was not a good idea, I should have written in English instead. But still.

With regard to point 1): The funny and annoying thing is, it seems to be part of Filipino contemporary culture to disdain the real and substitute the pleasantries for it. Real love and real feeling are "stage-y". Logic and deep thinking are "complications of simple life" (this, from the pimp in Harrison Plaza who tried to sell me 30-ish women for Php 500). Words in church, which express dogmas, are "highfalutin'". My mother exclaimed, when I converted to Orthodoxy, "Sana bobo na lang ang naging anak ko." (I wish my son had been dumb instead.) If she were not my mother, I would have laughed in her face, or kept silent out of contempt.

Society becomes a playground, and people play their way. It wasn't always this way: until the early Spanish period, people considered it important to work hard, parley with village mates, go to the fiestas to celebrate the saints, have meals with family, and then retire to bed. I don't blame any period or force in history for the change, but the culture developed its present form during the lawyers-or-doctors period of mainstream Philippine society (i.e. when you were important only if you were a doctor or a lawyer).

Answer to point 1): I can play without being untrue to myself. Sabina in The Unbearable Lightness of Being is for me the best model of this. I just don't know about Julius - if he can do this and still remain truthful to himself. He seems to have started playing early. I am a latecomer to this game, and so I know "truth" from "non-truth". Advantage? Sometimes I think it is a burden, but then I think: if I know the truth about myself, I escape from the game unscathed, and rest myself in my secret place which only God knows where. The past year has impressed on me the latter thought, and to this day I consider it an advantage indeed.

Of my five courtships in the past three years, this has been ended in the most acrimonious way. It rivals the October experience I had with a workmate, when she just stopped talking to me God knows why, and I submitted my last love letter on yellow pad. She did say on her wall:

Some things must be discontinued and ignored.

I think that she feels I'm just fooling around with her. It was really painful because she was also my friend, I told her many things about myself. So I understand her, and simply try to get along. But Julius, with his expressed disdain for "stage-y" real love on Facebook, takes the cake. For the life of me, I don't get it. If we're done, we're done. No need to plaster it on Facebook or any social space. It's like posting that you broke up with me because I have a small d*ck, or I have herpes, or I gave you chlamydia. It's rather tasteless, even in disguise.

I take my October love's status as my own this time, and say:

Some things must be discontinued and ignored.