The Allure of Quests
I really enjoy stories, and particularly movies, where an older man and younger woman are on a quest – perhaps to solve a mystery, right a wrong, or flee an evil force. They are thrown together and their shared aspirations drive them closer as they work together to pursue their quest. They learn from each other, despite occasional conflicts, and eventually succeed.
Movies that come to mind are North by Northwest (Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint), Charade (Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn), and The Big Sleep (Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall). There is an emergent romantic undertone in these stories, but the plot is dominated by the quest. The older man helps the younger woman to achieve her goals, in these examples, stopping the bad guys, finding the murderers, and saving her sister from her fate. Once the quest is successful, the romantic undertones take center stage as the story ends.
I think that what appeals to me is the idea of shared aspirations to achieve substantial goals involving some risks of failure. The couple – actually a team more than a couple – support each other to contribute to progress toward the goal. Conflicts of priorities and personalities emerge along the way, but the importance of the quest helps them to move beyond these conflicts. Respect for each other’s role and competency grows. They become truly interdependent. And, of course, the team achieves its goal, with warm affection as the immediate reward.
It seems to me that male-female relationships are much richer when there is a shared sense of purpose beyond going to respective jobs, keeping house, paying the bills, eating and drinking, and taking holidays and vacations. Raising children can, of course, provide a shared purpose, but also can tend to feel like another job with enormous responsibilities to buy more and more things, oversee schooling and homework, address logistics of extracurricular activities, and save for higher education. The idea that your only purpose is to foster the next generation has always felt rather limiting to me.
Yet, quests that benefit humankind are very appealing and, certainly, raising children to become good citizens fits in here. Plus, the joys of seeing your progeny succeed in life are difficult to overestimate. Nevertheless, the idea that your primary role is to prepare the next generation to accomplish what you could not seems like passing the buck – why couldn’t you do it? My sense is that you can have both great accomplishments and great kids. In fact, your kids can be even greater if they experience what you accomplish.
