What's Wrong With Silly Love Songs?

Dream Girls and the Realities of Romance

1. Silly Love Songs

Some people want to fill the world with silly love songs, sang Paul McCartney. And what’s wrong with that? I'd like to know, cause here I go, again.

I realize that it might be a little late, Sir Paul, and that your songs have already done whatever damage they are going to do in this life, but let me tell you what’s wrong with filling the world with silly love songs—in my experience.

Silly love songs made me silly with love, so in love with love, so beclouded by its romance, that for years I couldn’t grasp love’s realities.

Even now, I’m not sure I do.

Does anyone? Can anyone, with all the dream songs streaming into our ears? Wildest Dreams, Dream Lover, Teenage Dream, Sweet Dreams, Dream On, Dream a Little Dream of Me, A Headful of Dreams, Just a Dream, Girl of My Dreams—Sweet Mary, Mother of Dreamy Jesus!

How can any young, impressionable boy or girl keep an eye on the realities of love in the face of such an onslaught of romance?

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, and to honor love’s power, I want to recount the first three dream girls Venus sent my way, the beginnings of my education in love.

For if I’ve learned one thing about Venus, it’s that she is not gentle with those who underestimate her power. The goddess of love masters our heart with potions of fact and fiction, sending us our dreamboats and wrecking them on love’s realities.

It’s wise to attend her lessons.

2. Go-Go Girl

My first dream girl was Patty, who I loved throughout elementary school.

Patty had long, sandy blonde hair. Her soft bangs brushed her eyelashes and crushed my heart, but her blue miniskirt and Go-Go boots trampled me.

She was a Go-Go Girl! Just like the girls on TV who danced around the singers and bands!

At least she dressed like one, and that was enough for me. Too much, actually. I couldn’t understand how Mrs. Sullivan expected me to recite the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation with a Go-Go Girl three desks away.

The high point of this first great love was making out with Patty at a petting party in 6th grade.

But as I came to know her during my elementary school years, I slowly realized that Patty wasn’t a Go-Go girl at all; in fact, she was quite the opposite of exuberant and energetic. She was a gentle, bashful, passive girl with a streak of melancholy.

But what did I know of Patty? I knew only her image in my head, the Go-Go Girl look. I shrugged off my disillusionment without learning Venus’s first lesson, and she made me pay for it.

3. Night Moves

By junior high, I was a certified idiot for love and ripe for a hard fall.

This time, the dream wasn’t a Go-Go Girl, but a Cheerleader, the Madonna of the American Gridiron. Surprise, surprise.

Lynn was blonde, of course, popular, of course, captain of the cheerleading squad, of course, but she was not a mean girl. She was a good heart, and we were besties. We talked non-stop in the halls, at lunch, in Miss Daddino’s English class.

I bought her a bracelet for her birthday. Hell, we watched My Fair Lady together with her parents! I assumed this was IT—the real thing—love.

When my best friend Eddie one day told me Lynn was going steady with Mike, our star half-back, I was like, “What? My Lynn?” Completely clueless.

Somehow it never dawned on me that every dream girl has a matching dream boy, that the captain of the cheerleading squad needs the football star; they’re characters in the same rom-com.

My chest did not have the barrel bulk necessary for the role; it had more of the inward curve of a dried-up lemon peel.

Mike, on the other hand, was handsome, rugged, smart; worse, he was a great guy, and he was shaving! I was throwing birthday parties for any peach fuzz that was willing to sprout.

The only thing that saved me from despair that year was Kim K., a slightly older girl who visited my bedroom weekly to practice her night moves.

Kim did not fit any of my dream girl images. She was short and plump, with curly brown-hair and glasses. But when she stuck her tongue in my ear, an electrical shock ran straight from my eardrum to my core. It was a revelation.

Kim was the first girl to pierce the amazing technicolor dream coat of romance wrapped around the world of love, and give it the sexual punch of reality.

I am forever in debt to the generosity of her budding genius.

4. Beach Baby

Growing up on Long Island in the 70s, it was inevitable that when I dreamed of girls in high school, I would dream of a Beach Baby—an all-Sunshine blonde in a yellow two-piece on a blanket in the sand.

Lenora stepped right out of a Coppertone ad and into my heart. It was impossible not to love her. She was funny and kind. She looked like Venus, and she smelled like heaven.

What do you do when your dreams come true?

You make it last, as long as you can, as Lenora and I did in the summer of 1974, to the soundtrack of Endless Summer, the Beach Boys hit album.

Swimming in the ocean with Lenora, rubbing suntan lotion on Lenora’s shoulders, making out with Lenora under the boardwalk: for a brief moment that summer, a dream of love became my reality.

Then my parents moved me to the Mohave desert, and I forgot all about Lenora.

Lenora grew up to become a Wall Street woman with a head for numbers, a heart for rescue dogs, and a mad love of giraffes. When I saw her years later, she asked me why I didn’t come back; I had no answer.

It might have been because a boy so preoccupied with dream girls hadn’t yet learned to love himself enough to love a real girl.

5. Tuesday Afternoon

This year, I will have been married for 40 years. The woman who finally managed to wrangle my dreamy head out of the clouds is herself a dream girl.

As soon as I saw her in a college class on the philosophy and literature of existentialism, I was hooked. Teri was a Redheaded Hippie Girl with a psychedelic groove. She came wrapped in tie-dye scarves and listening to the Moody Blues.

She had a sultry, midnight-radio voice, she read French and philosophy, and she could pull ecstasy from of a Saltine Cracker.

The first night I slept with her, she played Tuesday Afternoon on her boom box. From the very first, she was trying to call me away from my dream lovers to a love supreme.

I'm looking at myself reflections of my mind
It's just the kind of day to leave myself behind
So gently swaying through the fairyland of love
If you'll just come with me you'll see the beauty of
Tuesday afternoon

We may say that when it comes to love, we don’t want to play games, but I’m afraid we have to because we reach out for real love only through our silly love songs.

Our dream lovers are wisps of our own cloudy hearts, all dust motes and water droplets, but they carry us, rocked in mad desire, into the heart of real love. There, in one another’s arms, our lovers sing to us the words of Stevie Nicks:

It's only me who wants to wrap around your dreams
And have you any dreams you'd like to sell?