stuff it in your mad passionate extra-ordinary bottom

Today my friend posted this quote on his blog....

"Unless it is mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of time. There are too many mediocre things in life—love should not be one of them."

For me it reflects the abiding and soul-destroying malaise of our generation....
Separating for a moment from my own love life - this is not about me - it triggers my now familiar philosophical reaction and launches me into my increasingly common rant...
Why, oh Why, is this, my generation, so unflaggingly conditioned to expect and accept only the biggest, the best, the most "extra-ordinary" as their DUE. Ordinary has become a dirty word - something that we must seek to avoid at all costs - to the point where the relentless search for the extraordinary has become, well, really rather ordinary!
Those bloody fairy princesses waiting for their knights have infected us from childhood - not for us the perfectly nice young nave who cleans the kings jewels for a job and looks after his grandmother - Oh No - for us only the rare treasure of the the charming and perfect-in-every-way prince of far-far-away....
AND ARE WE HAPPY???
As we search relentlessly for perfection our lives slip away, like sands through that hourglass... the days of our lives are spent striving for something we think we should be finding before we can really be happy.
My generation all think they deserve the fairytale...and as the quote above says - we consider anything else, any compromise, a "waste of time".
I say this is total bollocks. My generation is aging as single, childless, overworked and under-satisfied people who feel cheated that they never got their share of the extra-ordinary.
Happiness is, I think, about celebrating what you have - its about noticing something wonderful in ordinary moments... its about lowering your expectations and being happier more of the time! I don't need a mansion to live in, a fancy new car, the latest fashionable clothes and the most stylish interior decorating on the market - I do not need extra-ordinary success to be happy. Sure - if they come my way I will celebrate them, but I certainly do not expect that anything less is a waste of time! And so too with love.... Love is fundamentally ordinary I say... and wonderfully so. We all love, we all have passionate moments, and we all feel bored, slightly dissatisfied, or somewhat exasperated at times with the ones we choose to love. This is ordinary... and if we see it as mediocre and therefore an unacceptable compromise...well... we will spend our lives searching for something that simply does not exist out of Hans Christian Anderson's world. Or we will bounce from one sensation of "crush" to the next, because when reality creeps in - no matter who it is... there will definitely be ordinary times.
I say LOVE the ordinary, celebrate the soft subtle pleasures of the mundane, rejoice in the beauty that lies in creating deep and abiding love with another person who is - just like you - fundamentally flawed, honourably human, and essentially normal.
So I say "stick it" to the people who say "Unless it is mad, passionate, extraordinary love, it’s a waste of time" ... I looked for it when I was younger... at times, briefly, I thought I found it... but of course it never lasted... so I went back to searching....
And then I grew up.
I am much much happier now!
Perhaps in this way I myself have become "extra-ordinary"
:-)