Lawyers and love are ill-fitting cohorts. Or so says Mary Waldron in her column “The Love Life of Lawyers.” Her diagnosis: We are not love matches because we are trained to be pessimistic, skeptical and argumentative. (I might add that we are occasionally pompous and often self-important.) What to do? Hire a matchmaker, visit a dating site, rely on well-meaning friends? For me, Shakespeare illuminates our way. Shakespeare never blinks. Let’s tap into his wisdom.
He understood love is fickle, deceitful and intense (not in a good way.) Fickle is explored in “As You Like It.” Rosalind and her cousin Celia flee to a forest (with Rosalind disguising herself as a man) to ensure her safety from an envious and powerful relative. They stumble upon a nice guy shepherd as he is expressing his eternal love for a haughty woman, cruelly rejecting him. Rosalind’s sense of propriety is offended and a frustrated Rosalind blasts him: “You are a thousand times a properer man/ Than she is a woman/ ‘Tis fools such as you that makes the world full of ill-favored children.”
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