Trouble in Paradise

Have you ever screamed at those you love? Have you lost all patience with them at the moment when you’ve landed in paradise and you were supposed to have taken a complete 360 from where you normally found yourself--emotionally that is. Paradise is, in fact, where you’re likely to find many fighting couples. Surely you have gone on the big getaway, the schooner which is taking an elite group to some untrammeled Caribbean island where the waters are too shallow for the big cruise ships to dock. And there on the pristine sands where topless mermaids insouciantly bath in crystal clear waters, you heard a couple from New York quarreling about private schools. Have you ever been in the position where you felt sorry for them and their cantankerous baying about their failed vacation? You might have felt bad, but you were smug and self-satisfied; after all, it was not happening to you. You laid back and scanned maybe one page from some impossibly difficult tome like Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities which you had promised yourself you would read as the price to pay for your hedonism--before the book fell out of your hands. Falling asleep all seemed right with the world until, awakening groggily several hours later, you found yourself in the middle of the same familiar and heated tiff you could have had anywhere. You didn't even remember how it started, but you felt you were right. Being in paradise was no reason to relent. You had caved in enough. If you had to ruin your whole vacation to make your point you would. Meanwhile the couple you had originally felt sorry for and superior to were sound asleep themselves, nestled in each other's arms.  Remember Sylvester's "Trouble in Paradise?"