If Someone Says "You Complete Me," RUN! (3 page)

When I hear songs like this I’m thinking, “This is why we have no idea how to behave with each other in a relationship! Because there’s all this mythology about what a relationship should be.” And it is a far cry from reality.

All these songs send the wrong message. They make you weak and want to wallow, and love isn’t about being weak and wallowing. We all have those songs that we love to wallow in or use to beat ourselves up when we’re down. It’s a bittersweet kind of thing we do to ourselves.

Let’s do a little exercise. What are five to ten songs that you love and use to set up unrealistic expectations for yourself or your relationship? Or those that have set you up to fail? Really think about it, and list them here:

Now let’s look at movies, television, and even commercials.

I am a huge movie buff, but that shit can mess you up. In a way, popular culture conditions us to find someone who makes us happy which many of us take to mean “Just find someone, whether they make you happy or not. Just find someone or you won’t be considered normal.” That’s why so many people rush into relationships that make no sense.

Women in particular are told you’ve got to find somebody because your biological clock is ticking. Well, if the only reason you’re looking for somebody is because your clock is ticking, just have a baby on your own, because I always say if you mate to make a baby, everything else goes by the wayside. After a baby, you and a boyfriend may end up hating each other, loving each other, or just tolerating each other. It doesn’t matter. You’re going to love the baby, and Baby comes first. If you really want a child you just might be better off having one on your own rather than dragging the wrong person into it.

(As a side note to all my Christian friends, whose heads may be exploding right now: I am not antimarriage, and I am not anti-two-parent homes. Take what I am saying as an exploration of “There’s got to be a better way.” So you don’t need to tweet me, call me, write me letters. You don’t have to do that.)

This idea to find somebody and couple up also makes people who are not interested in coupling up, or who at this point in their lives are not coupled up, feel terrible. It
makes us ask ourselves, “Is there something wrong with me? Why doesn’t someone want me?”

Which brings me back to movies: Remember Bridget Jones at that dinner party where she is the only “singleton,” as Bridget would say—you know she and I are tight—and everyone else is a “smug married”? Why should she have to feel bad? The smug marrieds at that party are acting like assholes. Why should she be single shamed? She wants a relationship; she is trying. She is also a flawed human being who knows how hard these things can be and who still has the guts to keep trying.

No one should feel like they have to have someone there with them to show outside people that they’re worthy. It takes a solid person who knows who she is to go to the dinner party by herself and hold her own.

Women in this country feel that they in particular have been kind of set up. ’Cause they think a romantic relationship and marriage are the be-all and end-all, and the things they are supposed to be striving for—myself included. I tried to get that brass ring. Three times! And it choked me. I thought that in order to be “normal,” I had to be married. So I got married even though I knew it wasn’t right. When that didn’t work out I tried it again. And then again.

We push people in a desperate fashion to find someone, because everything we see, feel, and read oftentimes
is about someone finding that perfect person. So you’re looking and looking. You see somebody who looks halfway decent, and out of desperation you decide he or she is the one—as if there is only “one” out there for each of us (which is a whole other subject). We decide that this halfway-decent person is “the one” and try to make the square peg fit into the round hole, which always ends badly.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of great couples out there who found a way to do it, to make it last a lifetime, you know, and God bless them. Like Anne and Eli Wallach, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Sidney Poitier and Joanna. Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The Bush families. Bill and Hillary Clinton. It can happen. It can work, but you don’t know the compromises each of these people had to make in order to stay together. To them, it was clearly important to accept those compromises to maintain the relationship, because it was their priority.