If Someone Says "You Complete Me," RUN! (4 page)

I know lots of people who stayed together as long as they could. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, for example. They never got married, but it lasted as long as it was supposed to last.

But let’s go back to the origins of these fantasies we have. Where do they all come from? Music is a part of it, yes. But, again, think about the mythology of movies.

Of course, all this is coming from someone who once
facilitated a tearjerker of a reunion from the beyond between a woman and her dead husband in one of the most hopelessly romantic movies of all time! (And believe me, I am eternally grateful for that role, but I’m just saying… )

An Officer and a Gentleman
.
Pretty Woman
.
Fifty Shades of Grey
. (They call the last one Mommy Porn, but really, it wasn’t about the sex; it was about the money, at least in the book. Not that many people want to be flagellated, you know, whipped, for those of you who haven’t seen it—which isn’t to knock it for those people who do.)
Footloose
.
The Enchanted Cottage. Grease
.
Twilight
.
Can’t Buy Me Love
.
The Notebook
. (Or any fucking book or movie by Nicholas Sparks.) Then there’s Rhett Butler and Scarlett O’Hara in
Gone With the Wind
. Maria and Tony in
West Side Story
. Really? You’re going to die for love after knowing each other for less than twenty-four hours? I love that movie, but come on!

“But its true love!” some will say.

But it ain’t real, people. It’s a movie.

These are wonderful fantasies about love that rises above and beyond the normal human condition. And we have been programmed to think that this is what relationships are supposed to look like. We think these movies give us hope, but in reality they just create false expectations that will come back and bite us in the butt.

What extremely successful, gorgeous man is going to
pick up a lady of the evening off the street? Honestly? Billionaires tend to go for the high-class escorts or call girls. He might possibly buy her a designer dress, fall in love with her, and marry her. (I’m not naming names here.) Think about it, though: if someone who looked like Julia Roberts were working the streets, TMZ would be all over it.

Everybody wants that kind of magic thing that happens in romantic movies. Everyone wants to think that love can conquer all and overcome any problem, but it doesn’t always work that way in real life.

Some of the absolute worst movies when it comes to setting people up are also some of the most popular. They are ridiculously romantic, but they aren’t realistic. Do not watch these if you are looking for love. They might be really wonderful movies, but they tend to lead you astray.

1.
Fifty Shades of Grey
. The absolute worst.

2.
Jerry Maguire
. The title of this book comes from the most famous line in this movie.

3.
Almost anything with the younger Julia Roberts in it, but without question
Pretty Woman
.

4.
The Notebook
and any other movie based on a book by Nicholas Sparks.

5.
Any movie that makes you cry uncontrollably for no reason, or makes you look at your partner and wish he would be replaced by the leading man.

Now give me the five to ten that have led you the most astray:

Never watch those movies again. Delete them from your watch list and replace them with something more
relevant to real life or at the very least know that they are nothing but fantasy escapism, like
Game of Thrones
. You can get pleasure from the escapism, but don’t mistake it for real life.

While some of us may think we have a soundtrack to our life, none of us gets our own movie soundtrack. This means that we may have songs that have been important to us at times in our life, our history, but none of us has an actual soundtrack playing in the background.

In
Manhattan
, with Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, you hear Gershwin in the background while they are walking down the street. That’s not happening in real life. No one hears fucking Gershwin when they are out walking. You hear, “Honk, honk, move!” You see dogs pooping. You hear people talking loudly on their cell phones. You’re exposed to all that. In the movies, none of that.

That should tell you to be really careful in how movies relate to your real life. If you’re attracted to what you see in the movies, and you’re looking for that, the first thing you need to know is that it’s not real. The way you know it’s not real is that no one in the movie steps in dog shit. Chances are that movie relationship is not real, either.

We all go through it; it’s how we’re conditioned.

I have a friend who was watching
Twilight
, and her
husband was sleeping on the couch next to her. And that damn vampire got to her.

She thought to herself, “Why didn’t I fucking marry a vampire? Here I am stuck with you, and all I want is the vampire.”

When she told me this, I said to her, “Really? Do you really want to be married to a vampire who sucks your blood, is dead and deadly, and may eventually kill you? I don’t think so.”

The craziest stuff you can think of has been conditioned in us.

And by the way, can anyone explain how vampires, who have no blood in them, get an erection?… Just asking.

I was watching a terrific old movie,
Stella Dallas
, not long ago. You have the good woman, and she’s married to the rich guy, but the rich guy likes the girl from the other side of the tracks. They have an affair, and then she has his baby, and then the man comes to her and says, “I want the baby. My wife and I are going to raise the baby to be ours, and we will give it everything you can’t give it.” She goes, “No, don’t take my baby.” But then her maternal instincts kick in and she thinks, “Maybe he is right,” so she gives them the kid.

Several years later, the baby girl is all grown up and going to get married, and the real mom happens to be
walking by the brownstone where the wedding is taking place. She stands outside, this fallen woman, and she watches her daughter get married from afar.

And I’m thinking, “What the fuck? Go in and tell her that you’re there!” It was driving me crazy. Never mind that today this would have ended up in court with a paternity suit, custody battle, and child support. But this movie was driving me crazy because what you realize after a certain age, and after a certain amount of time being around people, is that people around you play out scenarios they’ve seen in the movies. And you realize, “Oh, my God, what we see is in us.”

That shit is just in us.

This bullshit even comes from commercials. You see the couple, they are taking a bath together, looking out at the sunset, with giant grins on their faces because he is using Viagra. I don’t know very many couples who sit in a bathtub watching a sunset, but maybe I don’t travel in the correct kind of circles.

What I’d like to know is what are they talking about? Is she saying the stuff that comes in the middle of a relationship, like “Why don’t you ever put the fucking toilet seat down?” “Why don’t you put the cap on the toothpaste?” “Why do you leave dishes in the sink?”

No, she is happy and smiling because this is a commercial written by men for men, and the woman is sup
posed to be smiling because her guy is going to have a hard-on for the next four hours. So who cares whether he replaced that toilet paper roll?

My biggest problem has always been that I love the idea of being in love and all the things that it suggests. Walking hand in hand, instinctually knowing what the other person wants, and looking up and seeing your love looking at you in that special soft-focus way people look at each other in the movies. We all want somebody who will fight for our love. In real life, we actually have to put the effort out. But because we are in love with the idea of being in love, we keep getting married or hooking up because we think, “I must be doing something wrong. Let’s try this again with somebody else,” as opposed to, “Hey! Maybe what I’m looking for isn’t real. It doesn’t exist. It’s a fantasy.” It isn’t like we are all looking for a knight in shining armor necessarily, but we are looking for someone who makes us feel like the leading man or the leading lady in a movie.