I don’t know what it says about me, and I’m not keen to summarize it with the impulsive answers I’ll provoke in speaking to it, but I root for the happy ending to love stories. I don’t care if it’s an anime or a CBS cliché. You’ve been estranged for years or forged a bond through a shared journey and hardship or are the exact “wrong” people for each other as you slowly find how you fit; I’m rooting for you. I don’t regularly seek out chick-flicks or have Hugh Grant stutter his way into my dreams every night, but I don’t hate it when it seems like they’ve figured it out by the end. And then there was that one day I sat on the couch for 7 or 8 back-to-back watchings of The Notebook in high school. Simply saying “I didn’t want to get up,” wouldn’t capture the nature of whatever hole I had fallen into.
If you’ve followed my writing forever, you’d know what a little romantic lover-boy I once suffered myself to be. Before the science and philosophy saved me, I was at the unmerciful swell of my feelings and hopes about who I could be with the prettiest girl, both inside and out, that I could imagine ever having the privilege to meet. What a coincidence! The girl of my dreams sits next to me in band!? There must be a God. I think about this given the last scene of a This Is Us episode I just finished. Kevin kept his valentine he made for Sophie when they were both in elementary school. He wrote her name down on it after looking up and seeing her for the first time as she joined his class. 40 years later, after their respective whirlwinds, they’re reconnecting to raucous applause from onlooking family.
Scenes like this are everywhere, and they’re getting modern renditions with an elevated consciousness that it’s not just pretty white people who have these kinds of stories. Hell, this scene played out at his fat sister’s wedding! Everyone can get in on this love game. Represent. It’s this kind of selfish all-encapsulating romantic notion now free to be explored with fill-in-your status signifier suggesting that we’ve somehow evolved on what it means to qualify a good or healthy relationship.
Certainly as a result of the work I do and the nature of the environments I spend the most time, but I’m pretty much always hearing about unhealthy relationships. The nature of their discontent is often more obvious and elevated given the drug use or various levels of abuse, but as far as I can tell, they’re just the dramatic versions of what I’ve been privy to listening to my entire life. I still think about my uncle beating my mom’s sister and no one doing shit about that. I think about how my other uncle spoke to my grandmother when I was growing up. I’ve heard countless stories from one friend or another about their boyfriend and the creepy ways they would impose emotional guilt or try to exercise control. No one has shared with me the valentine they’re still holding for when “their person” comes back around to finish the love story.
Moreover, when you consider the criterion that we tend to judge the “best” kinds of relationships, the answers people give for why they lasted are always a touch dark. “Happy wife, happy life!” Some people cheat and just don’t bother to open up the chaos of getting caught. Many figure out how much time you need apart to better appreciate their time together. For the ones that offer things like, “You have to communicate,” they’re suspiciously sparse on details as to how that communication is conducted, and if you catch snippets, it rhymes with a kind of capitulation for the sake of “peace.” Or maybe you “marry your best friend.” Great, perhaps both of you are terrible at making friends or defining what good ones look like.
The other place I get any remote perspective on how relationships are going is through the happiest of happy pictures from all of my not-exactly-but-still-kinda-rich white friends. Now the babies are incoming and extended families are all showing you the same genetically-bound smiles. I don’t know their actual finances, but I know they all suspiciously waited 10 years to even-out financially before the kids started dropping. They aren’t living in sheds lol, I can tell you that much. Whatever “arrangements” or difficulties they experience the rest of their lives, they’re statistically the most likely to stay married, for better or worse, destined to be the gray in their grandchildren’s first Christmas pictures.
I don’t know how to introduce the next thought I have about the concert I just attended, so glad I got that out of the way with this. The lyrics to so many of the Badflower songs had to do with this depressive hatred or anxiety about yourself. I had the thought that if I were half my age, maybe I would have found them as compelling as a My Chemical Romance or Linkin Park. Sometimes you get these moments that really drive home where you are or where you’ve been psychologically. I’m not actually an angst-ridden teenager anymore. I literally give life advice for a living. I’m not crawling in my skin, I am okay, and you almost certainly hate me more than I hate myself, if you hate me at all, because I don’t.
But it’s not just this era or a “phase” for many people. Not everyone grows to recognize tropes or the value of your favorite artist mixing up how they write their songs. You can constantly be getting into relationships that don’t respect, reflect, or even recognize who you are or what you need. Whether it’s with a person or media, your brain is going to run a pattern on the provided narratives. I can acknowledge that I’m rooting for the characters. I can check my impulse to fall down the rabbit hole like that’s how it’s “supposed” to or “ought” to work. I don’t have to morph my dissatisfaction with my own life not resembling the magic into an affinity for emotionally distressed music.
I’ve had the luck and privilege to be in 3 decently long romantic relationships. Leaving aside how none of those girls care to talk to me again, each taught me a considerable amount about myself and what needs to be meaningfully shared. You can’t fuck your way to happiness or sense of togetherness. You can’t pawn off your feelings on some intellectualized version of what your relationship allegedly represents. You can’t genuinely connect, trust, and rely on someone who isn’t, at the very least, comfortable with themselves. You constantly trying to attend to or build them up is called codependency.
The two longest commitments to me in life have been my dad and Byron. I value commitment, not the number of years by themselves. Sacrifice comes with commitment. This is one way people artfully abuse control or mask insecurity by how incensed and pious they get about infidelity. They pretend it’s commitment. They pretend they’re not reacting to the implicit understanding of their ownership of you. I’ve been plenty jealous of my girlfriends or fuck-buddies and whatever other attention or action they got that wasn’t from me. I didn’t turn that into rage or moves to control. I just wrote about how I hoped they considered it the same kind of fun or novelty that I would and would still come home hopefully because they liked me more.
As a society, we appear to have committed to the romance version of most stories. Marvel climbs higher and higher. We still habitually rally conversations around the machinations of billionaires. It’s hard to find a show where there isn’t a family doing everything they can to stay together or budding romance that the protagonist needs to attend to like the universe was designed with their heart in mind. I consider myself thankful that I’ve learned how to build in more checks and awareness. I don’t want to be Iron Man (well, I do, but not really) anymore than I want my high school crush to “come to her senses” and call me out of the blue.
It’s a considerable amount of work to have the kind of relationship I think I want. It’s an ongoing deep and meaningful conversation about how and why you’re together. It’s doing more than spending or capitulating in service to a self-perpetuating ignorance pattern. I want the romance of saving shows you like to watch together or the struggle to figure out how to achieve our highest ends. I want the idea that “you can always leave” to not resonate like some idle threat and escape hatch. I want it to be a boring fact jokingly referred to as we dive back in. I think people get comfortable, and they spend incredible amounts of energy to disguise that comfort as growth, connection, or commitment.
The 20 years of growth for This Is Us’s Kevin were neatly summarized by his Alzheimer’s mother telling Sophie he’d be ready for her one day, but she wishes he’d grow up sooner (imagining them both to still be in college.) She wished Sophie could recognize how great her son was when the timing was right, and luckily for them, she did by the end of the episode. To This Is Us’s credit, no one gets a happy ending, just another series of difficult situations surrounded by…rich supportive family members…wait...
No one will pull you out of the fantasy. You don’t have to eschew it completely or hate yourself for liking it or how it makes you feel. But you also need to recognize it for what it is, or you don’t get the opportunity to build an actual life from your actual values. How deeply disturbing it might be to fully appreciate how script-like the nature of your love or connection can be. How easy it is to laugh and cry with the characters verses the voices in our soul. Could I go out tomorrow and find a girl who is brought to tears by the words from a sad-band and endear her to me? Yeah, probably. Do I give you or myself the leeway to describe that behavior in anything but the most suspicious and damning manipulative terms? I mean, I wrote the blog. God forbid my first instincts merely fill out a prescription.
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