Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Great Expectations... "Relationship Guru" first published in The Planet, 3 February 2005

Over coffee the other day, I was listening to my friend Emmie tell me about a man that until recently, she had been seeing. She first described how great a connection they had had, how well he seemed to understand her, and how intense their chemistry had been. However, a few days before Emmie and this new man were to leave for a long weekend out of Paris, she ran into him at a café sitting with another woman. Delighted to see him on the street unexpectedly, she walked over with a happy grin on her face and leaned in for a kiss. But strangely the guy awkwardly kissed her cheek and before Emmie had any time to react, he was introducing her to his girlfriend of two years.
Emmie came to find out over the next few days that the details of this man’s public relationship were apparently well known amongst their mutual friends, acquaintances and other socially involved people. But, Emmie continued, she was unaware about any of this before she walked in on her pseudo boyfriend playing the game he had played with her, with someone else. And if his relationship was public to everyone else, her relationship with him must not have been as obvious as she had thought.
Although this story already sounds mortifying, we have hardly reached the climax. Aware that my friend was angry and slightly upset about the lies and deceit she had been invited to swim in, Mr. Two face called her a few weeks after their scheduled getaway to explain his “situation.” As the saying goes, the mirror has two faces, my friend’s newest and quickest ending relationship was just one hidden aspect of this guy’s life.
For about as long as Emmie could stomach, she sat there and listened to Mr. Two face explain that while Emmie was probably the love of his life, she could never be more than a sort of mistress in his life. His priorities were to appease his family, which would ultimately satisfy him in the end, or so he claimed. His girlfriend fit a certain mold that he, or they were looking for- she had the right breasts size, perfect full lips, straight, never frizzy hair, and while we are going there, the right size hips to produce the right size children. Her personality allowed him to feel in control but yet she was still interesting enough so that he wouldn’t get too bored, or at least know that when he was done cheating on her with innocent women, she would still have something to say.
As Emmie looked at me in utter disgust, we both couldn’t help but realize that she had found a new level of freakish men. He was dating to find the right genealogy not love or passion. As if he demanded all the women he would seriously consider dating to fill out a questionnaire where all the right answers got you gifts and “love” from him, while any one wrong answer would dump you in a pile of “flawed” characters. He discarded women as if he was scrolling down a list of women he found on an Internet dating service.
On a broader surface the question to ask is when did we all become such “know it alls” about our own life? At the mere age of 20 and if at most 25 we have hardly begun to even understand where we are coming from and where we are all going. Is it really necessary to pick out the people who will mother or father are own children someday now? The great expectations we have in life might just not be that great at all.
While Emmie’s experience might be extreme it is not rare. We are constantly judging people whom we might want to date by a list of criteria, yet at this point I am sure not even half of us would even fit our own criteria. It is as if we are looking for that perfect person to make ourselves into some perfect person. Perhaps we should start reality checking ourselves now, because perfect is only the ending of a fairy tale; it is never the ending of real life.
While in this situation it was a man who provoked this kind of response, woman are no better when it comes to throwing away perfectly wonderful, caring men because there was one specific flaw with him. Of course it is fair to say that if a man is too controlling, abusive or maybe just not very clean we have the right to be choosy. We can even discriminate when it comes to someone’s performance in bed, whether they are too selfish or just completely unaware that the other person is there and deserves elated satisfaction as well (and that suffice to say is an another completely different topic!).
However, when it comes to a person’s personality and who they are in a moment, you cannot expect them to be any more than who they actually are. It is unfair to ask them to hand over a map of their DNA so you are sure they will be the right person. Finding the person who appears to match you intellectually, financially, physically and emotionally will not guarantee a relationship without heartbreak, perhaps it will only keeps you from learning about yourself or about other people.
Yet, it is easy to think that if you did find the right fit person for you, almost scientifically, you will never have to put yourself out there again, that you won’t have to deal with rejection or even one more bad date. Unfortunately in the end though you will never understand real experience, or real life for that matter. Human nature seems to demand that we go where we have never been before, and if we return as the same person as we left as at least we will have had the experience to know what we liked or disliked about who we were before.
And, if all else fails, you can always try the Internet.

**This one caused a lot of stir when the subjects of the article figured out it was about them!**

No comments: