Love on a Sunday

It's true. When I was a teenager, the love of my life was Lloyd Dobbler. I would quote 'Say Anything' all the damn time and wished I could give Lili Taylor's character love advice (rule #1: Joe will never love you back if you write and perform songs about him in public with titles like 'Joe Lies'). So, I love this piece about 'fake love' by Chuck Klosterman that I found via Ken Wheaton's phenomenal non-dating series.

Klosterman writes 'It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box-office star in America, because every straight girl I know would sell her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker. For upwardly mobile women in their twenties and thirties, John Cusack is the neo-Elvis.'

As I wrote above, Lloyd Dobbler was the love of my life, operative word being 'was'. Who are these women that still dream of Lloyd and his boombox playing Peter Gabriel's 'In your eyes'? That stopped being me circa age 17.

These days, I would run screaming from Lloyd Dobbler. A guy who won't stop calling because he believes we need to be together? Creeeeeepy. Decides to follow me to another country as I pursue my own dreams? Looooooser. Really does show up with a boombox? 'Hello, police? Yes, there is a man trespassing on my property.'

'The main problem with mass media is that it makes it impossible to fall in love with any acumen of normalcy.'

How true. Read the whole thing about how we buy into the fake love sold to us by movies, tv and books. We're not going to be Harry & Sally, Monica & Chandler, even Woody Allen & any beautiful woman. We're going to be messy, inconvenient, confused, unhappy, bored and we're just going to have to find someone we can be less so with.

My two favorite lines in the piece:

'Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less'.

This is the ultimate in love advice. If you can't actually like the other person less, at least pretend. This may seem like playing games but in fact is just taking human nature into consideration when making decisions of love. People always want what they can't have and they always take for granted what they can. This is the truth. You can live with it and learn to use this knowledge or you can cry in your soup about your rejections.

'In the nineteenth century, teenagers merely aspired to have a marriage that would be better than that of their parents; personally, I would never be satisfied unless my marriage was as good as Cliff and Clair Huxtable's (or at least as enigmatic as Jack and Meg White's).'

Cliff&Clair do have the marriage I envy most. Good interaction, a comfortable life, a large extended family, respect for each other, their own successful careers. Jack&Meg? Well, I can live without divorcing my spouse and then forming a band in which we pretend to be siblings, thanks. But really, I'll take it if I can have a marriage better than my parents. 'Cause that's reality and the rest of this is just not.

UPDATE: Jeff Harrell calls me cynical in the cutest way possible.