Introducing the “Realizations” Category
I turned on my televisions for a few minutes this afternoon. Normally, I watch just about zero television, but I wasn’t really motivated to do much with myself this afternoon. I happened upon a channel that I hadn’t seen before: Style. This was surprising, because I have the most basic form of cable possible. I would never have watched it, but I thought I recognized Lisa Loeb in the foreground on some street corner in New York City. She was talking about meeting guys, which was intriguing given that it was Lisa Loeb. I’ve always been fascinated by her and typically enjoy her music, so I watched for a while. It was actually that “Number One Single” show she apparently has now. I think I had heard something about it at some point, but it seems to be focussed on cameras following her around as she meets guys in her quest for “the one.” I ended up watching the whole show, and sometime later I had a realization: there is no Mr. Right.
First, I’ll note that every single guy they showed a clip of was horribly weird. Granted, they were being filmed while on a date with a semi-well known musician. Even the guys in which she was semi-interested, seemed a little off–a little hard to like. Interactions between Lisa and each guy seemed uncomfortable. Now, there are a lot of normal guys out there, but apparently it’s hard to happen upon them. Even so, there must be even more girls looking for normal guys. Does that mean that we’re all doomed? Well, now. I think the real issue is that “normal” is so poorly defined. I may think of myself as a pretty normal guy, but I’m not really. But still, I feel like I can hold a conversation with most anyone and make myself at least appear normal. The guys Lisa was meeting didn’t even seem capable of that. Or at least, they were so confident in the legitimacy of their deviation from normal that they just embraced it (probably thinking it made them seem cool).
And this starts to really hit on my realization. There is no normal. No two people will ever meet such that every behavior of one is viewed as totally normal to the other. So, when you go out on a first date, and the person you’re with seems a little off, it’s because he is. He’s a little off from your expectation of what you had in mind. You may align on certain issues, but never everything (or even nearly so). There will always be something he does, says, or believes that will be horribly wrong and very much not normal. So what is it that we’re all looking for? Everyone is out there looking for the right person, and some people are actually happy. What are they doing if they have no possible chance of “success.”
I think the reality is that when we find the right person, we actually find someone whose weirdness we have grown to understand and appreciate. You can never tell whether you’ve found that person based on a few interactions. It takes time. If you think you’ve found exactly the right person after one date, then he’s probably just really good at presenting the image you wanted to see. You don’t want to be with someone that dishonest, do you? Growing to totally accept someone as “the one” requires time and adjustment. It requires growing to understand a person’s oddities: why they exist and why they seem perfectly reasonable to him. It requires some level of accept those oddities for what they are. Remember, he probably sees just as many oddities in you and has to learn to appreciate all of them.
I guess I wrote this post from a weird perspective. I hate always spelling out both male and female pronouns, so I kind of had to pick whether I was going to refer to a significant other as a him or as a her. We all know that “they” is an incorrect replacement, right? I mean, it only works for the third person plural. Anyway, I chose to use “he” and “him,” to refer to the generic significant other. I mean, I did start with refering to such a person as not “Mr. Right,” didn’t I? So the post kind of reads as if I’m telling a girl what she should be looking for in “Mr. Right.” Whatever that means.