neurosis for the morning.


Just because you start to find more extensive common ground with someone of the opposite sex over a couple of beers (ok... three on an empty stomach) does not mean that you might be accidentally falling in love. I, in my drunken, suddenly shell-shocked and excited naiveté have mistaken this more than once. Luckily this time the fall brief and minor and was over happy hour so I had time over dinner with a close friend to sober up and come to my senses.

I have many girl friends that over the years have complained about not being able to keep any close guy friends because eventually and nearly without fail they guys fall in love with them. In my case it turns out to be nearly the opposite. Almost without fail, when I start to discover something genius and special within another person, most often of the opposite sex, my first instinct is to get terribly excited about them, talk about them incessantly, and last, but not least, convince myself that I must be falling “in love” with them. In fact this happens so often that I rejoice when I hit it off with someone that I don’t immediately find physically attractive. The reason for this being that I assume or try to convince myself that if I don’t find myself attracted to them, I should be able to keep them as a good friend. Maybe I’ve just watched “When Harry Met Sally” one to many times, but I seem to fall into this trap.

Maybe it’s all about my incessant need to fall in love. If you need more pop culture references and labels I’ll put it this way. When “Sex and the City” came out all of the women I know rushed to identify themselves with one of the characters in the show. My former roommate was an obvious choice for Carrie with her penchant for spending money she didn’t necessarily have and her on again never truly off relationship with Mr. Big. No one in my group seemed quite ready to identify themselves with Samantha and her uber promiscuous behavior although her frankness about her not only her sexuality but also the rest of her life matched up well with another girl friend of mine. I, however, was left with not one, but two characters that I felt shared my styles, traits and whatnots (one mustn’t forget the whatnots.) I discovered that I am both Miranda and Charlotte. An, unlikely combination I know, and thinking about it makes me want to defend my affinity with that now horribly cliché Meredith Brooks song – I’m a bitch, I’m lover, I’m a child, etc. because isn’t every woman a combination platter. We don’t fit into nice little stereotypical packages of the slut, the domestic, the independent woman etc. But this is getting off the topic.

Back to the matter at hand. I identify with Charlotte because of her idealistic and unblemished view of the possibility of true love. Many see this as her naiveté, in fact often I do as well and it makes me question my own life. It makes me question y own faith that I will someday find “the one” and have adventures for the rest of my life with one person, have babies, send them to good schools, bake pumpkin bread, teach them how to ride a bike, and grow old with the same person. It’s a level of commitment that is hard to find these days – but I still believe in its possibility especially when coupled with “true love.”

Miranda and I are soul sisters however for the fact that I am utterly and completely terrified of everything that I just wrote above about matching with Charlotte. I am a strong independent woman who does not want to rely on anyone else for anything else – regardless of whether I need it or not. If we want to look into where this came from, the most obvious contributing factors seem to be that the fact that my parents raised me to be an independent thinker who didn’t accept things at face value who could do anything I set my mind to, because they had faith in me coupled with the fact that I have been - alone - single - for pretty much my entire life. Sure I had a boyfriend in high school (who lived an hour and a half away from me and neither of us had cars), and bizarre friendship/relationships in college that I think are just part of college and the fact that I tend to fall for flaky boys, but never a real relationship – never something where we called each other boyfriend and girlfriend or hung out regularly or called each other before we went to sleep at night or knew that someone was there for us. None of this has ever been a part of my life. So because of that I’ve grown to be a stronger independent woman who doesn’t make time for those sorts of things with possible boys I meet, and doesn’t even consciously expect a relationship as a possibility. Miranda didn’t want to commit to a relationship, sure our “histories” are different, but I think the driving force can be the same – fear.

So have I really figured anything out by saying these things? Probably not, my character is conflicted. Not that there is anything wrong with a conflicted character – they’re the great ones right? Every story has to have some conflict, mine just happens to be the internal sort. Maybe I am Miranda after all and it really isn’t about my incessant need to fall in love. After all, Miranda was the one who ended up with the career, the baby, and the clever guy with the round glasses and the curly hair. Will these issues get resolved some day? Possibly, after all I’m only twenty-four… and if we’re still going to follow the “Sex and the City” ladies I’ve got a lot of time left to figure things out for myself.