Right Time, Wrong Me

Last night I accidentally caught the first five minutes of My Best Friend’s Wedding on TV. I say “accidentally” because I had clicked out of my BBC America on-demand, and I made the terrible error of not immediately turning off the TV to do my dishes. I never even really liked the movie—I find it irritating when people behave like assholes and idiots and yet are still somehow considered adorable as protagonists. Nevertheless, I briefly remembered the amusing opening scene with Rupert Everett and decided that five minutes couldn’t hurt.

I believe these are what people call “famous last words.”

The plot had established by this time that Julia Roberts (the apparently adorable asshole protagonist) had received a call from her best friend, with whom she had a marriage pact. The pact was to be called into action by a certain age, which she is fast approaching as the movie opens.

And what, ladies and gentlemen, is that certain age?

Twenty-eight.

As soon as the words were spoken on screen, something in my stomach curdled, and the rational voice in my head commented I really would’ve been better off doing my dishes.

What followed was a truly pyrotechnic hissy fit in my living room, after which I called a friend to holler at her about the injustice of the romantic universe. She empathized and agreed. When the movie came out in 1997, we were both in our early adolescence, a time at which twenty-eight did seem like a theoretically reasonable time to be thinking about your marriage back-up plan. Now, a year and a half shy of twenty-eight myself, I have a slightly different take on the matter. Hence the hissy fit.

There were, as usual, a lot of moving parts that contributed to my unexpected hysteria, not least of which is my recently having given up an indulgent and questionable marriage pact with a friend. Compounding matters is the fact that over many of these moving parts hangs a general air of embarrassment: it is horrifying to me that romantic comedies still influence (or at least inflame) the romantic expectations I have for myself.

My friends and I laugh and scoff at so many of the logistical details in these movies: the unemployed ingénue who lives in a high-ceiling one bedroom in the North End; the twenty-eight year old who has somehow already become a renowned food critic; and the writer who can afford five hundred dollar shoes. These conceits are preposterous, and I know it. These are not the women I want to be, most importantly because these women do not exist. Not only are they fictional characters, but in many cases, even the fictional lives they lead are simply implausible: I just can’t suspend my belief that far.

All of this is good, sound logic—the hard-earned knowledge that comes from actually having to live in a responsible, sustainable reality. I have learned the distance between a happy life out here in 3D and a happy life in a work of mannered pop culture.

At least, in some areas:

I laugh at the logistics, and yet I still flinch at the mention of twenty-eight as an appropriate age for back-up plans.

When it comes to careers and expensive shoes, I’ve generally managed to reconcile my expectations with reality (it helps that I have very little use for expensive shoes). When it comes to my love life, I feel… inadequate. Exposed. And in a very painful way, somehow fundamentally flawed.

After all, it’s not just romantic comedies that are affecting my expectations anymore. It used to be that wedding announcements came from my friends who were a few years older than I am, or from friends who got married ahead of the curve. Now we are smack dab in the middle of said curve, and it feels as though I am caught in an avalanche of announcements and wedding albums. And I’m not even in a relationship—nor have I been for a long time. I am so far away from the commitments my friends are making that the idea starts to feel like a mirage, alluring but unattainable.

I’m the right age, I’m the right demographic, but I still can’t quite seem to get the whole relationship thing right. Sometimes I wonder if it’s simply me that’s wrong: that there is something about me in particular that is inherently undesirable.

Which is so absurd and pathetic I can barely bring myself to write it. It is so frustrating to understand how ridiculous these emotions are but to have them anyway. I remind myself repeatedly of what I know: that my life does not run by a script, that I am beholden to no romantic deadlines, and that in times of stress or sadness I simply figure it out. I am capable. I am adaptable.

But at the end of the day, I am also still single.

(And around and around I go.)

Perhaps what’s so embarrassing about this situation is that I feel like I’m going through a second adolescence, in which I am constantly and apocalyptically convinced there is something wrong with me. As it turns out, there wasn’t anything wrong with me in my first adolescence (other than too much eyeliner); it was simply a matter of finding the right environment: a place in which and people with whom I finally became myself. That sounds very plausible in terms of finding a partner: right place, right time, right people. The issue is that I can’t predict those circumstances, and the only thing I know for sure is that at the end of the day I will still be entirely myself. And that self hasn’t had a great romantic track record.

Part of me believes that these anxieties will be laughable in retrospect, and I have spent most of my twenties trying to learn how to not be ridiculous in my own present. I don’t know why I am so convinced that because it hasn’t happened yet, it ultimately won’t.

I was talking with a friend recently, who had been wronged by a spectacularly inconsistent man-child. After describing a familiar trajectory of events leading to disappointment, she admitted to me—with the same evident self-consciousness and hopelessness I experience—that it’s hard sometimes not to believe that she herself is the problem, that there is something about her that is essentially unlovable.

This, coming from one of the most beautiful, charismatic, intelligent, wickedly funny, and completely lovable women I know. I was hit simultaneously with horror and relief: horror that she would think that about herself, and relief that—thank God—I’m not the only one. What I told her was that I felt oddly hypocritical denying with all my heart that she was unlovable, when I directed the same self-doubt at myself. Still, I told her I honestly did not believe that there was a world in which she would not be entirely, ecstatically loved by someone really wonderful.

The funny thing is, she believes the same for me. We just can’t quite seem to believe it for ourselves. I suggested to her that rather than trying to trust in our own unknowable future, that we trust each other. The logic is just twisted enough for us to conceivably buy it—like a faith redirect. We each see the other as an intelligent, clear-minded person, so if that person believes that there isn’t anything wrong with us… who knows?

She might just be right.

Meanwhile, I will work on becoming a person who experiences a healthy proportion of joy to jealousy when a friend gets married. I will try to remember that sometimes I have to hold onto who I am just a little bit harder than usual and not get carried away by things I don’t really want or believe anyway. And in case that doesn’t work, I will make an effort to turn off the TV a little bit sooner.

I will also try to remember that just because it hasn’t happened yet, that doesn’t mean it won’t.

Because one of the things I still really do believe is that if it’s right, then it only has to happen once.