If Someone Says "You Complete Me," RUN! (5 page)

Beyond the pop culture mythology that sets us up for disappointment when it comes to love, the reality is that relationships are really hard and we can all get on each other’s nerves from time to time. We spend half our lives trying to find a relationship, and then, when we finally get one and all of it is right there in front of us, the good, the bad, and the very ugly, it becomes about
“Jesus Christ, can you make the bed every once in a while?” Simple dumb stuff.

It’s the little stuff that drives you crazy. You wake up one day and realize, “Wow, this is it. Oh, man. I’m going to be sleeping next to you for a long time. I’m going to listen to you gnash your teeth. I’m going to watch you not clean your hair out of the sink. I’m going to watch you smile in your sleep. I’m going to watch you thrash about and steal the covers. I’m going to listen to you fart. I’m going to watch you lie to your boss when you don’t want to go to work. I’m just going to have to figure out how to do this for eternity. Etern-a-fucking-ty.”

Once we realize that what we see in the movies and what we experience in real life are two separate things, we can learn to change the way we look at things. Most people think that they will find “the one”—that certain special person who makes everything in your life all right. They want to believe love is magic.

While I never thought love was magic, I did think it was going to be very, very different from how it is.

I
could write a whole book on “Cinderella.” It is a wonderful fairy tale… until you grow up and realize that’s really what it is. A fairy tale. It’s kind of a wonderful story about a guy who shows up and makes everything all right for a girl and saves her. And they live happily ever after.

If I had to write the sequel to “Cinderella,” the first thing she would say in the opening scene is “If you think I’m cleaning this fucking castle, you’re out of your mind.”

If I’m going to look at “Cinderella,” I would say it has evolved into today’s British monarchy. In some ways, I’m sure people look at Prince William and Kate and think, “That’s the Cinderella story, right?” She was just
a commoner, and they got married. They had a couple of kids—a boy and a girl.

As I understand it, though, their story was a bit different from that. It was really kind of fun, because they were in a group of friends, which is apparently how folks tend to find each other now—they just go out in packs. While they were in college, William and Kate were part of the same pack. For a little while they dated, and then they split up. Then he went with this one and that one, and this one and that one. But when he was ready, the one he wanted was Kate. He went back to get her because she had something that really worked for him, and vice versa, I’m sure. That’s kind of wonderful. God knows I can’t see the future, but I don’t feel them divorcing.

When you look at Prince Charles and Camilla, you see that that relationship is a long and strong one, too. It has been going on for years and years. Maybe lifelong. I don’t know if they were boning each other before he married Diana, but they knew each other, and there was definitely something going on between them. She’s already married with children of her own; Charles has got to get married to somebody else, because he needs an heir. Now, he doesn’t mention anything about Camilla to the new one, Diana—he didn’t say, “I feel like I have to marry you because this is about the continuation of the monarchy. But I really do love someone else.” Although, maybe he
should have. That at least would have given Diana a shot at choosing whether to marry him.

Having never been in the monarchy, I believe theirs was a planned kind of marriage. Wasn’t there a little pool of women that he could marry? That’s the worst beginning and ending. There was no love to begin with, see? There was only the sex, and the sex was for a reason: to create an heir to the throne. I’m sure he liked her, but I think she loved him. Or maybe she thought she did. Or she thought she was supposed to. Who can say? Regardless, the real Cinderella story is Camilla and Charles.

“Cinderella” has done more than almost anything else to give us a false sense of security when it comes to what a marriage or relationship should be. Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, the Little Mermaid—they all get the guy. That guy just happens to be perfect, and of course they live happily ever after.

Well, I hate to tell it to you, ladies, but that Prince Charming is just a cartoon, not a flesh-and-blood man. And I promise you, you do not want to go to bed every night next to a cartoon.

We drank the Kool-Aid, and the Kool-Aid about what relationships should be like keeps getting poured.

They should be perfect. There should be music. There should be a hunky prince on a white horse sweeping us up and saving us.

None of those things show you the day-to-day work
that has to go into a relationship. Whether you’re watching the movies that I just talked about or you’re watching
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
or
The Donna Reed Show
. My point is, you ain’t Cinderella.

Now, I know that, if you’re a woman, you can’t help but believe in this fantasy. It’s in you like blood is in you. You’ve been conditioned by years and years of happy endings, and not the kind of happy endings you get at a massage parlor. I’m talking about “riding off into the sunset with Prince Charming, on a white horse” happy endings, because that’s what movies tell you is going to happen.

On top of that, when you’re downtrodden, you get a fairy godmother. Right? When was the last time anybody showed up with a wand and did magic tricks for you? It hasn’t happened yet and it never will, unless it happened while you were on LSD in the sixties.

You also don’t have no little birds dressing you. You don’t have fat little mice turning into stallions to take you to some ball. You don’t have any of that.

You might have grown up with a wicked stepmother, that’s true. If that was you, then you have one out of the fifty things necessary to actually be Cinderella.

Everywhere you turn, people have romanticized what love is going to be like. And you’re like, “I’m going to get married. I’m going to have a big wedding. We’re going to
do this. We’re going to do that. He is going to make it all better for me. He will take out the trash. He will learn how to put stuff up. He will protect me.”

I’ll just put it to you this way: Girl, you’d better know how to do things for yourself. You’d better learn how to protect yourself, and don’t start fights you can’t finish. If you want something hung up on the wall, learn how to handle a hammer. You don’t want to wait for somebody to do it for you. That’s not why you want a relationship. If you want somebody to do stuff for you, get a handyman. It’s cheaper, especially if you’re going to divorce him. Handymen don’t want to get in the bed. He’ll just pee in the bathroom, that’s all, and hopefully in the toilet and not the sink, like some men I have known. The only problem you’ll have with him is he won’t put the toilet seat down. But what man does?

My point is when you are looking for a partner, having someone in your life because they can do stuff for you, or because they will take care of you financially, is not a good enough reason. All the things on your checklist of what you want him to be—you’d better equal them.

My question to you: Are you bringing it the way you want him to bring it?

Look in the mirror and ask yourself: Are you the woman Prince Charming is waiting for? Do you have
all those attributes? If you’re looking for him to be Prince Charming, know that he is looking for you to be Cinderella. (Or Kim Kardashian.) Everybody has that idea. Think about what that means. After marrying Prince Charming, Cinderella moved into the beautiful castle and became the queen. She didn’t have a job she had to go to every day, and she didn’t have to cook or clean or watch after the children, because she had people to do that for her. She sat around, as most queens do, and waved to people.

In real life, though, somebody has to clean the palace, pay the mortgage, and buy the groceries. Somebody’s got to make sure the kids are where they’re supposed to be.

So forget it—unless you are willing to adhere to those 1950s fantasies that men seem to still have about the perfect woman. Or, worse yet, that 1970s perfect woman in the perfume commercial who brings home the bacon, fries it up, and never lets him forget he’s a man—which I take to mean having sex with him on demand no matter how tired you are. Nineteen fifties or 1970s, they both sound like a raw deal to me, so you just might want to look for the right person who will share all these things with you, and not this so-called Prince Charming.

For you gay women, transpose whatever visual you need to understand what I’ve written. If yours is a “Princesa Charmita,” fine. Either way, I’m talking to you, too,
lesbians. If you’re waiting for that woman to come along who is going to take care of everything and make you a princess or a queen or whatever—it ain’t going to happen.

It. Is. Not. Happening.

So get your heads out of your butts, and stop assuming that everything that’s done is done for you or to you or because of you. Take responsibility for yourself, and don’t expect someone else to do it for you.

M
en: quit looking for your mother. Learn to do stuff on your own. Go to work, and when you come home, help your wife (or husband) with the kids and running the household. Listen to her and appreciate all she does. Don’t just pick up the remote and ignore her.

And sometimes size
does
matter.

E
ver since that movie
Jerry Maguire
came out, with that line where Tom Cruise tells Renée Zellweger, “You complete me,” people have wanted to believe in the mushiness of “you complete me” without realizing how bad a situation that is. It may be fantastic screenwriting—it’s a great line—but in real life, it’s a disaster. If they complete you, they can deconstruct you as well.

Are you a fully realized person? Well, who can say?
Only you know if that’s true. But no one you meet is going to make you complete, a fully realized person. You have to be one before you start any of this relationship shit. Otherwise, you’re like a goiter attached to somebody, at the whim of how they are feeling. “You complete me.” That’s such a weird phrase to me. It’s almost like you don’t have sense enough to do shit on your own. “You complete me.” Like, I go to bed, and I’m leaking somewhere because the valve that you are is not there? These visuals are just bullshittian things, and maybe that’s part of the problem.

People keep looking for someone to complete them, but that’s work you have to do yourself. No one else can do it for you, and if your work isn’t complete before you get married or get into a relationship, the relationship will seem a bit shaky, like you’re kind of a ghost, a phantom. It’s like you’re not really there. For someone else to come and work on you as though you were an unfinished painting doesn’t seem right. You have to be a complete person before you can commit to anyone else. And the idea that we are walking around as a half person, I find bizarre. Well, think about it. Who are you? Do you have the things you want in your life? Are you okay being alone for a time? Do you have the patience for it?

If you’re a complete, whole person, you have the patience to wait for the right person instead of living with
someone who isn’t for you. Do you have the confidence and faith to wait?

You know when the right one comes along, because you say, “Oh, I could walk with this person side by side, because I know who I am. I know what I like and what I don’t want. I know what I will take in my life and what I won’t take in my life. This person seems to have a similar feeling. He knows what he likes. He knows who he is.” When you come together you’re not clashing and fighting and saying, “You’re not giving me what I need.” You know what you need and you can tell that to the other person. And the other person can say, “I can do that” or “I can’t do that.”

But you have to recognize when someone is giving you a line of bullshit. You know bullshit when you hear it—that flag goes right up and says, “You know this is a lie, right?” You, as a complete person, know what you are comfortable with, what you can live with, and what you can’t. You are not afraid to say, “This is how I feel,” or “I don’t want someone who is not committed to me,” or “I don’t want someone who is feeding me bullshit.” A complete person is willing to wait to find someone who is committed to her before she commits.

Now let’s talk a little more truth.

Do you have the patience for this? Because it could take a long time. Not that there’s anything wrong with you, but the right person does not just come floating by
in a barrel. You have to open yourself up, pick your tits up, put your eyes up, and hold your head up, because you never know who is out there. If you’re walking around looking for perfection in the physical or perfection in the brain or your ideal, because you loved Cinderella or you loved GI Joe, and that’s your visual of what your perfect person is, you might want to put that to the side and patiently wait for the person who fulfills your need for truth, justice, and the American Way.

Patient or not, there is no person who completes you. A relationship is a mutual thing and it’s about expectations. You may find a person who is willing to try to fulfill what you need, and vice versa. My question to you is can you meet your own expectations? Are you who you want to be? The person who is willing to try to fulfill what you need or don’t need? If that doesn’t make sense to you, toss this book away and go find a comic book.

So I say if you think getting married is the be-all and end-all of your life, then you really need to think about why you feel that way.

If you’re going to do this and get married, really understand yourself and what it is you think it’s going to do for you.

If you’re doing this because you’re lonely, don’t do it.

If you’re doing this to prove a point, don’t do it.

If you’re doing this to get back at somebody, don’t do it.

If you’re doing this because your mother wants you to, don’t do it.

If you’re doing this because you figure, “What the hell,” definitely don’t do it.

It takes some strength and energy to go against all the cultural expectations, but it takes even more to live a lie, to get divorced, to fight with someone every day, to be confused or unhappy or untrue to yourself.

So this is a take on the age-old Freudian question “What do women want?” And, of course, to the question all women want an answer to: “What do men want?”

I am saying forget those questions and figure out what
you
want.

I don’t know what men want. I don’t know what women want. I only know what
I
want. Can you say the same?

At this point, I know what I want and don’t want, but it took me a lifetime to figure it out.

This is what I
don’t
want:

Ask yourself what you are looking for in a relationship. Maybe that’s the question.

Are you looking for someone beautiful?

Are you looking for someone who has a good heart?

A good soul?

Someone you can talk to, someone whose company you enjoy, someone who is smart, funny?

Maybe you have a vague idea but have never really spent time thinking about it. You have to walk yourself through that. Sometimes it changes at different points in your life, so it’s important to check in with yourself every once in a while.

I can tell you the things that I want in a relationship. My list goes like this: