2.17.08
Has anyone seen the recent ‘romantic comedy’ released in a timely manner, I believe, on Valentine’s Day? It’s really cute—but not in the usual ‘cute’ way (this line’s for you JWF), in that it’s not cute like one of the precious babies my friends have had in years or months past, my cat (who is more of a princess in her cuteness than just a fury feline), or an older man clasping his wife’s hand to lead her cross the street—none of those kinds of cute. This movie is cute in a make-you-laugh-a-few-times-out-loud-during-the-movie-while-at-the-same-time-smile-in-a-nostalgic-kind-of-approving-way-through-the-whole-movie....like my friend Diana did for an hour and a half. “But I looove those kinds of movies,” she pleadingly professed as we poked her with are-you-serious? sticks after seeing the movie this weekend. But this essay will not be about the movie, Definitely, Maybe, friends. That might influence you not to go see it because then I would have told you its tale, keeping you from paying the nine dollars and fifty cents for the entrance fee and the twenty dollars for your small popcorn and medium (diet)/Coke encounter with the generation-oh-my-God-what-do-we-do-with-them-teenager who could give a shit behind the snack counter.
No, friends, this essay’s premise will focus on the message that the movie suggested (to some of us) rather than the movie’s storyline itself. Let me backtrack by reminding you of that German lady, Gabriele Pauli, who proposed the seven year contract for marriages back in October of 2007 in order to lessen “financial and emotional costs of divorces” in her country. She put forward that people often experience the “seven year itch” in their first seven years of marriage, so they could sign a contract for the first seven years and then each would have to say “yes” again to one another before the marriage could be prolonged. Interesting idea, huh? Some didn’t like the idea so much, but others…well…it got us thinking…
Those of us who started thinking about that idea read some books to see what other people thought. You know, those ‘relationship experts’ (whatever that means) who have shrink degrees and write books to help people who have lost loved ones due to other reasons than death: cheating, compulsive lying, irreconcilable differences (big Hollywood claim); the writers who do things like trace the history of marriages and talk about how people used to stay married for their whole lives because we only lived until we were thirty or forty years old. So if we got married at nineteen or twenty, we only had to be together for ten years or so. They write about how we used to need each other for different reasons—farming and survival and such; and how now (brown cow) we live until we’re a hundred and two, and we change careers four or five times throughout our lifetimes, and we tend to end up being different people in our later lives than we were in our younger lives and our partners aren’t usually the same people who we first marry because we’re both living in such a different world today. And of course there is the church influencing our historical past. The different churches who still declare men as the servants of Jesus and women as the servants of men—well, you know what I mean—submissive stuff. There are plenty of those shrink types who write the books about the Catholics and how they protest divorce as a sin against God to the point of such absurdity that one of their own even left them (the Catholics) hundreds of years ago to start his own religion so he could find a good ol’ gal who would be able to give him a son and not get in trouble for divorcing her. I mean, chopping people’s heads off could be an option, but a seven year contract could have been a more positive alternative…and a life-savor for a few good women.
So here I am in the South, like I’ve mentioned a few times before, and I am surrounded by precious, beautiful twenty-somethings who pray (and I mean PRAY) for a ring. They set up their whole young lives for the ring, the experience of the proposal, the excited anticipation of that final day. My friend Sarah is presently doing a research project (approved by our board of research people at UGA and everything) about how our preservice teachers’ lives and future careers in teaching are influenced by their hopes of marriage. She has more than enough willing participants in her study to help her look at society’s social construction of marriage versus what some others of us think we might want…that might be a little different than that idea of the sociohistorical influence of marriage and ‘happily ever after.’
Speaking of happily ever after, yesterday I bought some Do-Si-Dos outside our local Kroger from some remarkable little Girl Scouts. There were about four of them standing at a table with their cute little uniforms on, some with more earned badges than others leading me to believe a few of them had some work to do if they were going to have any kind of future in Troop 47. I’m standing there chatting with this little girl, all of about ten, and I say, “So what do you hope to be when you graduate Girl Scouts and move forward into another stage of your life?” Blank stare. Rephrase: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” (This may sound like a strange question to ask a little Girl Scout as I’m buying a box of cookies on my way to the car, but I’m in this awesome class right now on social class in education, and we talk about how our culture sometimes privileges kids going to college too much, therefore setting students up who don’t want to go to college and would rather be a beautician, a large machine driver, a landscaper, a mechanic, etc. as “losers” and kids who want to go to college as “winners” when we need all of the occupations that we have in our society; so we should honor all of the jobs and not just the ones that need a college degree. But that’s another essay.)
This little bit of a girl looks up at me and says, “I want to get married when I grow up.”
“Oh.” I said with a supportive smile on my face. “That’s interesting. Good luck with that.” I mean, what else could I say? Almost every friend I have is married. And I know you all love being married. My parents have been married for forty years. Marriage is all around me. I’m not opposed to marriage, per say, I’ve just, um, decided I’m not ready to get married. And I don’t have time in my cookie-buying moment to tell the little girl that she can follow that dream if she wishes or she can have a series of wonderful relationships during her life and sign metaphorical seven-year or shorter contracts in her head as she enters into a new relationship each time, knowing that she will learn something from each one to help her grow and change as a person, and then she can move on in her single, successful life. So I say ‘good luck with that’ to this little aspiring and hopeful ten-year-old bride-to-be and go to my car to munch on some of my Do-Si-Dos.
Pan back to movie with friend watching with approving-nostalgic-smile on her face throughout multiple scenes. The guy in this movie is telling his little girl how he met her mother because the man and wife are getting divorced and the daughter wants to know how they met in the first place. So in his story-telling, he recalls all of the relationships he had on the way to meeting her mother. All wonderful relationships. All teaching him something about life and himself. All leading him back to his wife, to whom he was married for eight years before they got divorced. This is a romantic comedy. They love, they laugh, they break-up. But it’s also a movie of a new sort, in that it doesn’t privilege marriage like many other romantic comedies that lead we the movie-goers into believing that our own relationships are failed or not up to the romantic comedy fallacy status that they could be. One of the sexy, successful women in the movie doesn’t believe in marriage. And she never gets married. And she’s happy. I won’t tell you any more so you can go drop your hundred bucks on the flick if you’d like, but the point is that they released a movie where it’s enough to date, to be involved, and maybe to move on. What a novel idea.
I remember last year on Valentine’s Day I wrote about the “singles” party I was invited to where all married people were banned and I thought that idea was…interesting…and new. This year I was at a school observing student teachers on Valentine’s Day and I promise you I’ve NEVER seen so many roses. Ever. I counted the rooms as I walked by and out of some thirty classrooms that I passed, there were roses—long-stemmed, at least six to a dozen—on at least half of the desks. This is not including the amazing money spent on the students by other students. Huge stuffed doggies, pillow bean-bag hearts, chocolate—oh my, the chocolate. Singing heart-o’grams by groups of students in the halls outside of classrooms; Valentine’s poetry covering notebooks and walls. It was…lovely. I made sure to write St. Valentine’s Day Massacre on one of the whiteboards so the kid would ask the teacher what that was after lunch. A lil’ historical V-day fun with Al Capone! My daddy sent me flowers so I was covered, don’t you worry.
So here I sit in a coffee shop on Sunday morning writing about hearts, flowers, cookies, social construction, and marriage contracts instead of reading about social class, deconstruction, and qualitative research. Maybe I’m using my new understandings of deconstruction to think about marriage. Maybe I’m looking at the center—the core belief of this constructed definition of what is supposed to be in a certain structure that we have created and breaking it down a little bit to see its historical influence on our present actions and beliefs. Or maybe I’m procrastinating the inevitable. (
Cheers! HEH
