Varieties of Petulant Boyhood
Memo to the Rilo Kiley dude (as symbol, of course): why’re you still hanging out in an intimate relationship with your ex? Why are so many ‘of us’ so accepting of the idea that messy relationships are a fact of life and ‘very damaged’ people are everywhere, particularly in desirably hip circles? Why so resigned to the lowering of standards that involves falling for people who we know don’t have it together? Why this recurrent theme of helping each other cope with our brokenness? Is this just Christianity cashing out with a whisper? Are we really that needy? And if so why?
One possibility is that we continue to cultivate the contradictions and incoherent gray areas of romantic/sexual/emotional life because there are tangible side benefits, like getting on the cover of SPIN. But I don’t think this is the answer. Another is possibly that we all really do need each other, body and soul, on an ad hoc basis and regardless of the consequences, and that once people are part of the stories of our lives, they are forever, and that just because two people who loved each other turned out not to be right for each other doesn’t mean they still can’t indulge in a weird semiplatonic White Stripes fraught-with-undertones codependency chic thing. Doesn’t mean they can’t still be, y’know, kinda messed up over each other.
But to me that sounds like a very cool and honed lie, an act of denial clad as Postmodern Romanticism. A pose. An attitude practiced in front of the mirror contrived to hide a hurt. That we have somehow taken as our fate. And compensated for by going public with the wreckage of intimacy in all its ‘authentic’ fecundity. So why this inability to get over ourselves and get over people we’ve been emotionally intimate with? Human nature or immature mega-wank? Or a misplaced guilt fix? Or…?
First, I have had to beat this tendency out of several friends. Much of the article may be rock star psoing, but there is a real problem underlying.
On a theoretical level, isn’t it really just the latest, deepest manifestation of the old fear of commitment? People my age are loath to abandon any opportunity or possibility, even when presented with better alternatives. The youth out there find themselves in something that doesn’t work, but making a clean break of it is too drastic and final a move for them to contemplate. In the same way that they might not want to commit to a relationship (you never know when something better might come along!), the kids these days don’t want to be locked down into not being involved once they’ve found something that had even a little value. So they cling to the scraps and shards or every failed relationship, nursing old wounds, because it might be good again in the future, you never know.
Moreover, when the respective parties aren’t really mature to begin with, this attitude gets in the way of them growing the hell up. So round and round we go.
— Trevor · Nov 5, 09:25 PM · #