I guess I’ve always had this warped idea about love, and that all the great love stories were the same. Rick and Ilsa, Sid and Nancy, Gatsby and Daisy, they all just, they just kind of ruined each other. And not in the fake fifth-grade broken heart kind of way. They totally fucked up every fiber of each other’s being. They were magnificently miserable together, but without one another, that was just a massacre.
In this day and age it’s a strange thing to grow up as a man. We don’t have the great, life (and generation)-defining wars like our fathers, grandfathers, and so on. You hear a lot about how 20 somethings these days are over-protected, coddled, and a generation of men raised by women. Maybe thats true, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that we are a generation growing up on these great love stories. We grow up hearing how our parents met, how our grandparents met, and then we turn to literature and film.
I was having a discussion with a friend the other day about novels and our favorite protagonists. When discussing one of my favorite author’s lack of being able to write good female protagonists, it suddenly dawned on me that I couldn’t think of a single literary female protagonist that I enjoyed.
Does this mean I’m sexist? I can’t relate to women? I never really could get into any work that is considered feminist, because there seems to be two trends while dealing with female leads. Either they fit the stereotypes placed on women, or they go so dramatically against them. Feminist literature, in my experiences (yes I’ll admit they are limited), doesn’t pray into gray areas as much. As a result, they are flatter characters. They aren’t as complex and interesting. A lot of male protagonists have character flaws and are three dimensional. They are cynics & romantics. Idealists & pacifists. Masochists & Chauvinists
One of the biggest themes in modernist and contemporary literature is men and their relationship to women. The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, The Rum Diary, these are all complex, timeless novels. You can even see it today in cult favorites Fight Club and Kiss Me Judas. They have a variety of themes, but at the end of the day they are still about men & women. The effects of women, both devastating and beneficial.
Gatsby aspires to make something of himself to catch the eye of Daisy. Jake Barnes can’t get himself together and with Brett. In Will Christopher Baer’s Kiss Me Judas, Phineous Poe falls for a dangerously destructive Jude after she steals his kidney & leaves him in a bathtub. Sure, it’s an urban legend, but that is just the beginning with these two.
So if we grow up on these stories of love and unfathomable ruination doesn’t it stand to reason that to be our expectations of love and relationships? I think everybody is looking for somebody to completely devastate them. For good & for bad.
In my experiences, theres always that one girl that crawls under your skin, seeping into your brain and subconsciousness. They violently cut out little metaphorical chunks of your heart and soul. Sometimes this girl will be fleeting. A drive-by attack. A footnote in the plot of your life. But she’ll still leave her mark.
Then there is the girl that makes leaves more than fingerprints on you. She shapes the course of your past, present, and future. You will look back and remember her, you will forever plagued by the psychological effects on you. It could be trust issues. It could be paranoia. It could be the song you can’t listen to, or the city you will never visit again. A distant association that inexplicably fucks you. And then it will make sure you never make the same mistakes twice.
It’s a hard thing to come by a girl who will destroy every little shred of your being. She makes you question your life, your decisions, your vices, and your self. You may do things to her, or yourself, that you never thought you were capable of. You may rise or fall to the occasion.
Even after time apart, like an old sweater, we can slip and fall back into the same patterns with these women. The hole are still there though. They make us forgo logic, and indulge in them, and who we are when we are with them. We are aware of the loose, slipping threads, but we also learn how to avoid them. How to deal and cope with them, to wear the sweater to its best use. For good or bad, these women will be the death of us. Most claim to be looking for a savior, most men are looking for a destroyer.
