Those poor unfortunate souls! In pain! In need!
(Ursula, the Sea Witch, from "The Little Mermaid")
Katherine Hepburn said, "Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then." I see the truth of this sentiment play out in every public area, every single time I watch humans and the dynamics of their relationships. It's like handwriting on a wall.Yesterday while shopping for shoes, I watched hundreds of couples interact. It was a balanced slice-of-life sampling, and most of the couples were heterosexual. Most were also tragically amusing.Unfailingly, every interaction was about Who Is In Charge. Even the teenaged couples, many of whom surely have no idea of the larger gender and/or power dynamic in their relationships (with the nubile young girls and the oafish young boys) reflect this struggle. Gestures and body language are so telling, it is like listening to a movie with two soundtracks: the spoken, and the unspoken. Who leads with their shoulders, who slumps? Whose arm or hand is on top of whose? Who gets the last say in any discussion, no matter how trivial? Who looks the other in the eye, who is gazing off in the distance in boredom, passive aggression, or other? Who walks away without looking back? I was struck by the levels of frustration and grappling between the men and women on such a simple errand as shopping.I saw only one balanced straight couple (I won't comment now on the gay couples observed) out of maybe 300+ couples I watched. Balanced as in respectful exchanges, no overtly dominating gestures or body language ... being civilized and courteous to one another. Age played a bit of a factor; the younger couples were wildly out of balance compared to the older couples who were more subdued in their jockeying. What does this say about relationships in general?I keep flirting with a deeper conversation with a friend of mine; he vigorously supports the "Opposites always attract" postulation. It's as if he thinks that because they attract, it is Meant to Be. I want to argue that just because they attract does not mean they are appropriate. But how many of us have the cohones to say no to attraction, just because it might be bad for us?It does appear that he is right; opposites do (foolishly) attract: male to female (both in gender and in energy), outgoing to shy, frugal to generous, pessimist to optimist, etc. But is that healthy? Is that truly the ideal arrangement? Should we build the core units of society on relationships created by such extreme opposites? In terms of day-to-day, put-down-the-toilet-seat, get-the-bills-paid grind, probably not. (Ms. Hepburn also said, "Marriage is a series of desperate arguments people feel passionately about.") Building lives together should be less about "hair-pulling and jumping about" and more about pulling together in the same harness.It seems to me that commonality makes a LOT more sense. I call it "using the same glasses prescription." Truly successful and happy couples (those oh-so-rare creatures) seem to see life fundamentally the same way. They want the same things (i.e., urban v. country life, secular v. religious, ostentatious v. frugal). They pull forward together instead of pulling separately, and thus apart. They speak the same language together: in the kitchen, in the sheets, in the car.So why do they so rarely end up together? Humans are crazy.I see the animal kingdom doing a lot better at matching energy and skills, at least in terms of community and pursuit of procreation. I always think of lions in this frame: the females hunt, kill, feed, give birth. The males are seed sowers and figureheads. There are always many females to one male, because the males can't get along but the females do. The females do all the meaningful work. The males propogate the species and fight each other, which means only the strongest genes survive. (That's a massive simplification, but my point is merely this: if humans hook up and marry only to make babies -- ignoring for the moment homosexual relationships, which arguably are about attraction exclusively since procreation is obviously not possible without outside assistance -- then humans are going about this in all the wrong ways. There are easier, less frustrating and seeped-in-drama ways to propogate the species, as lion prides can prove.)I am all too aware of how impossible it is for anyone to control whom they love or for whom they feel attraction. And certainly PLENTY of humans are out there loving each other without the lure of making babies. I just can't help but wonder how much farther along the evolutionary rail we'd be if we would stop making the love connection because Johnny is strong and Sarah is sweet and won't their babies be cute, and start making the partnership connection because Johnny wants X and so does Jessica or James.P.S. Because of this inherent friction in love, I grow more and more attached to the concept of "Friends with Benefits" as I age. To me, this seems a good nod towards the efficiency of the animal kingdom without all the need for tearing out zebra throats to eat.Links:Katherine Hepburn Quotes: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/a/qu_k_hepburn.htm