Sometimes You Have To Turn Into the Skid

I've been feeling sad and loserish lately. No calls from The Charmer, no texts from The Puppy, just a personals message from a guy who wants his women to be "ultra feminine" and the discovery, while cleaning, of a used condom, wedged between my nightstand and my bed, which could only have been left there by The Man/Child, who it turns out is too lazy and immature to ensure his scumbags make it to the trash.

I am not this girl. I promise. I am smart and accomplished and interesting and have great friends and lots of creative and professional projects and yet the holidays are creaming me. I haven't been single at this time of year in seven years, and it shows. I miss my ex. We may have rightly split over the 20% of our relationship that just would not work no matter what, but I miss the 80% of the time he and I fit together like snug puzzle pieces. I miss having someone with me through all the familiar and tortuous rituals of the season, someone to make eye contact with at the dinner table with my elderly aunt, who I can say to later, "Can you believe what she said about _____?" I miss obsessing over the exactly perfect gift for him. I miss being touched, just being in physical contact with another human being, on a regular basis.

Instead, I am going to be the reason there are an odd number of people at the dinner table. The last few "singletons" of my generation in my family have ALL gotten engaged in the past month, if you can believe it, and I'm going to swan into all of that shit solo, the sad girl who couldn't hold onto her man. They will cluck about me, how difficult I am, how I can't let myself be happy. Behind my back if I'm lucky. And with the mood I'm in lately, I won't even really disagree with what they're saying.

I've been trying like hell to fight off this couple-culture poison melancholy, but sometimes the best thing to do with a mood like this is indulge it until it passes. Which is how I found myself alone last night with a newly-opened bottle of vinho verde and a rented copy of Bridget Jones' Diary. I am somewhat ashamed to say that I love this movie. It comforts me, with its urban family narrative and British ordinariness and its purported message that I can be sometimes bumbling and sometimes brilliant and sometimes bizarre and still, in the end, Colin Firth will love me just as I am.

But I've never watched it while single before.

Here's what pissed me straight off about it this time around: it pretends to be about Bridget finding herself. That's one of the things that sold me on the film -- the moment after Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fight over her, and she essentially turns them both down. She basically decides it's better to be single than to compromise what she knows she wants in a partner.

I made that exact decision earlier this year and it was the single hardest thing I've ever done. Strangely enough, 15 minutes later I didn't find myself on a snowy street in my underwear kissing Mark Darcy as though my life depended on it. But in Bridget Jones' world, that's exactly the promise: commit to yourself, refuse to compromise your values, and you will be rewarded straightaway with the very handsome prince you let go of in favor of choosing you.

Empower your way to true love, ladies!

Nor is this message exclusive to Bridget. It's there in nearly every chick lit/chick flick derivative out there. It's the way they sell us fairy tales these days. Feminism has had enough influence that the story can no longer be just about being virtuous and secretly beautiful and vulnerable and pure of heart and wanting it bad enough. No, now in order to sell us the "happy ending" (and all of the personal consumer goods that go along with it) we learn we must value our own independence and careers and dreams -- in order to get what we really want, which is clearly a man.

If you've been reading this blog, you know I do, in fact, want a man. (Maybe several.) But love is worse than a crap shoot. It's more like a spin on the world's largest roulette wheel. When you love someone (and I mean that term broadly, to include attractions, crushes, any of those moments our insides open toward someone else in a way which is beyond logic and our control), it doesn't mean anything except that you love them. It doesn't make them good for you, or interested in you, or anything else that ends in the word "you." If it turns out that they love you back, in a way that makes both of your lives better, that's one of the luckiest coincidences that can happen in the world.

And yet here I am, courtesy of Helen Fielding (and Jane Austen) and the romantic-industrial complex, trying to make deals in my head. I'm just going to let go of worrying about whether some nicknamed boi/y is going to attempt to contact me, and what it means if he does or doesn't. I'm going to focus on my friends, on writing my book proposal, on dipping dried fruit in dark chocolate and arranging it in lovely little jars as gifts for my colleagues and family, on working out, on refinishing the nightstand I just bought on craigslist, on painting my toenails the perfect shade of dark red. On doing whatever it is makes me happiest.

And then The Puppy will call, right? If I do all of that really well, he'll call?

Fuck you, Bridget Jones.