Two years ago, a fictitious Meredith Grey stood in front of a fictitious Derek Shepherd and said:
“Okay, here it is…your choice. It’s simple. Her or me. And I’m sure she is really great. But, Derek, I love you. In a really, really big pretend to like your taste in music, let you eat the last piece of cheesecake, hold a radio over my head outside your window, unfortunate way…that makes me hate you…love you. So pick me. Choose me. Love me.”
After a good deal of self-analysis regarding the matter(s) of my own interpersonal estrangements, I’ve come to the slow realization that Meredith Grey wasn’t some iconic figure of modern-day romance. She wasn’t emblematic of all that is true and hopeful, and ever-resilient in our own collective quest for love against all undefeatable odds.
That bitch was a hater.
A tried and true, dyed in the infidelity-strewn wool hater.
The i-know-you’re-with-someone-else-but-seriously-let’s-walk-out-this-motherfucker-together-and-never-look-back choose me is the signed, sealed, stamped and delivered verified move of every grand-scale hater throughout the annals of real and fabled history, alike.
Lancelot said that shit to Guinevere. Tristan said that shit to Isolde. Alicia Keys said that shit to Swizz Beatz.
It is the Hail Mary of Hail Marys.
And frankly, it’s highkey selfish.
Because there’s a reason that person isn’t with you in the first place. I’m not going to say that reason is some fault or lacking in you. Only you know your life. I’ll draw my own conclusions.
But you are literally asking the object of your affection to accept one of two troubling options:
- Leave your situation and walk away with me. Fucked up me. Non-committal me. Flaky, unpredictable, wayward me.
Or, in the bold, almost-as-fucked-up alternative:
2. I’m doing better now. This is a new, improved me, standing before you. I promise this situation with me will be better than where you’re at, but, at the very minimum, will at least be comparable to that great shit I’m inducing you to leave behind.
Is that love? Do we lead the people we love from the warmth and security of their new lives, back into the darkness and unknown of our own potentially-despicable company? Is that be-with-me-at-all-costs-come-what-may shit love? Are we really so self-absorbed to believe that any life that person creates with us is better than the life he/she leaves behind?
“So pick me. Choose me. Love me.”
At what cost?
Can this set-fire-to-the-rain love be quantified?
Where do we get off?
Where do I get off?
How dare I presume to make an assessment of your relationship, and where you should stand (preferably the fuck outside of it and with me) with respect to it? Who am I? Who do I think I am?
I had a thought, today.
Who you are with is not—as is commonly held—a reflection of who you are.
Who you are with is a reflection of what you believe you are worth.
Granted, this theory gets tricky when you move towards an entirety-of-the-person analysis, and further from the inclination to compartmentalize a human being into bits, but I’m certain it holds water.
I’m currently sitting at Soho Tea & Coffee, and the most obnoxious of upperclassmen girls is sitting behind me, scrolling through her phone, fastidiously determined to tell each and every friend not preoccupied with the drudgery of exams (all zero of them, it seems) her struggles with her live-in boyfriend. Struggles that drove her from the quiet of the Georgetown University Library, to this very place—she apparently can no longer concentrate (In the interest of full disclosure, I have sincere doubts as to this child’s ability to concentrate and/or function in the aggregate, under the best of circumstances, but, whatever).
Two days ago, she made dinner for Horrible Boyfriend (who I’m assuming wasn’t quite so horrible then), and left the dishes in the sink to “soak” (Haven’t I told you people about this shit? This shit ruins relationships. I swear by it. Wash your fucking dishes or put them in the GD washing machine. You people are fucking animals). Horrible Boyfriend (who, I’ll note, in his own fuckshit thoughtlessness didn’t consider doing the dishes himself despite the fact Simpleton Girlfriend made dinner) in a feat of first rate bitchassTed passive aggression, watched the dishes sit in the sink, “soaking” for two days. On this, the third day, Horrible Boyfriend walked over to the campus of Georgetown University, where Simpleton Girlfriend was studying, and, before a cast of characters including but not limited to, her peers, library staffers, and an assortment of similarly studious strangers, laid her out like the trifling, making-dinner-but-not-washing-the-dishes-and-then-letting-them-“soak”-in-water-for-two-days bitch that she was. Simpleton Girlfriend says that Horrible Boyfriend was all fury and righteous indignation, blew the entire situation out of proportion, humiliated her, and what’s more, does this “all the time.”
I don’t judge her mate.
I judge her.
Clearly, something in this girl thinks that she doesn’t deserve more than a man who is given to temper tantrums and embarrassing her in public.
And who am I to say she does?
I don’t know the secrets of that bitch’s heart.
Maybe Shout-y McDish-Nazi is precisely what her lot in this life should be.
We all need to look deep within ourselves for these elemental truths. We’re so quick to reassure ourselves, and our troubled friends, that we and they “deserve better.” But is that true? Is that really true?
Your boyfriend’s dick doesn’t work. He hasn’t fucked you right ever. He is at best, quick, and at worst, impotent.
But he’s your boyfriend.
Bitch, CLEARLY you don’t think you deserve better.
So, neither shall I.
That non-fucking sonofabitch is your soulmate. Something inside of you, like his dissatisfactory dick, is broken, impotent. Y’all belong together.
Fooler, you’re a shit. We all make sacrifices to be in relationships.
Sure.
Agreed.
I submit to you that each sacrifice you make is a concession of “don’t deserve.”
Stanley doesn’t pick up his dirty drawes, but I love him anyway. That’s a sacrifice I made when I said “yes” to this relationship.
Word.
You don’t believe you deserve a man who picks up his dirty drawes. You have looked inside you and found yourself lacking. Maybe you’re the type of bitch who uses the same towel for a month. Whatever the case, you’ve cast your lot in with dirty-drawes Stanley. I assume that man is the full measure of your worth.
“So pick me. Choose me. Love me.”
Maybe instead of trying to lure people out of their relationships, or making an outside assessment of how successful they are, we should look to ourselves; to our respective worths—to the question of whether said worths were equally-yoked.
Maybe the object of your affection looks at his/her current partner and sees the fullest, most natural extension of himself/herself. Maybe he/she has run the numbers, weighed the cons, and come to the conclusion that this person is what he/she deserves. For better(than us) or worse(than us).
And maybe he/she is wrong. Maybe he/she has mischaracterized his/her worth, or your worth.
Derek Shepherd certainly had.
But if this is love-
If this is the shit bards poeticize, and singers lyricize, and school-girls fanaticize—
If this is the real thing-
Such that it is-
I can’t see myself forcefully pitching it to you…..
Romantic a notion though it may be…