5
Perfect Love, Perfect Life: The Ultimate Girl Fantasy
Women’s near-constant pursuit of perfection is the engine that drives Girl Logic. Especially when it comes to relationships. GL, wanting us to have all the things and be all the things—sometimes simultaneously—encourages us to build elaborate fantasies about our dream relationship and what we want from it. Which isn’t a bad thing, of course; GL can help determine precisely what “perfect” means to us and cheer us on as we strive for it. The problem is when we start believing that our fantasies are imminently attainable and literally nothing else will do. (Sound familiar? Bridezillas are a good example: “I SAW A PICTURE OF A LIVING CRYSTAL DOVE ONCE AND I NEED THAT AT MY CEREMONY, OR MY MARRIAGE WILL MEAN NOTHING!”)
Another pitfall: GL can encourage us to want a zillion things all at once. You want to dance barefoot in a downtown loft till 5 a.m., making out with a sexy Spanish model… but you also want to wake up fresh faced and “hit the gym” with a partner who genuinely worships and respects you. Girl Logic always reminds us to take stock of the past, for better or worse. You might have always dated bad boys before. Even though you know you don’t want that in your current relationship, you can’t help but miss it a little when you’re strolling through a farmer’s market with your new guy, who likes buying lavender in bulk. Even though we want our futures to be “perfect,” it’s hard to shed our old ideas of what we used to love and move into the unknown of what we might actually need to be happy.
Women cobble together fantasy notions about the “perfect man” from movies and novels. Then we find ourselves disappointed when said man shows up because he’s 5’1”, eats with his hands, and wears a cinched-waist leather coat from Wilsons.
Then there’s social media. We see all the beautiful women on Instagram with their doting spouses on their arm, the two smiling kids, the golden retriever named Bailey, and the barn-chic anniversary party she’s throwing together between meal preps and running marathons. We see her, and our GL starts whispering that our current partner isn’t enough. We start wanting what she’s got. We start questioning the choices we’ve made and the things we truly want. We start feeling shitty about this happy but imperfect little life we’ve built, thinking maybe there’s someone else out there who’s better for us. Even if this is a person we’re in love with!
Fantasies about what we should want are forever enshrined in our culture. Everyone knows fairy tales are garbage, yet they’re the first stories we hear. Whatever happens, never fear: in the third act, a prince will save you. Take a closer look and those stories are filled with helpless women and idiotic inbred princes. In the end, Belle from Beauty and the Beast was so desperate to get away from Gaston, the hot French misogynist, that she was willing to fall in love with a lion in a tailcoat. She so wanted to be left alone to think and read, and she could only find a creature who appreciated that once she had left town, gotten herself locked in a castle, and fell in love with a giant feline that walked on its hind legs and wore a jacket! She was planning to fuck a giant housecat in a dinner jacket! That’s where said story would have gone had that weird magical rose curse not been broken and he turned back into a human.
In these fairy tales, all the princesses experience an “all is lost” moment until someone saves her. Sleeping Beauty falls asleep, Snow White eats the apple and falls into a coma (She was in a fucking coma because a jealous witch poisoned her! Women have been fucked from the start!), Jasmine is for sure gonna get raped and murdered by Jaffar, the Little Mermaid will never get her voice back (she gave it up to be with a man)… and then! When it seems like all is lost, the prince shows up to rescue her.
You can’t blame women for wanting to believe. Our Girl Logic is still hardwired to think, “If I do what society says, if I stay pretty and take care of myself and am independent but still vulnerable, then surely my own perfect White Knight will appear.” They all came for the princesses, right? I can’t help but think of that episode of Sex and the City when Charlotte exclaims, “I’ve been dating since I was fifteen, I’m exhausted! Where is he!?” If dating were merit based and the amount of effort and time you put in were directly proportional to what you eventually got from it, then life would be… fair. Sorry, kids.
The only reason we should strive for anything resembling “perfection” when it comes to finding a partner is so we can feel loved and supported, not so we can fulfill a childhood Disney fantasy, impress our friends, or freak out and cry, “I did the work, I put in the time, now where the fuck is my human reward?!” For some of us, the reality is that we’ll spend our lives building an identity, going to the gym, and making our own money, seeking out happiness in the form of friends, travel, culture, and food. Then, in our thirties (or later), we’ll wake up, look around, and say, “I’m the best possible version of myself! Universe, I’m finally ready for a partner!” Oops. Sorry, sister. He’s already married, “super busy with work,” or threatened by you because you floss and brush.
The deepest irony is that the fairytale princesses somehow maneuver a prince into saving them when they’re at their weakest. When women in the twenty-first century realize we’re ready for love, we’re usually at our strongest, which sends certain lesser (but still desired and eligible) men running in the other direction. In real life, there is no saving. In real life, when you’re lonely, disappointed, and burned out and you find yourself in an “all is lost” moment, you know what happens? Nothing. You cry a little, maybe watch Chef’s Table on Netflix all day while eating a can of olives and cheap chocolate left over from Christmas. The next day you wake up, tired, and… you keep living. That is, if you didn’t choke on an olive, alone in your house. Your best friend returns your text like five hours after you’re done crying, and by then you don’t feel like talking anymore. The only e-mail that comes in is a reminder from Allstate about your policy renewal. No one saves you; certainly no man. There’s only… you. As Carrie points out in that Sex and the City episode: “Have you ever thought that maybe we’re the White Knights, and we’re the ones who have to save ourselves?”
And yet for most women, our Girl Logic still embraces the fantasy, and we measure ourselves against it. We love to collage lovely vignettes of perfect possibilities—that’s why so many women are obsessed with vision boards and Pinterest. When I was a freshman in high school, this guy in my grade, Dan, was dating a girl named Mary who was a year older and just so, so cool. She had a nose ring as a tenth grader! I still remember standing next to them one day as she was hyperbolically proclaiming she was “stressed out” and “losing it.” She wailed, “Ugh, I’m a mess,” and he cupped her face and said, “Hey, you’re a lot of things, but you’re not a mess.” And she closed her eyes and laughed and he kissed her forehead, and, unbeknownst to them, I was standing five feet away, watching the whole thing and having a moment.
For some reason I latched onto that sound bite. I don’t know why; I’d had boys say cute things to me before. But that couple just seemed so… mature. She seemed so adult in her self-diagnosed hysteria, and he was so assertive, reassuring, and in control. I carried that snippet with me through high school, college, and into my twenties. I decided that one day my Perfect Guy would say that to me, and it would be SO, SO SPECIAL. Well, he finally did. Kind of. Except he didn’t turn out to be my Perfect Guy.
I was thirty-one, and he was my boyfriend of a few months. We were inside a very well-lit Hollywood 7-Eleven and, in a chemically induced amorous fog, I decided to try to make that one high school memory happen in real life. Feigning being frazzled and tapping into my already natural wellspring of annoyance toward most things, I declared, “Oh my God, I’m SUCH a mess!” and he responded, “You’re not a mess.” He said it! He actually said it! Fairy tales do come true! Then, noticing I was holding three different bags of Mexican cookies, he noted, “You’re just a monster.” Then he tickled me and I got annoyed. I might have accidentally farted quietly. It was nothing like I had hoped for.
; See? Nothing is perfect. Not even the “perfect” moments we dream up, like that one. If the universe can’t even manage to create perfect moments, then how are women, in all of our mortal complexities, supposed to be perfect, look perfect, or have perfect relationships? The simple truth is, our obsession with perfection isn’t just about what we expect from men—it’s about what we expect of ourselves.
Everyone knows nearly every model in every ad campaign is photoshopped. But that doesn’t stop us from secretly thinking if only we looked like them, then our lives would be perfect. The rational knowledge that those ads are fake—that in day-to-day life, no one looks like a model all the time—doesn’t stop our Girl Logic from whispering, “Maybe I, too, can effortlessly wear a vintage football jersey and have it skim my privates while I flit around a Super Bowl party laughing, unspilled cocktail in hand.”
All this model-worshipping nonsense has triggered an epidemic of body-image issues. Intellectually we know that whatever flaws we’re obsessively harping on, chances are, males don’t notice. Eight percent of men are colorblind, for God’s sake! And though women may never truly appreciate this fact, our bodies aren’t ugly. “Muffin tops,” stretch marks, cellulite—it’s all normal.
I’m going to admit this: I’m disappointed every time I look in a full-length mirror and don’t see a model looking back at me. Somehow my time away from the mirror allowed me just enough momentum to concoct a new fantasy about what might be there later on. Then, when I look again and don’t see mile-high legs and a perfectly symmetrical face, I’m shocked: “Huh! That’s not what I expected.” I also expect to always look as good as I feel. Which is impossible because I might feel fine about last night, but my face and under-eye circles tell a different story: Moscow mules, dry skin, and Party Goblins.
I’m also shocked when a man doesn’t give me a second glance. Not because I think I’m a supermodel (we’ve already established the deal on that) but because movies have taught us that if you’re the star of the film (a.k.a. your own life), then that perfect guy will notice you, no matter what. It’s the reason single girls get dressed up to go to the grocery store. We all, deep down, like to think that our light shines so bright that some sexy, sweet stranger will see it through all the cracks in the surface and call us onstage at the One Direction concert. What? Not One Direction? That’s not a band anymore? What’s left, the Chainsmokers? Are the Wallflowers still touring? Never mind. We all like to think we’re attractive enough that a cute guy will suddenly walk over and say something like, “Excuse me, I couldn’t help but notice the bright, beaming glory of your soul shining through…,” and then you can be like, “Cool! Is that a Wilsons leather jacket?”
But part of us always fears our inner light is about to burn out. This can be blamed partly on biology. Women have a finite amount of time to have children, and many women happen to want them, or think they want them, or at least want to leave open the possibility of wanting them somewhere down the line. And why wouldn’t they? Getting married and having kids is held up as the Ultimate Climax Perfecto Moment of Womanhood from pretty much the moment we’re born! But the clock is ticking on these future children, which means we have less time to date and even less time to go through that murky period where you just give hand jobs and refuse to keep the lights on during sex. It feels like, after twenty-one, you have a week to figure out the narrative of your life, find a partner, and decide when and with whom you’ll be making babies, if you choose to make them. Now, obviously I’ve exaggerated that time line, but this idea of a fertility shelf life creates a feeding frenzy as we get older and causes standards to drop ever lower in the dating department.
When our GL starts descending into panic mode, it tells us that if we don’t act now, we might end up past our prime and “miss our window” on love or kids. GL whispers in our ear: “Just pick someone already; grab the next normal-looking carbon-based being who talks about wanting a family.” But here’s the fantasy I subscribe to: The window never truly closes on happiness. Even if your ideal life always included being a mom, that doesn’t mean your life will become a meaningless void of despair if for some reason you don’t end up having kids. Maybe you’ll adopt. Maybe you’ll foster. Maybe you’ll become a tutor. Maybe you’ll open an animal sanctuary, or babysit a lot, or realize you always hated children after all (oops). You can always find new paths to fulfillment. Easier said than done, I’m sure, but there can’t just be one kind of happiness for everyone. And in those situations, even though I know GL is trying to push me toward what it thinks I need, I have to step back and calmly tell it to calm the fuck down and leave me alone. You can’t force time, or fate, or whatever. Meditation can also be handy, if you’re into that, from what I’ve heard. I don’t know, I was busy.
In my twenties, I remember hearing thirty-five-year-old DINOSAURS talk about dating. They would jokingly say things like, “I just want him to have a job and know how to make a dinner reservation.” And I would think, “Ew, how lame are those women?” Now, in my thirties, I’m saying the exact same thing. It isn’t that my standards dropped, it’s that my expectations are lower because I know through painfully lived experience that quality men get taken quickly. Because men don’t have that godforsaken biological clock, endlessly ticking, louder and louder, “Tell Tale Heart”–style, there isn’t always the same urgency to “make it work” with random women.
As a no-longer-young woman trying to find the right man, sometimes you need a real push-comes-to-shove moment in order to stand up for yourself and tap into the part of your Girl Logic that innately knows and wants what’s best for you.
Here’s my moment: I matched with someone on a dating app, and he asked me out. His profile on the app was… fine. He was Jewish and normal looking; you know, the kind of normal where if he’d had a stellar personality, then everything could have been incredible. So we went for a drink. I had refused to give him my number, justifying that if we could make a plan via the dating app and it worked out, then I would give this stranger my number.
I should have bailed when he walked in five minutes late and mildly sweaty from walking over from his office. Letting the woman know that you made the date as convenient for yourself as possible isn’t exactly a turn-on, right? But hey, desperate times call for desperate dates!
We talked for about an hour. Things were going… well. Which, on the gradient scale of dating, translates this way:
This Is Going Great. You’re laughing and making googly eyes at each other; you have the same interests and passions; you think you might already love him. He’s even moved to sit next to you instead of across from you in the booth! In your head you’ve already paired your first name with his last name. His last name is something horrible like Gobbletron, but you don’t care, you’ll just be Iliza Shlesinger-Gobbletron and have telemarketers forever dread having to pronounce your name. OMG DID OUR PINKIES JUST TOUCH!?
This Is Going Well. One of you is laughing more than the other, but you are having interesting conversation. You aren’t overtly irritated by anything he’s saying. Maybe he keeps messing up his grammar, saying things like “could have went,” but you write it off as some sort of colloquial affectation and maybe even envision that his rough-around-the-edges demeanor could complement your refinement.
This Is Going Fine. One of you keeps saying dumb things, and the other is trying to be polite. Nothing egregious has happened yet to make you leave. Maybe you noticed he is wearing those square-toed Kenneth Cole Reaction shoes from like ten years ago, but he’s cute enough.
This Is Sparta! He has said something heinous about an ex, or children, or animals, or why Jews run the media. Maybe he even dared to utter something insane like, “I don’t get why people choose to be gay.” And now there’s a fight, and you’re two seconds away from sternum kicking him into a ditch.
So yeah, again, our date was… going somewhere between Well and Fine. I had finished my drink and was pondering a second one when this exchange transpired:
&
nbsp; ILIZA: Do you have any pets?
DUDE: I have—well, had—a dog.
ILIZA: Aw, did he die?
DUDE: No, I sort of lost him in a breakup.
ILIZA: That’s terrible. How long ago?
DUDE: A year.
ILIZA: Oh wow, were you together for a while?
DUDE: Nine years.
ILIZA: Uh.… Shot in the dark: Were you married?
DUDE: Yeah, we were.
ILIZA: Another shot in the dark.… Do you have kids?
DUDE: Yeah, I have two. They’re six and nine.
Now. If someone is divorced, in my book that’s not a reason to write him off. No, I like to write men off for concrete flaws like yawning weird or holding a fork the wrong way or saying “porridge.” But the fact is I don’t want to date a man with kids at this stage in my life. I like children fine, and I’m sure I’ll love my own someday. But they add a layer of complication to a relationship that I’d just rather not deal with. Some women in my shoes might have opted to stick around and have that second drink. Their Girl Logic might have kicked in and insisted they hold onto a shred of hope, as in: “Hey, you never know! Maybe I’ll fall in love with this 6 out of 10 and his adorable kiddos! And, at thirty-three, I can TOTALLY put my dreams aside to become a stepmom and be mildly resented by his children and hated by his wife who is FOR SURE only a few years older than me!”
My Girl Logic, on the contrary, went in the opposite direction. I immediately scanned through all the other things I could have done that night. This was my first night off in weeks! I did my makeup (I even contoured!), took an Uber, and wasted over an hour of my time with someone who wasn’t even viable for me—something I could have known BEFORE WE’D EVEN MET if he’d bothered to tell me. Tomorrow I would be back on set; tonight could have been the start to something important or fun or silly, and I’m trying to find a boyfriend, and this guy is in the way, and I flat-ironed my hair for this, which is a nightmare in and of itself because my hair BREAKS EASILY! OH MY GOD MY HAIR IS ALL GONNA BREAK OFF AND WHEN I FINALLY MEET SOMEONE I LIKE I WILL JUST HAVE A HEAD OF BROKEN BLONDE PICKUP STICKS! I NEED TO GET AN ARGAN OIL HAIR MASK ON THE WAY HOME, IS CVS EVEN OPEN?! That whole Girl Logic thought stream happened in about five seconds. Then I stopped sweating, the room’s ambient sound returned around me, and I made a choice. At the end of it, I decided to put myself first, simply saying:
Girl Logic Page 11