Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [16]
By the time the last of these relationships ended I was such a quaking mass of colliding, exploding neurotransmitter malfunctions that the only coherent sentence I could form in my native tongue went: “Never again.”
So there I was, trapped in that damp, mildew-covered portal between the eighties and the nineties, obsessively analyzing memories of ancient conversations with old boyfriends in search of some hidden second layer of meaning that wouldn’t become visible for many years.
Ah, the eighties.
Who didn’t love those happy-go-lucky days when single women could luxuriate in a delightful study that claimed that the chances of a woman in her forties being killed by a terrorist were greater than her chances of getting married? In retrospect, the only remotely beneficial by-product of 9/11 was the instant and radical change in the terrorist murder/marriage odds in favor of older single women.
Then again, what were we expecting? If someone had told Mother Nature at the dawn of creation that there would come a day when her sons and daughters would be doing Jell-O shots and going to Ozzfest in their forties, fifties, and sixties, sometimes still in hopes of hooking up with their ultimate soul mates … she would have laughed derisively. Then, if she was feeling irritable, she would have made the whole species extinct.
Unless I’m misunderstanding something, Mother Nature’s Original Plan for the Dating and Mating of All Creatures was basically this: when said creatures were in their teens, they were supposed to attract the healthiest, most genetically desirable members of their own species and procreate. They were meant to do it pretty quickly, too, judging by the time span between meeting and mating allowed for in nearly every other life-form, which can usually be measured in hours, if not minutes or seconds.
And once the act of giving birth was over, all bets were off. There’s very little evidence that Mother Nature saw happiness as the next logical step for the new family. In fact, she seems to be fine with cannibalism (sharks, hamsters, and chimps all eat their young), fratricide (when black eagles have two chicks, the stronger one kills the weaker one), infanticide (monkeys, ducks, and pigs keep the size of their broods down by killing the extras), and child abandonment (pandas let all but one cub die; black bears walk away from their babies unless there are at least three).
But that’s for those guys. We humans like to rewrite and improve Mother Nature’s rules wherever possible. Thus we have reinterpreted a successful postcoital union to mean one in which both parties are giddy with love day and night, forever, until they die. (Or until the end of time, whichever comes first.) If things get Grumpy or Sleepy or Dopey (or any of the seven dwarfs except Happy), a Greek chorus of empathetic friends and relatives of the dissatisfied couple—most of whom are several times divorced—steps forward from the shadows to helpfully chant, “You’re too good for this. Leave.” That’s because American humans now live in the Age of Perpetual High School. It’s the first time in human history in which two-thirds of the over-eighteen population feel that they do not yet have the credits they need to matriculate to adulthood. Twenty has become an extension of the teens, thirty is “postadolescent,” and forty is “still a kid getting started.”
When my last relationship ended, and I was just a kid starting out, about to turn forty, I was as eager to