Apr 21, 2010

Hollywood Has Destroyed Our Love Lives (a short rant)

After reading about it on another website, I read the John Mayer interview on Playboy.com. Despite all the backlash it received, I think it was a solid and honest interview. Plus it helps to support one of my latest rants - that Hollywood has distorted women's perception of what dating and love should be so much that there may be little hope for us.

John stated, "Internet pornography has absolutely changed my generation’s expectations. How could you be constantly synthesizing an orgasm based on dozens of shots? You’re looking for the one photo out of 100 you swear is going to be the one you finish to, and you still don’t finish. Twenty seconds ago you thought that photo was the hottest thing you ever saw, but you throw it back and continue your shot hunt and continue to make yourself late for work. How does that not affect the psychology of having a relationship with somebody? It’s got to." (Playboy.com)

The same kind of reality distortion goes for women, but with romantic comedies. We've become so influenced to think that these situations where the man is hard to get, emotionally unavailable or just plain disinterested, have some sort of happy endings. We think that it's going to make some grand romantic story that we will tell our kids one day. So we put up with it. We drive ourselves insane wondering why he isn't calling and why he hasn't gotten back to us. We wait for him to show up on our doorstep with flowers (preferably in the rain to complete the feature film imagery) and say they were wrong and they love us, that they can't live without us. But in reality, they likely haven't given us a second thought, because as Mayer so aptly described, there's always something better around the corner. There's always someone new who may be better than the one before.

So while we are sitting at home theorizing endlessly to our girlfriends for the thousandth time, they've already moved on; and so we will, but not before torturing ourselves over what they were thinking and where we went wrong. We've all been conditioned in one way or another. We need some shampoo.

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