Relationships: Expectations vs. Reality

Relationships: Expectations vs. Reality
Courtesy Photo Pam Beesly and Jim Halpert from “The Office” were America’s favorite will-they-won’t-they couple. Their beloved love story made for unrealistic relationship expectations for couples everywhere.

Courtesy Photo
Pam Beesly and Jim Halpert from “The Office” were America’s favorite will-they-won’t-they couple. Their beloved love story made for unrealistic relationship expectations for couples everywhere.

Last year around this time, I wrote about online dating and the challenges of making a long distance relationship work. One year later, and I’m happy to say that that advice worked! My lady-love moved to Fayetteville in August, and we’ve been doing the regular relationship thing ever since. Funny enough, I didn’t realize how terrible I am at being a boyfriend until she got here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a piece of shit or anything. I just have a little trouble separating reality from the things I’ve come to think of as love. Let me explain…

One of the jokes I make about myself that has deeper roots in my reality than I like to admit is that I learned how to interact with other people from television. While mildly funny, it’s actually very true. I didn’t know how to be with people, and sitcoms and stuff like that taught me what to do, which is why I make far too many jokes and use far too many one-liners. I’ve known that about myself for a long time, but I had never considered that there are certain things, even in the most real-feeling shows (Parenthood), that were giving me unrealistic expectations about life and love.

Think about The Office, one of my all-time favorite shows. One of the things that made that show so great was the epic love story of Jim Halpert and Pam Beesley. For years, they were the couple people prayed would get together, and when they finally did, they were the couple we wanted to watch through to the end. In Parks & Recreation, another all-time favorite, there were fantastic love stories all over the place. I watched these and I wanted that, I wanted that kind of stupid, television love.

Thing is, that’s not a real thing. Those epic love stories that I want to live so much, and that so many are invested in, are a product. Really any kind of fictional love story is a product, but television’s stories don’t even belong to one person. There is a team of people sequestered in a room, clacking away on the keys of a computer, and coming up with the next great plot-point. It goes beyond those people being actors and their performances, it’s so not real that it took a large group of people sitting around a table to come up with it.

The worst part of it all is that while I was despairing over my life not unfolding like television told me it would, I was missing my own love story. Cheesy though it may be, it’s no less true that we are all the authors of our stories, and they are being written all the time. Who wants to read a book about some sad-sack lying around and letting life pass him by as he waits for everything to turn into a sitcom? That doesn’t sound engaging or interesting at all. Two people meeting online, getting to know each other over a year of living hours apart, finally being in the same city at last, hiking up mountains, driving crooked roads, trips to Eureka Springs, hot summer nights and cold winter ones; that sounds like a story worth reading.

So over the weekend I decided I was done. Or at least I’m doing my best to be done. Done with second-guessing everything, done with that stupid little voice in the back of my head feeding into my fear and doubt, and done being so ungrateful for the things I actually have in my life. I want to be something good in her life, and not something she looks at with exhaustion or apprehension because I’ve driven her there.

So if there is anybody out there reading this who, like me, is waiting on their made-for-TV romance, an umbrella that includes fairy tale romances as well as anyone waiting on their own romantic comedy moment to come, trust me when I say stop. It’s not worth sitting around waiting for something to happen. You never know what you’re missing while you’re wallowing.

Categories: Commentary