Angels Among Us

Cupid Rhymes with Stupid

-       Or, Taking Responsibility for Your Own Love Life

By Cherri Randall, PhD

“Angels Among Us”

                The yellow archangel plant, lamiastrum galeobdolon, is a member of the mint family.  As a perennial, it prefers damp places and partial shade.  Imagine trying to grow this plant in your east-facing garden in Phoenix, Arizona.  The success rate is going to be dismal and a botanist is going to shake her head in wonder and ask, “Did you do any homework at all?”  Most of the time when someone is landscaping, she goes to the trouble of researching the climate, soil, and other growing conditions before investing a lot of time, energy, and money into a project that might not pan out. 

                The woman who does a little homework does not invest in plants that won’t grow in her geography no matter how pretty the blossoms or sweet the fruit.  And the woman who plants haphazardly grows nothing.  If the yellow archangel fails to thrive in Arizona, nobody comes along and says “what a stupid plant.”  The plant is not at fault for dying where it does not have the conditions required to flourish.  

                Women research projects, but expect love to fall out of the sky.  There are two cultural taboos working against women this way.  One is that we are culturally constrained to be “nice girls” and to put everyone else’s needs ahead of our own.  As Ursula the sea-witch tells Ariel in Disney’s version of The Little Mermaid:  “It’s she who holds her tongue who gets a man.”  

We are not supposed to ask for what we want and while we are expected to want to be joined in holy matrimony, we are not supposed to articulate our sexual desire.  We want to wear white dresses with lacy veils and carry flowers down the petal-strewn aisle. 

                There’s nothing wrong with wanting the wedding day, but there is something wrong with being programmed to want it.  Almost every Disney Princess movie ends with the wedding scene.  The princess gets her voice back, saves the day, and gets married.  She slips the glass shoe on: voila - she is now a bride.  The kiss of true love, the last withered petal, the spell is broken, and a pretty girl is swirled around in white ruffled satin on the arm of her prince. 

This is the formula for more movies than can be listed, not all of them cartoons.  Wanting a wedding is not the same thing as wanting a marriage. 

Porn, with its primarily male audience, teaches men to look at women as parts to be used towards their own sexual fulfillment and nothing else.  Romantic movies play the same role as porn with a female audience in some cases.  It teaches women to look at men as their ticket to marital fulfillment and nothing else.  Either medium teaches its audience to see means to fulfillment, not the meaning of human beings.       

                So even if you are prepared to make the leap and admit that you are a woman entitled to both an emotional and a physical relationship with a man, another cultural stumbling block arises.  We want love to be spontaneous, at first sight, filled with mystery, foreordained, perfect, a gift from heaven, the coming together of cosmic forces, thunder, lightning, and feeling the earth move.  We want the fairy godmother to wave her wand.  We want to duck into a cozy bookstore out of the rainstorm and bump into “him” in the doorway and know the moment our eyes meet that our ship has come in, our wait is over, and destiny has finally arrived.  We want Cupid to hit the mark with that one perfect arrow.  We want, in a word, magic.  The first order of business is to recognize that some men are never going to be a good match for you. 

Magic cannot be planned, programmed, researched, or scheduled.  Carly Simon sings that’s the way I’ve always heard it should be.  Then, when it isn’t that way, reality sets in and we hear other songs (if love never lasts forever, what’s forever for?) and we blame the fairy godmother.  We curse Cupid.  Fate, Karma, Destiny, by whatever label you affix, the end results are the same:  you have been unlucky in love.  It is a convenient self-serving cop out, to absolve ourselves of responsibility when we do not get the relationship we were hoping for. 

We are waiting for lightning to strike and we do not even go stand out in the rain for it to happen.  And when it does not happen, we tell ourselves it is not our fault.  Or worse yet, we blame the messenger.  We blame the yellow archangel for not growing in our sunny desert.  We place ourselves in a lose-lose situation and say it was an accident of fate or it was the wrong man, and we never consider if we should have been planting some other kind of seed instead because that means planning, and that would mean we were trying.

                There are plenty of wrong men out there.  Some of them are in jail crimes against women.  There are plenty of men out there who are good men, but just aren’t good for you.  There is danger in becoming a female chauvinist pig who bashes every man she meets for the simple fact that he is a man.  Your yellow flower might not do well in the sunshine of your love, but he might bloom in other conditions with a different gardener.  That is what plants do, and to pretend otherwise is to go against nature and all practical advice.

A few women cop out in yet another way.  Like Samantha on Sex and the City, they stay emotionally detached from men and use them only to gratify their sexual desires.  Eventually Samantha gets her heart broken, and it takes some gentle coaxing by Smith to make her pliable again.  But no one is as cynical as Miranda when she meets Steve.  She is determined that love cannot happen to her and she tries her best to sabotage their relationship.

  Happily, fate steps in and she gets the man, but if you don’t have a scriptwriter attending your life, you might want to consider taking matters into your own hands.  If you don’t believe in love, if you think you should love ‘em and leave ‘em, then you are copping out.  Whether you are breathlessly waiting for your one and only to fall from the sky, or you believe he does not exist, you absolve yourself of all responsibility for being in a good relationship. 

                You cannot expect to sprinkle seeds and have them grow with no regard for your geography or climate.  If you want fruit or flowers or foliage, you get the best results when you plan accordingly.  Love may be a red red rose, but you cannot expect much if you depend on wild flowers to provide you with emotional and sexual sustenance.

The first order of business is to recognize that some men are never going to be a good match for you.  You may admire many things about them, much like the yellow archangel flower this article begins with, but the flower does not always match the climate and geography.

  Assessing your own needs when it comes to love should include a list of what you want in a partner, but also a list of the things you do not want. 

                Once you achieve that, you won’t need arbitrary rules.  There are many different lists of rules, and  there is wisdom in postponing the sexual component of a relationship until other components are firmly established, but to give yourself a rule that says “no sex for the first month” or “no sex till he says I love you” or whatever yardstick you want to measure this by is another way of copping out. 

Imagine what a man must think if you tell him this rule during the first month.  It screams “I don’t trust my own judgment!”  It says you cannot manage your feelings or control your responses without giving yourself a curfew.  It says you are not mature enough to set your limits based on each individual relationship, that you bring a set of one-size-fits-all rules with you every time you meet a man. 

This is not an appealing picture for him, and it takes responsibility from you for governing your own life and puts all the authority onto whatever bylaws or boundaries you have chosen.  It takes away your power to define yourself first and foremost, but if the new man in your life knows about your rule, it transfers that power not to your rules, but to him.  He holds the key to your sexual surrender if he will just say the words or wait out the calendar.   

                One of the rules men live by can be found at most university fraternity houses, and the rule is simple:  “Bros before Hos.”  If your girlfriend doesn’t like this, you simply find another girlfriend because they are all hos and therefore interchangeable.  Your brothers are forever.  These men are not flowers to plant in any garden.  They are weeds.  They should be pulled out by their rootstock, and if they cannot be reeducated, they should be left to wither.  On that list of what you do NOT want for your life, please write this down in the number one slot: 

A man who treats me like a piece of meat.

That is not to say that this pendulum cannot swing back the other way.  The music industry is one of the first arenas where women gained economic power, and having attained that, they have creative control of their projects and enormous influence in the media.  Women can now treat men like objects to satisfy their sexual appetites and nothing more.  In an early video by Robert Palmer, Addicted to Love, feminists lambasted the performance because the all-girl back-up band was clearly lip syncing.  The women in the video were not adding to the music in any way.  They served only one function:  to be eye candy.  Dressed alike, they almost seemed to be clones of each other and are saved from the title bimbo by only one saving grace:  they are all brunettes.          Almost simultaneous to the rise of music videos is the career of one of the most financially successful artists ever - Madonna.  In one video, she has a tall, lean, almost naked black man in the background adding nothing to the musical performance except a rhythmic swaying that effectively showcases his physique.  In response to this, critics coined the term “himbo” to refer to a brainless male ornament.

When women achieve success in a previously-male dominated business, they also exhibit the behaviors, for better or for worse, of their male peers.  So despite the economic success of many such artists, and now women in politics, business, and the other arts, women still function in a system organized and operated according to men’s rules. 

                There are two problems to be wary of in targeting a relationship.  One is waiting on cupid to shoot the right guy for you and leave him on your doorstep.  Cupid is a little bit like Santa Claus.  If Santa Claus really existed, why would some children get candy canes and some get Magical Mansions and X-boxes?  If Cupid was really flitting around with that quiver full of arrows, wouldn’t he be working on behalf of everybody?  That’s one song nobody should listen to without shaking their head:  I believe there are angels among us.  Where were the angels when Jon Benet Ramsey and Jasmine Archie died?  There is no superhero waiting to fix your life on any holiday of the year, so get over it, and get busy fixing it yourself. 

                Secondly, there are men out there who are not well-suited to partner with anybody, and there are a lot of men who are not well-suited for you, and there are a few men who will fit a lot of your criteria.  You have to know yourself. 

You have to know if you are Phoenix, New York City, Billings, Montana, or some point in between.  You have to realize that no one is going to be 100% perfect.  Even when you find him, you still have to cultivate the garden in every season to keep love flourishing.  This is your responsibility, and if you cop out, you cannot reasonably expect an angel to come along and make it okay.

               

                Cherri Randall has a PhD in Gender Studies from the University of Arkansas and is Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.