Yesterday I was sitting in class when a girl two rows over announced “in two more weeks, I will be twenty-one.” I’ll spare you the monologue about how hearing this made me feel old and so nostalgic I could almost smell the scent of a dorm room again and just say I was intrigued. I continued to listen as she described all the ways she planned to celebrate this milestone birthday including, of course, the almost obligatory “club hopping” night she and her friends were going to head out for on the weekend of her birthday. (Sidebar: Is it not okay to call this “bar hopping” anymore? Or even a pub crawl?) She proudly announced that, on the day following her umm, hopping excursion, she and her boyfriend were going to spend the day together.
“I told him there are three rules,” she went on. “One, he has to make it all a surprise, two, it has to include cake and three, he cannot burp or fart or watch sports all day!”
While I wholeheartedly will agree with rule number two (because when is cake a bad idea?), I still cannot wrap my mind around this rule thing altogether. First, making rules? Um, high-maintenance much? Second, “he cannot burp or fart or watch sports all day?” Okay, is she trying to kill this guy?
I watched as two of her friends nodded along in agreement. “Awww, how sweet” was among the many phrases uttered. It was like they were saying yes, this is a good idea. Force the guy to do something, give him all kinds of conditions and expect nothing but perfection. This is true love. THIS IS REALITY.
I tried to think back to when I was twenty-one. There’s no doubt there were things I did that I can look back on now and think my gosh, that was hugely stupid. Like the time the idea of a twelve-hour Checkers tournament fueled only by tortilla chips, Velveeta cheese and Arbor Mist seemed perfectly normal. Twenty-one is no doubt a great age to learn that the choices you make today, the beliefs you’re tooling along with so happily can all come to a screeching halt tomorrow when you wake up and realize cheap cheese* ["product"] and even cheaper wine are getting you a whole lot more than you’d predicted. In other words, you learn to think ahead. And you learn to detect what’s right and wrong for you, and what’s real. Perhaps you even realize it’s a choice.
I think that’s what, at twenty-one, most of us don’t realize about love and adult relationships in general. Rules are not always going to apply. There is going to be imperfection and unpredictability, and heaven knows there is going to be burping and farting. I’m thankful I realize this. I don’t know what age it happened and while there is some charm in the fantasy, I’d rather choose the reality.
Later yesterday, while I was Interneting instead of homeworking, I read a short blurb from an interview in Essence magazine with Duane Martin and Tisha Campbell. In this portion of the interview, they were asked by the interviewer to defend recent divorce rumors.
Interviewer: So for the record, are you getting a divorce?
Tisha: Hell no!
Duane: Listen, let me tell you something. I will chew her ass up and swallow it before I let someone else have her.
For some reason I like that approach more.
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*Okay, so I sort of still like cheap cheese.