We’ve been sold a fairy tale of a damaged man who needs us desperately, from Mr. Rochester to Jerry Maguire.
We’ve repeated, I’ve repeated, the same pattern of overfunctioning in relationships, then being shocked when the man doesn’t step up.
I’m tired of the “you make me a better man” line.
If a girl makes a guy feel like a better man, it’s probably because she washed the dishes he left in the sink.
Listen, I’m not telling men they have to be perfect. We are all a work in progress.
But women aren’t the construction workers and men the glorious monument. The building up and support has to go both ways.
When I’m not exhausted by man-baby behavior, I’m actually a very nurturing person. I enjoy doting on my partner, and I try to be generous in all my relationships. I only want to find a man who won’t take advantage of it.
Somehow, even when I explicitly try to avoid this dynamic, it sucks me back in.
I started seeing a guy who was open about how he had often dated girls who needed him to fix them. And I thought, yes! Finally, a man who gets it.
After all, it goes both ways. Just as women suffer from the Mr. Rochester trope, the damsel-in-distress narrative unfairly burdens men.
I was ready to jump into a post-fairy-tale romance.
But then he couldn’t stop talking about those exes. He compared me to them constantly: “You’re so different from…”
“… used to always do that. But you’re nothing like her.”
The only compliment he gave me that wasn’t relative to another woman was, “You’re exactly what I need.”
It raised concerns, but I wrote them off. I admit, I was flattered. And I told myself that this was the sort of self-reflection in a man that I’d been looking for. That he happened to think aloud was unfortunate, but not a deal-breaker.
Nobody’s perfect.
I felt like we were stuck in our heads, well, his head, so for our third date, I suggested dinner and dancing to loosen up.
We didn’t make it that far. Before they brought the check, he asked, “Should we talk about how this is going or just go dancing?”
Post-fairy-tale indeed.
I told him it sounded like a rhetorical question, but he insisted I go first. I brought up the ex-talk.
“I feel like you’re viewing me in opposition to these other girls, like I’m the antidote. But I’m a person, too. I’m not a girl-vitamin.”
He burst into laughter. He told me I was exactly right, that “girl vitamin” was “perfect” and “so apt.”
He wagged a finger at me. “That’s why you’re a writer.”
Thanks?
He explained that he thought I would be good for him, that I’d break his bad habits with women, but “I guess I don’t feel that spark with you.”
No thanks.
So I have a message for all the men out there: Women don’t exist to complete or inspire or cure you.
Women are not vitamins.
Women are not muses.
Women are not anchors.
Women are not crutches.
Women are not your mom.
Loving us may make you happier, healthier, more motivated, or more responsible, but that’s not our sole reason for being.
Take your vitamins.
Then give us a call.
Which Spices Would You Take to a Kitchen Island?
Lisa
There’s nothing like home improvement to improve your life.
At least, not in theory.
I say this because I’m adding a garden room to my house even though I don’t know if that’s a thing because I have a garden and I want to see it from a window.
Like TV, only with flowers and butterflies.
In other words, children’s TV.
The garden room is attached to the kitchen and since it needed a door, the oven and cabinets had to be moved, and in any event, you see where this is going. Adding a garden room meant that a section of the kitchen got remodeled. Because the thighbone is connected to the leg bone and the leg bone is connected to the wallet.
Anybody who’s ever started home improvement knows that as soon as you improve one thing, you have to improve other things, so that everything is New and Improved, like detergent, only much more costly.
But I’m not complaining.
I feel lucky to be able to make these changes, and since I work at home, I’m spending twenty-four/seven on the premises, I want the premises to suit me. And while we’re turning that frown upside down, let me add that since I’m still terribly single, it’s great to have everything exactly the way I want.
Finally.
And then I’ll die.
My epitaph will read:
HERE LIES LISA SCOTTOLINE
DID SHE IMPROVE ENOUGH?
To stay on point, remodeling the kitchen means that I’m starting to look hard at my priorities, namely, spices. Please tell me that I’m not on the only woman who owns approximately 75,932 spices, accumulated over decades, and that the spices are dusted off every decade, which is the only time they’re even touched.
I’m looking at you, cardamom.
How this came about is that when I moved the oven, I lost the shelf above it, which is where I kept the aforementioned spices, and that meant that I had to find the spices a new home or concede the obvious and throw them out.
So I began to cast a skeptical eye at my spice rack.
And it took me on a tour of my own life.
Let’s begin with Marriage Rookie Enthusiasm.
In that time period of my life, I had just married Thing Two, my daughter Francesca was young and I had two stepdaughters living at home. I wanted to be not only the best mother of all time, but also the best stepmother, so I instantly bought American Mom spices, which you use when you bake apple pie. You know the autumnal array of allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves.
I made exactly one apple pie.
Divorce ensued, but I got custody of the spices.
Then it was just Francesca and me, and being Italian-American, I decided that I was going to make homemade tomato sauce, or gravy. Mother Mary made the best gravy ever, but she refused to give me the recipe because I was a lawyer.
Don’t ask.
I watched her do it and she always used onion salt, garlic salt, salt salt, and extra salt.
No fresh spices were involved.
Yet it was delicious.
Still, I could never make gravy as good as she did, and in time I gave up, though I still have the garlic salt. I feel certain that Mother Mary approves, smiling down from heaven and hoping that the garlic salt has solidified into a sodium bullet.
The next stage of my spice life was Francesca going to college, and that was when I decided I wasn’t going to act mopey because I was an empty nester, and believe me, I got over that fast.
LOL.
But in spice terms, that was the time of my Indian Awakening, an idea I got from a Williams Sonoma catalogue. I bought every Indian spice known to man, extending well beyond starter curry into garam masala, turmeric, and vadouvan. They came in round pots full of orange and yellow powders, like nightmare blusher.
These were the coolest spices ever, but I never looked at them again because as an empty nester, I stopped cooking altogether.
Which was coolest of all.
This brings us to the present day, when the only spices I use are salt and pepper.