Closed Doors

"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us." - Alexander Graham Bell

We hear this quote, or one quite similar to it all the time, whenever something bad happens in our lives. The breakup of a relationship, the loss of a job, whenever those things happen, someone will invariably pull out this phrase, nodding wisely as if they are imparting the most important piece of wisdom in the universe. We hear the phrase often, but do we ever really listen to it, think about what it means, follow its words?

Not too long ago, I lost someone in my life. More than just someone who had captured my heart, he'd also become my friend, my closest confidant. At the time, it seemed like the end of my world. I moped around, did nothing but lament the end of the relationship, and generally make everyone around me miserable. Of course, someone pulled out the old "when one door closes..." phrase, and of course, I merely rolled my eyes like I had every other time I'd heard it. But later on, when I was alone, I heard those same words again, and I thought about them. I decided that instead of continuing to look at the closed door that was my past relationship, I'd look at the world through different eyes. I decided to look for those doors around that might be opening, to keep an open mind and explore whatever opportunities that presented themselves. I decided that what the hell - I had nothing to lose, right?

So that's what I did. I went places, I did things, I talked to people. I got on with my life. And you know what? Eventually, other doors did open, and had I not kept an open mind, they would have passed me by unnoticed. But instead, I saw each open door for what it was, took a deep breath, and walked on through. And I cannot say that for one second that I've regretted that decision.

For those of you going through something that it seems you cannot get through, let me share what I've finally learned at the age of 31...

Whatever it is you're stuck on, let it go. Look to your future. We will always see the past as better than it was, the present as worse than it is, and the future as more unclear than it truly will be. The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past. You can't go forward in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches.

Be open to new opportunities, new friendships, new loves. Trust in the fact that everything happens for a reason. It's a cliche, it's trite and overused, but generally it's true. You never know what lies around the next corner - it could be the love of your life, the job of your dreams, or anything in between. Don't close your heart or mind to that possibility.

Be happy. The happiest of people don't necessarily have the best of everything, they just make the most of everything that comes along their way. Learn to enjoy every minute of your life. Be happy NOW. Dont wait for something outside of yourself to make you happy in the future. Think how really precious is the time you have to spend, whether its with friends or with your family.

Be what you want to be, because you have only one life and one chance to do all the things you want to do. Dream what you want to dream. Go where you want to go. Life is too short to spend it hoping to change the unchangeable, and wanting what you cannot have.

Don't waste your life looking at that closed door and hoping that it will magically reopen. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it won't. Instead, look for those doors that are opening around you all the time. Find that open door meant for you, and go through it. You never know what awaits you on the other side.

Hey - your chocolate's in my peanut butter!

I have to confess something - unlike the majority of women, I'm not really much of a chocolate fan. I occasionally eat some Lemonheads, or other sour candy, but rarely chocolate. Every once in a while though, I'll get an intense craving for one particular type of chocolate candy, and I have to give in... Reese's Peanut Butter cups - perhaps the best candy in the world - to me, at least. Despite the fact that I don't really like peanut butter (unless it's Jif Extra Crunchy), and don't much like chocolate either, I love Reese's Peanut Butter cups, go figure. There's just something about the contrast between the slightly salty peanut butter, and the sweet, smooth chocolate that I really, really like. Nothing is quite like it in taste.

It's odd... you can buy Reese's brand peanut butter in a jar at most any grocery store. It's mediocre, as far as peanut butter goes. And, it really tastes nothing like the peanut butter you find in a Reese's cup. Comparing the ingredients between what's in the jar and what's in the candy, they are identical - I even went so far as to call Hershey's once to verify. So why is it that the two taste so completely different? You can buy Hershey's milk chocolate as well - in bars, and as Hershey's Kisses. It's pretty mediocre chocolate - nothing great, but nothing terrible. And again, it doesn't really taste like the chocolate in a Reese's cup. And also again, the ingredients are the same. Why is this? What is it about taking the two key items and separating them that makes them seem so much less satisfying than when they're together?

The answer is simple... you have peanut butter, and you have chocolate. Two things that on their own, each taken individually, are pretty good. But put them together, and you get something way better than either one is alone. It's the blending of the two things... the mingling of flavors, of textures, that make a Reese's cup what it is.

And that's how the ideal relationship is, too. We've all seen "that couple" - they're the perfect blend of personalities, attitudes and quirks - and when they're together, you can't help but notice how well they fit. Of course, neither of them is perfect, but put them together and they sure seem like it. He may be loud and boisterous, she may be shy - but one balances the other - him drawing her out of her shell, her calming his wilder side. The weakness possessed by one is the strength of the other, and when you mix them all together, it's the perfect blend of tastes. That's how a good relationship is - the give and take, yin and yang, chocolate and peanut butter of it all that makes it so great.

So in the context of a relationship, am I the chocolate? Am I the peanut butter? I don't really know. What I do know is that when I'm with my husband, we become something more, something better, than either of us are on our own... we become that Reese's cup.

Bridges

I have always thought of life as being much like a bridge. We are essentially trying to get from Point A to Point B in our lives, although these bridges that I sometimes imagine are anything but straight. Life is always full of little surprises and we never know which way our life will turn in the future. Every bridge however, as most of you probably know, needs a steady way to support itself from the elements. It also needs to be built in a manner that is strong yet flexible, and will withstand the test of time. This is why a lot of bridges today are built with different cables of sorts and triangles (they are the strongest shape). As I think about this, I have to pose the question... what are the support structures in our own lives? The majority of my support in life comes from a simple word - faith. By putting my faith in God, in my family and friends, in my significant other, I am simply believing that there will be a line of trust in my life - a cable that will hold my bridge up and make it even sturdier. It is this faith that I can hold onto through any storm that my bridge may encounter... and instead of being a torn down bridge, I find myself having a stronger bridge because of that storm. Perhaps instead of deciding where to build our bridges, we should first look for a support system that will allow us to get there. A support system in which we can put our trust and faith in, even if it is a bit risky at times. Because without the proper support, we would simply be a sunken road.

So on this day meant usually just for lovers, I say Happy Valentine's Day to my support system - to God, to Jake, to my sister Lori, to TD, to Courtney, to Diesel... and the rest of my friends here on teh Interweb and in the "real world" - thank you for your love, support, and friendship. Without you, I wouldn't be nearly as strong as I am today. I love you all.

You Can't Always Get What You Want

"...You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you might find
You get what you need..."

The Rolling Stones may not have been spiritual gurus, but they sure got it right on this one. At times, I think that it's the soundtrack of my life. At the risk of not saying anything new or unique, sometimes getting what we want from life can be to our own detriment. What do you want? It seems like a simple enough question. If you are hungry you desire some food. If your throat is dry, some water would be nice. Sick? How about medicine? Easy enough. But apply that same question - What do you want? - to the interpersonal relationship between a woman and a man and the great majority of us go blindingly stupid.

Perhaps I am misstating the problem. Maybe the answer is just too obvious. What do you want? Why, I want it all, of course! Freedom, security, sex, friendship, money, status, fun, excitement, yada, yada, yada. It is somewhere in this surreal world of expectation and hope that the real answer to the male/female quandary lies. I think.

You see the problem lies in the fact most of us don't know how to balance what we want with what we need. It seems to me our basic problem with the opposite sex is how often we misconstrue need with want. (Folks, this can't be that hard to understand if a guy like Mick Jagger gets it.) A real life example you ask? Sure.

A female relative (okay, okay - ME) for years dated the same kind of guy over and over. Big, handsome, usually athletic, and more often than not - dumb as a box of rocks or an outright asshole. Despite the glory of the outside package, all of them seemed to possess some kind of emotionally restrictive malaise - bitchy psychotic ex, IRS troubles, deep and abiding love of illicit substances - which inevitably kept them from being "the guy." These prime examples of manliness never failed to fail, and eventually even she (I) grew tired of the whole thing. Vowing to change, she (I) eventually met a very intelligent man who not only could spell c-o-m-m-i-t-m-e-n-t but who also knew what it meant. And no, he was not a geek. On the contrary he was exceedingly good looking, athletic, and had no state or federal agencies looking for him. Nirvana, right? Wrong! Mr. Right had a problem no amount of rationalization could conquer - he was too perfect. Yes, you read this correctly. Because he did not have an air of mystery, intrigue, and danger I very soon found him boring. Predictably, the relationship eventually fell apart of its own accord.

I'm not trying to pick on just the women out there. I know plenty of men who have also made a career out of dating boat anchor women (and I use that term loosely) whom nobody would ever think of as the sharpest knife in the drawer. These women usually look great in a bikini, or perhaps are all-stars between the sheets, or maybe are just a warm body. Just as often as women, guys stay in relationships because they simply don't like to be alone. Other men I have known seem to make a habit of getting into relationships with "stress junkies," those women who love to live life in crisis.

The bottom line in the human relationship dilemma is that for us to get anything even close to what we need we first have to understand what it is we really want. Not what we think we want, but what we really, really want. And not just from our significant other but from ourselves as well. That being accomplished, we should turn our attention to what it is we are willing to give up in the process. Yes, that's right - you actually have to give something to get something back in life.

I'm not suggesting we should settle for less all the time, but then again, what have we been doing anyway? Too often we let looks or some other superficial bullshit have too much bearing on who we spend our lives with. I understand that looks are important - nobody wants to date Quasimoto - but if that is the primary focal point you choose for a relationship, then you had better know going in that you may already be in trouble. Losers come in all shapes and sizes, but so do winners. Think about that the next time you get the itch to try something new.

Just maybe there's greater learning in not having our desires completely met. Okay, obviously. But, often getting to the core of that learning takes patience and an openness to considering other possibilities. Take time to slow down, get curious, and reflect on what's there. Because you may not ever get exactly what you want, but sometimes... you might end up getting just what you need.

Love Junkie

So, for reasons that are unimportant to the purpose of this rant, I found myself in a hotel Sunday night. Late at night and lacking anything better to do, I stumbled across the movie The Notebook on cable. Now normally, I avoid this type of movie like the plague. I have the same allergic reaction to this type of open faucet of tear-jerking swill as I do to any other book written by Nicholas Sparks - an author who never met a romantic cliché, dramatic contrivance, transparent plot point or insipid line of dialogue he didn't love like a dog in heat. The Notebook is, in fact, a laughable story all around.. a cheesy, dopey, by-the-numbers affair that fails in its every attempt to be anything other than painfully predictable. The characters are clichés straight out of the Stock Character Handbook, their actions a seemingly endless parade of poorly constructed hazy lens falling-in-love bits, mixed with the occasional limp confrontations, all supported by bad dialogue. There is not one single millisecond of originality or opaqueness of plot in the entirety of The Notebook. Yet somehow, even while rolling my eyes and sighing dramatically at the aggravatingly trite and predictable corniness of the character's circumstances, I still became honestly and emotionally invested in the story. By the end of the movie, I found myself in tears, hoping that the main characters would end up together, and sobbing like a child at the final conclusion.

Going into it, I didn't want to like this movie. In fact, I wanted to hate it with all the fury that I normally reserve for all so-called "chick flicks". And really, after watching it, I still cannot say that I liked the film. Actually, I disliked The Notebook, not because it's a rotten movie, because it IS that, have no doubt. Rather, I disliked The Notebook for what it forced me to discover about myself. At the end of the movie, as I wiped away my tears, I realized that for all my toughness, my impervious to the world facade, I'm nothing more than a hopeless romantic at my core. And the reason I avoid these films is because, often, my own life is nothing like that depicted in movies such as The Notebook.

What these types of films fail to recognize is that real life never plays out the way it does in the movies. The guy doesn't always get the girl, true love doesn't always win. But then again, if the movies were like real life, who would go see them? Nobody wants to sit through ninety minutes of actors struggling and failing with the same issues that they face in their own lives. Real life, real love, as opposed to what we see on the big screen, is messy. It hurts. It's ugly far more than it's beautiful. That's not to say it isn't still great, but it's never the way it is in the movies - all wrapped up in a neat little package, all the loose ends tied up, everybody living happily ever after. It's this vast separation between fact and fiction that is where I run into trouble.

I find myself embittered, not because I've been hurt so badly in the past and in such a spectacular manner that I no longer believe in love - that's far from the truth. I'm somehow bitter because despite how many times I've had my heart broken, I still believe in love. Deep down, I believe that love conquers all, even though I've been shown time and again that it doesn't. Despite my past, despite what common sense tells me is impossible, I believe in that all-consuming, passionate, torrid love story. That desperate, triumphing over all obstacles, clinging to the object of your heart's desire, as depicted in the still image above, from The Notebook. The kind of story where the knight rescues the damsel in distress, and they ride off into the sunset, to live happily ever after. And that proves to be my downfall time and again - ignoring what I know to be reality, while looking for that perfect movie ending.

So really, while on the surface, this appears to be a rant about a spectacularly schmaltzy movie, it's really more a rant about myself, and my mistaken ideals. They say that the first step toward recovery from any addiction is realizing that you have a problem. I consider The Notebook to be my intervention, my wakeup call. Like the heroin junkie who wakes up one morning in the gutter, I have hit bottom. It's time to pull myself up, dust myself off, and start being realistic about my expectations in the romance department. Because until I can do that, any and all relationships I'm in will be doomed to fail.

Now, if only there was a Love-aholics Anonymous...

Neurotically yours,
--jen.

The L Word

As I was watching a movie the other night, I casually remarked to a friend of mine during a dramatic scene that the downfall of most relationships is the indiscriminate use of the "L" word. Love. Ever since I said that last week, I've been thinking about it over and over. Sometimes my rambling oddball comments have a small grain of truth. I've thought back at the failed relationships I've had and those of my friends as well, and at the root of many, using the "L" word has played a part.

I think of how people blindly jump on this rollercoaster of pleasure and pain they call love and how many feel its bitter sting at the end. Is it because the idea of self-sacrifice isn't clear to them at the beginning? Is it a lack of understanding that emotions will run high and low in all relationships? Or are they just in love with the idea of love? Perhaps it is that people jump to using the word "love" far too soon, and far too easily. It saddens me that many people throw the word "love" around so much that it has lost its meaning. It has almost become a pointless word. "I love you" isn't a statement said to just end a phone conversation. It's not something that if you say it enough times, it becomes magically true. Love has truly lost its meaning (if there ever was a concise meaning to it), and people seem to say "I love you" to anyone and everyone, without really meaning it, or more accurately, without understanding the meaning of such a powerful word... such that an illusion of love is created in their minds and all emotion behind it lost...

I mean, if you think about it, is there even really a need to tell someone that you love them in the first place? If you truly love them, wouldn't your actions speak for themselves anyway? Wouldn't the two of you have such a deep understanding of how each other feels, that those three words wouldn't even need to be said? Do you have to hear it in order to understand that it's true? That's not to say that you should never say it, don't get me wrong, but to say that you shouldn't use it so much or so indiscriminately that it loses its meaning in the context of your relationship. Think of the couple that's been married fifty years - do they say it non-stop the way they did in the beginning of the relationship? Probably not. That doesn't make it any less true. I know that when I am in love with someone, it's shown through my actions, in how I look at him, in how I touch him, not by my use of any particular word or phrase. Of course I use the "L" word, I say "I love you", but if I don't say it every five minutes, that doesn't mean I love him any less.

Oh, that I had the strength to prevent others from leaping before they look, from using the "L" word inappropriately, to stop the heartbreak before it starts. But I've learned that when hearts are set on someone, even the wisest of advice often falls upon deaf ears. Experience is a harsh teacher - everyone learns that lesson at least once, and more often than not, people leave relationships with a bitter taste in their mouths and their hearts. I know this holds true for me. In fact, I can really only speak for myself.

That being said, let me also state empatically that this is not an advocation for or against relationships, or even for or against love. I'm only ranting because it seems that love, or the idea of it, is thrown about far too casually these days - be it in the media or amongst my personal acquaintances. Holding hands, smiling, kissing, "making love" and riding off into the sunset... The idea of it seems so promising, but there is so much more to love than that. There has to be. I see so many people jump headlong and fall into relationships that are bound to fail, blithely spitting out the "L" word before they could possibly experience that feeling. Commitment, self-sacrifice, forgiveness, being willing to do anything to make another happy, being there in good times and bad... these are the things that build a lasting relationship. These things - both giving them and receiving them - are what constitute love. Not just saying the word, but following through in action.

That isn't to say that I've never fallen victim to this emotional pitfall. Of course I have. I've spit out the "L" word when that really wasn't the case... Sometimes to avoid hurting another's feelings, others because I was so wrapped up in that new relationship giddiness that I said it thinking I truly meant it, only to have the harsh reality come crashing down later. However, having been taught that lesson the hard way more than once, I resolve to never speak that word blindly again... to think before I speak, without exception. Like everything else in my life though, it's a work in progress - I'm still learning.