This week in Sunday Life I discuss The Notebook

If you ever find yourself in the laundry at a party skewered against the tub of stubbies by some eye-glazing, go-nowhere conversation, try this tactic. Ask everyone’s thoughts on The Notebook. In my experience everyone has a take on this 1996 novel, turned into a film in 2006. And it’s always pleasantly diverting.

I mean, most of us admit to only having half-watched the movie, and only to witness Ryan Gosling work his magic. Right? Blokes will say their wife made them do it. But in the next breath they’ll confess it made them cry. I know an ex-world number one light heavyweight boxer who’s watched it 14 times and a burly fireman who’s seen it nine. Both cried every time. Which is a phenomenon in itself.

But what I find interesting when I spike party small talk with such a conver-bomb is that invariably women say they love the film because the female protagonist Allie – who’s faced with choosing between first love Noah and her posh, sweater-n-chinos fiancé – eventually goes with her heart. Chicks love this.

Blokes, however, say they get all prickly-eyed because the dude who sticks to his belief that he’d found his girl (and built a house in readiness for her return) wins the day. The nobleness entailed in this and the fact he stands by Allie through all kinds of calamities hits a waterworks nerve for men. Chicks also love this.

Choosing to go with your heart, and determined, stoic nobleness – it’s fundamental Venus vs Mars stuff. But at the core of both takes is the same principle, I think. A “good” decision was made. And committed to. Simple! Phew!

Since seeing the film myself, I’ve always wanted to know author Nicholas Sparks’ take on love. Is he a romantic? A cynic? This week I got my opportunity during his visit promoting his seventeenth novel The Best of Me.

Today. This. Dedicated to Pete.

I saw Gotye play live a few months back. The most sublime experience. He played about six or seven instruments during the gig, dancing between each one. It was a dance, I tell you! More than six million people have viewed this on Youtube, so apologies if you already viewed it. But I reckon it’s special. It’s my soundtrack to today.

This song is drenched in the kind of sadness we all know. Rejection. With a double coat of (feigned) apathy.

The sadness of when the other person looks like they’ve “won” in the hurt game, because they seem to just not care – sending a friend to get the records, treating you like a stranger. You don’t see it as their hurt playing out. You see it as them moving on without you. You lost. They won because you were nothing. We never see it clearly in the moment.

Told myself that you were right for me
But felt so lonely in your company
But that was love and it’s an ache I still remember

Definitely an ache I still remember…we convince ourselves of all kinds of things when we don’t want to be left behind in love. This spoken as someone whose experience flies in the face of the “it’s takes half the length of a relationship to get over a deep love”. I take double.

What do you think? Is the pain of being “somebody they they used to know” about feeling like you lost? And because they won, they somehow know more than you about life and love and everything, and always did, and so now you’re left without their “knowingness” on TOP OF IT ALL…on your own?

I’ve been thinking about this a bit. In part to understand what I’m seeking. In part to understand my friends’ relationships…some of which I don’t fully…get.

Pic by Javier Lovera

I used to believe there was a One.

I now believe arranged marriages can often produce better relationships than when we’re left to our devices. We create our love, once we decide. For a VERY interesting discussion of this see Sheena Iyengar’s book The Art of Choosing (she compares different relationships and finds the arranged ones are far happier 20 years down the track. It’s a terrific read.) I’ve put her TED.com talk below…as a sideline.

So the point is…we choose love. We choose to make the relationship work.

I used to believe relating was about facing each other and seeing each other in each other’s eyes.

I now believe relating is about travelling side by side, looking in the same direction. Every now and then we look across at each other and prod each other on with a kind smile.

I used to believe we found our match.

Today I simply share this. A poem by Oriah. I’ve been thinking a lot about the kind of love I seek in my life. And then someone recited this to me.

I found it interesting to read the poem as a message to myself, rather than as something I impose on to an “other”. It’s always better to do this when you stumble across something that strikes a chord….

The Invitation

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living. I want to know what you ache for, and if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.

It doesn’t interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon. I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain! I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own, without moving to hide it or fade it, or fix it.

This week I play relationship games

I’ve just found a word to describe one of the most spleen-tearing, devastatingly destructive relationship scenarios a soul can ever face.  If you’re old enough to read this, you’ve no doubt been there. You’ve stood opposite someone you love, mired in a fight (about wet towels on the floor?) that’s lasted all night.

It’s Sunday afternoon and you haven’t slept or left the house and you’ve forgotten what you’re fighting about. Both of you so desperately want the other to give in, but neither can move, paralysed by a need to see a sign of love from the other. If you compromise first you feel you lose. If you don’t, you sink deeper into the stalemate.

You’re in anguish, screaming through tears. You’re due at the neighbours for dinner. But there you are, staring at each other across the boggy, battle-scared Flanders Fields of your disconnect. And you couldn’t be further from peace.

Oh, I’ve been there. And I hope I’m never drafted to another war like it again.

Anyway, the word, from the Yaghan language is mamihlapinatapai, which translates as, “looking at each other hoping the other will offer to do something that both parties desire to have done but are unwilling to do themselves”. Ha! Perfect! The Guinness Book of Records lists it as the most succinct word in any language, and it’s regarded as one of the hardest to translate. Go figure.

I learned this week that this particular relationship scenario is of some interest to game theorists, mathematicians dedicated to solving sticky human quandaries with tactics used in everyday games like cards and chess. Game theory seems to have had a spike in popularity lately, possibly due to it being 60 years since John Nash, as immortalized in the film A Beautiful Mind, devised his Noble Prize-winning theory the Nash Equilibrium (a point in a relationship from which neither party can escape independently without landing in a worse situation). And so it was that I shared a peppermint tea with Australian-born game theory writer Len Fisher, author of Rock, Paper, Scissors, who explained to me strategies for negotiating through the grimmest of relationship stalemates. So I’m never drafted again.

Over the past week debate has been raging about a few studies and op-eds that – sigh – tell us that women who are smart and successful don’t score blokes. What do we all think of this?

This Psychology Today report says people who’ve always wanted to be successful (since they were kids) grow up to be single.

“Those who were married valued meaningful work less than single men and women did…Those who valued meaningful work when they were in high school were more likely to be single 9 years later.”

Then the New York Times waded in with a story about female empowerment killing romance.

Now, as more women match or overtake men in education and the labor market, they are also turning traditional gender roles on their head, with some profound consequences for relationship dynamics.

It identifies three types of scenarios that play out for ambitious chicks

1. successful women in their 30s who have trouble finding a mate.

2. the alpha-women who end up with alpha-men but then decide to put career second when the babies come.

3. there is also a third group: a small but growing number of women who out-earn their partners, giving rise to an assortment of behavioral contortions aimed at keeping the appearance of traditional gender roles intact.

As much as I can’t stand these types of generalising stories that express a bafflement that things change when, um, we change things, it’s certainly been my experience. (Oh, and I HATE how this gender disconnect is blamed on female empowerment…!!! Isn’t it just because the world is shifting that romance has changed?).

I agree that while women now fight in wars and sit on boards, when it comes to relationships we revert to old-school roles. Women are still attracted to men who look/act like providers  – so they go after men with money. Men still like women who can be good child bearers – so they like chicks with boobs and happy to stay at home (read: not so big career plans).

And men do tend to find fierce ambition in a woman unattractive. There I said it. It’s true. If it’s straight ambition, without any room for vulnerability… room for them…they run. And I say this as someone who pushes 99% of men away inadvertently. Over time I’ve worked out that men balk from smart chicks in part cos it all seems too hard. Being with a smart woman demands a man rise to the occasion.

But it’s also because it leaves little room for the man to be masculine. To be in his masculine role and feel himself.