I had an uncharacteristically lazy day not long ago. To give my brain a rest, I plopped down in front of the TV, surfed the channels, and landed on a "young chick flick," a tale targeted to twenty-something XX-chromosome owners. My first reaction to the story line was annoyance, which turned to thoughtfulness as I thought about the subtle and not-so-subtle messages in the characters' interactions.
The protagonist of the story was a woman just shy of her 30th birthday who appeared to be something of a slacker in her life. She had a hard time holding down a job and was sort of floating through life, though she did have a pretty terrific boyfriend. This boyfriend, in fact, proposed to her, but she turned him down because she needed to figure out what she really wanted. She returned home, hooked up with her old best friend, and unearthed a sort of "bucket list" she had written as a teenager-things she wanted to do by the time she was 30. One of the items was to marry her then-boyfriend.
Predictably, the best friend helped our heroine cross off items on the list. Also predictably, the high school boyfriend entered the picture. He was engaged to be married shortly, but sparks flew when he remet our heroine. This set up a set of conflicts for both parties, which were compounded by the presence of his fiancée and her boyfriend, who came to town to renew his suit.
Then came the scene that really annoyed me. The fiancée found a way to have a one-on-one conversation with our heroine and pleaded her case. She wanted her to lay off the old boyfriend and let him go ahead with the marriage. Her reasoning? The heroine was an accomplished person in her own right (as evidenced by all the things she'd recently done), but that the fiancée's only accomplishment was getting engaged to the guy in question.
"I'm nothing without him," she said, and I could feel my blood pressure rise.
What a thing to say! What kind of message was a movie like that sending to the young women who watch this kind of thing all the time?
Our heroine didn't bat an eyelash, didn't stop the fiancée and say something like, "Wait a minute, sister. If that's the way you think, you should seriously think about putting off this wedding until you have more confidence in yourself and your abilities. Entering into a marriage thinking that you can't be complete without the person you are getting hitched to is a recipe for big trouble."
No, the heroine seemed to be of the same mindset. She did "find herself," and part of that finding was deciding to marry her current boyfriend after all. Everybody was happy happy happy.
This kind of message was everywhere I turned as I grew up and it took many many years for me to break free of the notion that being in a relationship/getting married was critical to my survival or to my success in life.
I think that in this world full of misinformation and unsupportive societal "must dos," this is the most debilitating. If more women would take their attention off the men they need, have, or want and put more attention on their own personal development as whole, complete, and worthwhile individuals, there would be far fewer women looking back from middle age and wishing they'd lived a little bit differently.
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