The Idea of Him & Safely Married

If you let it, The Idea Of Him can be a dark force that nudges us into relationships that, like the Sally & Joe relationship in When Harry Met Sally, may not be really traumatizingly bad for us, but are serving only as placeholders and that are wasting everyone’s time.

See, Sally thinks she’s in a “Man Who Can’t Commit” relationship – they talk it out, and that’s as far as he can go. But what she was really in was a Man Who Refuses to Settle for a Safe Marriage relationship.

When Joe actually met the girl he wound up marrying, it happened fast; what’s difficult for us as women to wrap our minds around is, this is not an insult to Sally. Sally’s a bit Type-A; she’s wracked with remorse – if she had been lower maintenance, Joe would have married her, blah blah blah. Almost unconsciously, she sees it all as a competition that she lost.

Joe is the hero here. Well, and Sally. But especially Nora Ephron – she’s conceding a fault of smart women, but it’s a concession better to face and move forward – a certain percentage of these Men Who Can’t Commit relationship scenarios are actually Women Who Want To Have Been Right. With strong hints of I Don’t Want To Have To Start Over.

Women do this all the time, and in recent decades women have wasted the universe’s time with piteous appeals that men are soul-less and fickle, and it’s pretty dadgum brave of Nora to admit that sometimes girls are just in a hurry and that the boy was right to sideswipe Safely Married and hold out for Gloriously Married.

Keep following this blog, and we’ll get you Gloriously Married.