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.

Post-Valentine's Day and The Idea of Him

The Idea of Him

In When Harry Met Sally, the title characters are discussing their ex’s, and Sally confesses that she doesn’t really miss “him”,

Sally: You know what I miss? I miss the idea of him.

The Idea of Him is a powerful force in our lives – the notion that we’ll have a date on national holidays, that we’ve succeeded, somehow.

If you’re not in a relationship, it’s possible that Valentine’s Day was difficult for you, not – almost certainly not -- because you are actually lonely, but because the notion of The Idea of Him floats in the ether, almost requiring you to feel unhappy if He’s not in your life.

Stripped of all the emotion, it’s almost a comical force.

Sally’s best friend, Princess Leia, well, anyway, Carrie Fisher, illustrates for us the absurdity of letting The Idea of Him rule our lives. She stays in a pathetic, semi, in reality just being used relationship with a married man; she keeps a Rolodex of available single men; despite the face that she has a great job and great friends, she makes herself frantic and unhappy for years. Then she meets the right guy, when it’s the right time for both of them, and everything falls into place, and she’s wasted an insane amount of time and energy, but you don’t have to.

So, we’ve got Jane Austen giving you the advice not to be in a hurry; we’ve got Nora Ephron giving you the advice not to be in a hurry; we’ve got Aunt Lee giving you the advice not to be in a hurry – it’s something to keep in mind.

Note – we’re eventually going to be spending a lot of time with When Harry Met Sally; you’ll want to consider buying the screenplay, which will make it easier to keep up and will get you acquainted with screenplay formatting, because I’m going to convince you to write your own.




Next, The Idea of Him and Safely Married.