The Project Rule

(The Greek Myth thing was fun for me yesterday, so I thought I’d give you another one. Bear with me. )

I knew this girl who once told me that she was finished with men. It wasn’t that she’d suddenly decided to come out, no. It was worse: She’d a-sexualized herself; she'd given up on men in in general because, after a series of relationships with tragically flawed, beautifully intense, gorgeously broke and ultimately self-destructive men, she’d decided that we were all much more trouble than we were worth. I asked her whether there would have been anything she would have changed about her last break-up, to which she told me:

"You know, my man has to want to be a father for his kids, to raise them as a father should; play baseball in the back and pay attention to me when I need it. I don’t need to hear about his dreams! I need him to treat me like the queen I am! I need him to treat me with the respect I deserve. I really just wish I could make myself a man, order him up and have him shipped out to me. That would be pretty much perfect.”

She got a dog that year, and now refers to him as her husband.

One of my favorite Greek myths of all time is the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor and Galatea, the very Image, in his mind, of perfect womanhood. In the Greek version, Pygmalion, who had no love for women in real life but only in their abstractest sense, sculpted this statue and began to fall in love with it. He adorned the statue with all of the things that women at the time were to have loved, even made beddings for “her” and different clothing for him to dress her in. After months of this obsessive behavior, at a festival for Aphrodite, Pygmalion gave offering and secretly prayed for the Goddess to breathe life into this statue—which of course he had built into his own sense of perfection. Aphrodite, who seems to have only ever indulged the most self-delusional of her followers, did grant this prayer, the statue became the woman Galatea, bore him a son, and they lived out their days in total and complete marital bliss.

I’m actually more a fan of the play adaptation of the myth, where a British linguist and lifelong bachelor (Professor Henry Higgins), famously aloof, sexless, and misogynistic, is approached by a flower-girl (Miss Eliza Doolittle) to be made into a “lady”. He takes her payment, and within weeks not only makes her linguistically and stylistically into a lady fit for any West-End ball, but falls in love with her in the process (whether or not he admits it to her). Unfortunately, dressings and proper English and cotillions aside, Eliza still falls in love with a boy who’d loved her all along, for all of the reasons that had kept her the flower girl who she always was and the lady ino which she was so deftly molded. In the end, friends, Eliza went off to live with the poor and perfect Freddy, leaving her Pygmalion to rot away with his books and his perfect English. For those of you who pay attention to movies and playd and such: yes, I understand that I’m leaving out the musical version, </a> but as it is good old Lerner and Loewe let Higgins off easy. Shaw gave the idiot exactly what he deserved. Herein lies the basis and foundation for The Project Rule.

Here’s the deal, friends: there have been songs written about this very topic, books, plays, musicals, movies, doctoral theses; yet for some reason, so many of us function under the delusion that we can, when met up with a person who has one or two flaws that we can’t see in a mate, try to fix. Turning a person into a “project” dehumanizes and degrades the relationship into more of a teacher/student one and not one of equals. For some of you, that might be perfect; for me it’s always ended in loss, resentment, and pain on both sides. When you meet someone, certainly you’re going to realize her flaws as much as you see that she has the perfect legs, skin, smile, kiss; whatever. Sure, she’s got an insane attachment to guns, or an eerie attachment with her high school class ring, or a fascination with jack white that you just can't grasp; but all in all, a person is what that person is, no matter what you try to change about them and, ultimately, trying to do so will backfire on both of you.

We all have created the image of The Perfect Woman or the Perfect Man in our heads, friends. Frankly, those images don’t materialize. Certainly, they're (most of them) good as guideposts to follow, but are ultimately counterproductive when we're faced with the reality of living, breathing human beings. We were none of us given the right to mold our perfect matches, no matter what the website dating services say. We are as a race of beings flawed and challenging and incredible, stupid, loving, irascible, inane, cantankerous, backbiting, generous, vivacious and utterly alive. If you see that girl across your table as someone you can fix, walk away. You don’t deserve her and, most probably, the process will destroy one or the both of you for a very, very long time to come.

If you find a person you want to fix, your time is probably better spent figuring out whether you should turn that sculptor's chisel on yourself instead. Make yourself your own project and leave her well enough alone.

Incidentally, to make sure I'm not full of shit about all of the references, here you go:

For the myth, go here: http://www.loggia.com/myth/galatea.html

For the play, go here: http://www.bartleby.com/138/

And, just in case you're curious, here's stuff about the musical: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Fair_Lady