Find man, lose him, repeat cycle

The thinking girl's guide to serial monogamy.

By Carina Chocano

Jan 28, 2003 | Despite the looming threat of repeated failure, people as a people are wildly optimistic about their prospects for love. In fact, get enough drinks in them, and just before they try to hug you, a surprising number of people will confess to a heartfelt belief that love is all there is in this crazy, mixed-up slag heap of a world.

While this belief is not entirely our fault, it's nothing to be proud of, either. Children who watch too much television harbor similar beliefs about sugary breakfast cereals, and we don't think them adorably romantic. What is love, anyway, aside from a liquor-fueled period of psychosis counteracted with a lifetime's worth of received romantic notions and a tingling sensation in the pants? Of course, it's love's mysterious qualities that account for a large part of its enduring entertainment value. Most of us are attracted to rare and mysterious things, like truffles and Greta Garbo. Too much information is almost always a turnoff. (Note how "Foie Gras" sounds delightful, yet "Spreadable Ruptured Liver" does not.) In fact, love is a nightmare of compromise and generosity.

Still, when it goes wrong, when it fails to appear, or when it comes home blind drunk at three A.M. and pees on the bed, we experience disappointment and a crushing sense of failure. This causes many of us to suffer from what my mother (a picturesque foreigner) amusingly calls "low self-steam." We blame ourselves. We vow to embark on a vigorous self-improvement program the very next day. We may even purchase a self-help manual, or maybe a mug with an encouraging saying on it. But the path to self-improvement can be an expensive and hazardous row to hoe, assuming one would even want to hoe a row in the first place. Most of us, on consideration, would prefer not to.

In such a climate, it is not easy to talk about serial monogamy. For one thing, we don't have the words. Look up the word "relationship" in the thesaurus, and right away you'll see the problem. "Blood relation" doesn't do it, unless you have an attractive cousin and have decided to take advantage of recent changes in the law. "Connection" seems a weak and rather tepid alternative, given the highly volatile nature of this particular type of "connection." "Dating" -- an antiquated word that refers to something people did in the fifties and stopped doing once it became okay to openly sleep around -- doesn't describe it either. Relationships can begin as early as the first "date," even if that "date," as such, never takes place.

But where are the words for that thing that happens when you meet someone (say, in college or at your first job or through a friend), hang out for a few weeks, keep hanging out for a few more years, and move in together, making sure not to purchase any big-ticket items together without holding on to the receipts? And what box do you check on your insurance forms when you've been living with the same person for five years but still aren't sure you want to get married because there are some things you have to work on first?

You know. Relationships. What's another word for them? It may very well be a semantic problem. As words go, "relationship" is conveniently elastic, and can be used to describe any number of associations, connections, affiliations, dalliances, flings, flirtations, long- and short-term bonds. In almost every instance, it is used to describe ambivalent sexual liaisons that are neither legally binding nor particularly exciting.

It is not known, exactly, when the word "relationship" came to replace other, more descriptive, terms like "courtship," "engagement," "marriage," "illicit extramarital love affair," and "rebound." Experts trace its modern usage back to a time when people were no longer forced to conduct their love affairs in private, but were still too embarrassed to use the word "lover" in public. Thankfully, this is still the case.

I do not claim to be an expert in the field of successful relationships. But if any subject lends itself to the sort of indolent, poorly researched, and whimsically half-cocked theories I will put forth in this mercifully slim volume, it's the practice of segueing from one committed relationship to another without pausing to consider why one is segueing from one committed relationship to another.

Is there advice contained in this book? Yes, but it's terrible. On the other hand, it's probably just the sort you generally give yourself, so there's no hard work involved. If you follow it, you will learn how to leap blindly from relationship to relationship, how to ignore your better instincts, how to drag out a doomed affair, how to enter into an exciting rebound, how to make the most of your ex-girlfriend persona, and more -- just like you've been doing all along. The fact is that serial monogamy is now the norm. Consequently, there's no reason to keep looking upon it as some kind of repetitive failure pattern. Maybe we should just start regarding it as a flower pattern or paisley.

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