Lessons on Love Learned from Watching Court TV: A Cynical List of Foolproof Rules.
<You can learn a lot by watching angry couples on Court TV. Our personal favorites are Judge Judy and The People's Court, but really, you can see the same scenarios being enacted in every television courtroom.
These shows, my friends, are the real raw thing. In real life, people who fall in love are often credulous, pathetic, undignified, and stupid. Such people tend to fall in love with--and sometimes marry---people who are venal, greedy, shameless, amoral, undignified, and stupid. The credulous ones end up in court because they just refused to believe that their situation wasn't special.
Though the dynamics are not a pretty sight, the stories they tell when they sue each other are instructive. I could write a book about things you can learn about relationships from watching court TV, a whole cynical book, but instead I'll content myself with one mere cynical list of rules---rules which are as inalterable as the law of physics.
Le1. If the person you're in love with is still married to someone else, then he--or she--already doesn't love you enough. Furthermore, it isn't going to get better. It never gets better. If the person isn't head over heels in love with you at first---to the extent of viewing every second that isn't spent in your company as a second lost---then he (or she) isn't ever going to be in love with you at last. I don't care how many children he has or how many of them there are or whether his wife or her husband has all the money. Real love doesn't take any account of reason. Enjoy your affair if you must, but keep your options open; otherwise, you will be spending every Christmas alone for the foreseeable future. Believe it.
He might divorce his wife, but if he does, it won't be in order to be with you.
2. If the person you're with resents having to keep you informed of his or her whereabouts, that person is not a good prospect for a long-term relationship. People who are intimately involved with one another are reciprocally interested in knowing that the other is safe, comfortable, and not ill or dead or in trouble.
3. ON THE OTHER HAND, if the person you're with demands a minute by minute account of your whereabouts, monitors your phone usage, gets torqued if you want to go anywhere without him or her, stalks you when you go out, checks up on you regularly, reads your emails or your text messages, or otherwise by any sign that he or she feels entitled as a consequence of love to control you, RUN LIKE HELL before it's too late; or if it already IS too late, proceed with extreme caution to get help. It shouldn't make you feel loved; it should make you feel pissed off and shit-scared. Find someone who recognizes that you're a separate person.
4. If someone you've been dating for less than six months asks for a loan or gift of money, give him or her the money if you must, but get out of the relationship. A person who wants your love will yearn for your respect, and a person who would ask someone he or she hardly knows for money is a person who cares more about the money than about respect. Also, if you do loan the person money, at the very least, make sure you use a check, write "loan for [purpose]" on the check, and ask the person to sign a writing setting forth the amount and intended payment date.
If you've been seeing the person for longer than six months, use your judgment about whether you need to break off the relationship, but still follow the procedure above. Do ask yourself before you lend the money why it is that a responsible adult would need to borrow it. Has your loved one no bank account, no credit, and no family or friends?
Don't move in with someone you haven't been dating for at least a year. And never, EVER invest in the business of someone you're involved with but not married to.
5. Love can't be bought or won. In general refrain from doing anything at all that would tend to prove how much you love the person. Don't buy expensive gifts (except perhaps for special occasions), pay the person's child support or college tuition, or buy the person's groceries.
Keep the cards and gifts to a reasonable minimum. Too much too soon is scary, especially if the person is still deciding about you.
Don't make stupid "generous" gestures such as paying for the person's fare on a world cruise unless it is your intent to make a no-strings-attached gift (which it won't be).
Don't---DON'T---pay for the person's breast implant surgery or tattoos. On the same ground, don't have implants put in for the person's benefit or have his or her name or logo tattooed on your body.
If the person needs that sort of incentive to be with you, you really are better off on your own.
6. If you suspect the person is seeing someone else, either end the relationship immediately or make up your mind to live with your discomfort till you get further evidence one way or another. But no fair gathering the evidence yourself. No reading letters, emails, or text messages, listening in on phone conversations, or hiring a private detective. An adult---including a married adult---has the right to privacy and autonomy. If the person you're with has a secret he or she is keeping from you, that's an adult's privilege.
Yours is to end the relationship if it's making you uneasy. If you're feeling uneasy, let your lover know. If you're not satisfied with the response, you can walk away. You can't make the person love you and only you.
7. If someone wants to leave you, assume that you will never, ever be happy with that person. No one who is in love ever wants to leave. Let him or her go.
Maintain your dignity. It's the only way to ensure that the person will remember you with regret and affection. When the loved one thinks of you afterward, you don't want the image in his or her mind to be your red, sweaty/weeping, yelling/screaming, cursing face, now do you?
Let the person go so you can move on to the next thing.
8. People with strange sexual proclivities (I'm talking here about any sexual obsession or fetish that isn't principally concerned with actual sex) have a problem. Somewhere in their brains, sex and other things that aren't about sex have somehow become entangled. The wires are crossed and there's probably nothing the person can do about it without help you're not qualified to give. Furthermore, the odds are high that at some level (including the conscious one) the person doesn't want your help. People tend to enjoy their own strange proclivities.
If you don't share the particular proclivity, forget about a relationship. Don't listen to promises by the person to change. The conscious mind can never hold out against the unconscious.
And definitely don't be lulled into false hope by the person's promise to go into therapy. You've got other things to do, like finding someone who shares your strange sexual proclivities.
9. A person who becomes verbally abusive when angry is not an adult. You shouldn't be involved with someone who isn't an adult. End the relationship at the very first sign.
If someone flies off the handle in your presence---never mind whether it's at you or the vending machine---don't give second chances.
And that goes DOUBLE for someone who becomes physically violent, even if the violence consists in kicking the vending machine or hurling a cell phone into a wall.
Don't let anyone tell you that such conduct is normal or that it's normal in their family. It might well be, and so what?
Don't listen to excuses. Don't wait around to find out if anger management will work.
***If you're already in an abusive relationship, get help in getting out of it. Just walking out on a dangerous person can put you in extreme danger. If you're in that predicament, contact your local crisis center or battered women's shelter before you do anything that might put you at risk.
10. No one ever falls in love because of great sex. This includes all men everywhere. Nor do people fall in love because the other one gets pregnant. Love isn't a cause and effect sort of feeling. It can't be induced or evoked. It happens because of the way you make the person feel in general, not because of what you do to or for the person.If people fell in love based on great sex or its consequences, the phrase "baby mama" would not exist.
11. A lover who is not what Judge Judy calls "age appropriate" always has other motives for being with you than love. If the other person is much younger, you'd better make sure you understand what those motives are, so that you can ask yourself whether or not being with someone on those terms is acceptable to you.
It doesn't matter how many times a billionaire or film star in late middle-age tells the public that he's got a great body and can still cut the mustard; we're never going to believe that the 26 year old he married is married to him only because she decided that he was the man of all men she most wanted to be with. The same applies to women, only more so, because women seem to mind more than men do about not being loved for themselves.
A basic rule of nature: young things don't go with old things unless the older partner can offer substantial advantages to make up for the absence of youth.
Without such advantages, you will never ever hang on to your young lover. It's not that you have to compete with younger men (or women); it's that you can't.
12. The person you love isn't special and neither is your relationship. A person whose personal history, character, or condition of mind is such as to explain WHY he or she is the sort of person rules 1-9 warn against is still a person the rules warn you against. There are lots of people like that out there.
Even if it's the person's misfortune rather than his or her fault, the effect is still the same: the person isn't someone you can be with.
Comments