Nobody puts baillee in the corner

I know I know. Long time, no write. I was in a creative rut. Heck, I was in a life rut. But I’ll get more into that with my next blog post. For now, I want to talk about couples.

Before I get into the meat and potatoes of this post, I want to set out the T.G. I. Friday’s mozzarella sticks. First and foremost, I’m not writing this with anyone in particular in mind. It’s a GENERALIZED post. This disclaimer merely serves to avoid any awkward tweets or text messages. Secondly, introducing the topic of couples usually evokes an emotion that is best personified through the eye roll of a teenage girl talking to her parents followed by the almost demonic guttural groaning in response to her parents asking her to do any basic human task. This isn’t one of those posts though. I’m not going to complain about being single. I’m not going to use this as a platform for why I like to be independent. I’m not going to keep writing about what this blog post isn’t. Now that we’ve finished the appetizer, let’s get to the meal.

When I was but a wee baby Baillee, I had specifications for my significant other. They had to be taller, more muscular (or at least defined), and for a while, Jaret Reddick from Bowling for Soup. I want to wear their hoodies and over-sized shirts. I wanted them to be able to rest their chin on my head. I wanted them to have made the album A Hangover You Don’t Deserve. I had a checklist to cross off. Sure, as I grew up some of the requirements changed (sorry Jaret), but most of the specifications just changed into other traits. They needed to be funny and smart and pop culture savvy and quite frankly, my equivalent. The day you realize you want your significant other to essentially be you is rather jarring. You don’t quite reach the level of narcissism that would make Kanye wryth with envy, but you don’t quite reach the level of enlightenment that would make Siddhartha peacefully nod either. It’s scary. It’s weird. It’s the result of a high level of intoxication. For the most part, it simply makes you rethink every preconceived notion you’ve ever had about romance.

The one thing I forgot to mention in my intro was that I’m also not hear to blame the media. I’m not saying rom coms can’t, in some way, be attributed to my checklist. But they aren’t the only factor. I’m also not hear to fully blame society (okay, I’m kind of here to blame society, and society and the media sometimes tend to be bosom buddies sooooooo). Don’t get me wrong, society DEFINITELY played a part. As a girl who hit my growth spurt early, a lot of the movies and TV shows I was watching lead me to believe being tall wasn’t something to be proud of, and I would never find a fella. Rarely did you see a girl taller than a guy. A lot of the women I saw were either petite and cute and found a guy who was quirky and taller than them or they were tall and defined and found a guy who a douche bag with a good heart. Oh yeah, and he was also taller than them. These couples were perfect. That’s the problem.

No couple is perfect. Relationships are flawed. You fight. You make up. You might even break up and then make up. Relationships are good and bad. You make each other absolutely happy at times and absolutely miserable at other times. The important thing though is there are more good times than bad. When you strip away the physical features of each person, what’s left is what matters. It doesn’t matter who is taller or funny or smarter or weighs more or wears t-shirts more ironically (That’s what couples do for fun, right?). It’s about the passion and the love. It’s about whether or not they make you a better person. It about whether or not at the end of the day you can say you’re truly happy. Love doesn’t have any definitive physical attributes, so why force it to? It’s the feeling you have for your mother when you realize she pawned all of her jewelry for your college education or your friend brings you cough syrup and tissues to work or your copy of The O.C. box set comes in the mail. Love has no bounds, so why constrict it? You love your mom, your friends, and Seth Cohen, and each one of these loves is different and looks different. Don’t let someone’s physicality stop you from asking them out. If you really like them, stop at thinking Wow, I really like them, not Wow, I really like them, but (insert physical characteristic here).  It’s definitely a hard habit to break, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have to fend off the apprehensions in my head, but I feel like you look at everything differently when you stop hindering yourself. You also finally get inspired to write a damn blog post after almost a week and a half of a creative block, so everyone wins.