The Expert

When I was in college I wrote for the school newspaper and my stock in trade were movie reviews or film-related articles. That was my niche. However, I wrote one piece during my tenure that deviated wildly from my normal topic. I believe it was my junior year, and the topic was “relationships.”

At 21 years old I had the unmitigated gall to pen an article about relationships – as if I knew anything. I still don’t know anything, but back then, I was somehow Dr. Phil. The article stunned people who knew me, and it got a big response on campus, more so than anything I ever wrote. It was the first time I weighed in publicly on anything that was not fluff (like movies), and I was hailed as Mr. Sensitive.

There are five, maybe six moments in time where I wish I could go back and kick my own ass. This is one of them.

I do pride myself on a certain observational quality. Most people go through the motions of life and never really examine why they behave a certain way. Now I’m not saying I ever truly learned from my mistakes or purged myself of personality traits that aren’t that attractive, but I’m cognizant of what they are, and I’ll give you a list if you ask for one.

I paid close attention to how people behaved in relationships, myself included. I wasn't overly impressed by my own behavior when things got rough, but I often saw far worse in the relationships of others.

If I recall correctly I was in a fairly new relationship at the time with a much younger girl who thought I walked on water (that didn’t last). I’m wondering if I wrote it to impress her even further. I can remember railing against the notion that the relationships of youth were fleeting and there was so much joy and misery in such short bursts of time – how you could get so close to one person and they might be out of your lives in less than six months.

Well, duh.

I look back on those days and there was so much high drama. My friends and I all went through it, but never at the same time, so it was a safe bet that when one of us was on Cloud 9 the other was in hell.

I can remember getting so fed up with it, but I was railing against the natural order of things in the article – spouting platitudes about how people hurt each other and isn’t that so terrible. I was master of the obvious.

Of course people don’t stay together at that age. Of course they move on. As significant as these relationships were (and I would never downplay that fact) they were transitory. They were the proving ground for our lives to come.

Something else I wish I could’ve told that 21-year old schmuck was that life is not easy. When you’re young and you have no other concerns everything that happens in these relationships feels like either the greatest joy or the end of the world.

I feel like telling him wait until you have to pay bills, buy a house, find a job, or develop an illness (or more than one). Wait until someone dies.

We (hopefully) gain at least a little wisdom as we get older. I look back on those days and my own naiveté somewhat fondly, because everything I’ve just discussed comes to us through the natural progression of time, but few of us have that indelible imprint of who they were at that moment (i.e. the article) to wince at.

I was a very emotional, subjective young fellow in those days, who could never see the forest for the trees. My intentions in writing the article were all good. I was trying to promote understanding, but I just did not get it.

Do I get it now? Let’s put it this way - if I could sit that young man down, who moaned over break ups and people moving on, I would steal a line from one of my favorite movies, "Ghostbusters," and tell him that when it comes to relationships, and what people are capable of, "I have seen shit that would turn you white!"