Behind Closed Doors

“When everything else fails, you just go with whatever works.” – Boris Yellnikoff

Larry David’s character, Boris Yellnikoff, the star of the new Woody Allen film Whatever Works, has a view of life and relationships that is somewhat depressing, but I found to be overwhelmingly healthy in the end. David plays a neurotic genius who is trying to piece his life together after a failed marriage and a subsequent misfire of a suicide attempt. He doesn’t know where to turn. His life takes a series of fortunate and then unfortunate turns, and in the end he sticks to his guns about what it takes to create a healthy and long lasting relationship. He believes that the randomness and worthlessness of existence is what keeps us all going every day. We all take whatever small pieces of life that we can and try to learn from them but it’s generally pretty difficult to be prepared for the worst. It hit right at home for me, and even as I turned out of the theater and strolled up the empty aisles I noticed that the only other people in the theater were of retirement appropriate age. I swallowed the lump in my throat and chalked it up to my parents ability to hand down their taste in film to my sister and I.

There is a moment in the movie where in a non characteristically brazen manner, Yellnikoff expresses how coincidental his having met his new trophy wife truly is. It got me thinking about how incredibly constant, complicated, convoluted, confusing, and compromising the world is. After having made a ton of rash decisions about which girl to sleep with, which one to follow around at a bar, which one to go on a date with, which one to dump, which one to go steady with, which one to be jealous of, and which one to consider dating but then get terrified by at the proposition of being exclusive with – I have come to the conclusion that there are thousands of different little decisions that we can make every day that lead to each action. (Most of the time we can’t even tell if those decisions are positive or negative, we just keep going because there’s no other option!)

The nature of life in general means that relationships are fairly random and concocted at the hands of not just two people face to face, but the actions and reactions of hundreds of thousands of other people over small periods of time. This may seem overtly philosophical and downright silly but it’s actually just a very simplified version of saying that the world is so vast that it sometimes feels out of our grasp. When two people are face to face with each other they do and say things that they would never say out in public in front of their friends or loved ones mostly because they’re afraid to say or do exactly what they’re thinking. (A quick tangent: when someone writes you a text message, you have all the time in the world to think about how you’re going to react to it. Thus, it’s not a brutally honest or forthright answer most of the time. If they say it right to your face, the way you react is simply the way you react. There’s no changing it. Right?)

As a group of friends and I drove away from the theater I couldn’t help but notice how different some relationships are when the two people are only with each other. This is something most people can relate to whether it has happened to you or to a couple you know. (I would call this the best example of why we should never judge others relationships because it’s impossible to know what goes on when there is nobody else around!) Then again, it is generally very important for most people that their significant other can mingle with their friends and family on a regular basis as part of the stipulations for being in a healthy relationship. It is one of the scariest thing ever to fret about whether or not your girlfriend or boyfriend is going to do well with your family for the first time. I still can’t sit up straight thinking about meeting my first girlfriends parents. I think I’d be nervous to talk to them today even if she wasn’t there.

Both of my relationships were largely based on being alone with one another. In the first one, I was jealous of all my friends for hanging out together when I wasn’t there because I was spending time with my girlfriend in some cruel attempt to batter my life with hardships. In the second one I simply wanted to keep her away from every guy on the planet, A-Z. She liked guys quite a bit and unfortunately for me she acted on it several times.

However unfortunate those experiences may have been, in the end you kinda just have to go with whatever the wind may bring you.

Recently the wind hasn’t been ferociously active and I’ve been forced to go with whatever works.