Green Monster and all

This was a slow San Francisco morning; the kind of morning when 2PM seems like an absurdly early end to the farmer’s market, because it’s already 1PM and I just got out of the shower and by the time we get down to the ferry building they”ll be packing up anyway and all the good stuff will be gone. So never mind. But it was a very productive morning for Conversation, which is a fine activity when the sky is grey (just ask the Irish.) And we got to talking about envy, in one of its most insidious forms. 

 

Now I know all about envy, and I know it can surface in different ways. There is Apple Juice Envy, which is envy of the enjoyment of a thing but not the thing itself. (The origins of this term date back to daycare, when all the kids were served apple juice, and I was thirsty as hell, but I hated apple juice. I envied the enjoyment of the apple juice but I didn’t actually want any.)

 

There is Personality Envy, in which you look at someone else’s “determination” or “discipline” or “ability to have casual sex without feeling dirty, used, or regretful.”  Some of this stuff is just a matter of choices one makes, and perhaps one should quit one’s bitching and go after what one wants, rather than just wishing for some magical God-given personality trait. But some of this stuff is just in us, and it will never change, and you can alter your behavior all you want but you will never be able to fundamentally alter your emotional response to a given set of circumstances. 

 

There is Career/Life Path Envy. This one is becoming increasingly more popular in the grown-up world, and it looks like it is here to stay. How much does your job pay? Where is your apartment and how awesome is it on the inside? Pretty soon it is going to be…married? How many kids? How well do they do in school? Square footage of the house you just bought? Blah blah blah. 

 

An obvious place for envy to surface is Relationships, not just the SExy kind but the friendy ones too. Are all your best stories about her? And you talk about her all the time and hang up on me in the middle of our conversation when she calls? 

 

One hopes that in a romantic relationship, the level of trust will keep growing over time, so that the tendency towards feeling jealous will just go away. But both parties have to agree to this. You have to agree to look at yourself and really figure out what is making you feel fearful or threatened, but the person you are with also has to earn your trust, both by being fully present with you while you are together, and not compromising that trust when you are apart. 

 

BUT. There is another kind of envy that can be a little harder to shake, and that is Envy of the Past. Someone once told me that when you are starting something new with someone, mentioning an ex is just a bad idea because it plants a tree of questions in the other person’s mind. So true, right? Because we all now that the people we meet have stories and scars, because we have stories and scars. And these are good, because to be with someone whose life experience is much more limited than one’s own is not really a desirable prospect (for a number of reasons.)

 

So ok, we understand that they have stories, and that those stories are part of who they are, and we have come to love who they are, and so we love those stories too, in a way. But it is still pretty painful to admit that someone came before. It is this inexplicble envy of the past, that no matter what we do from today forward, no matter how many bullshit in-jokes and intimate moments and loud screaming dirty orgasms we share with this person, we will never have had what they had with..um. The Predecessor. Yes. 

 

But there is nothing you can do. You can’t go back in time and meet the person and intervene in the Scheme of the Universe and prevent them having what they had. Right? (Everybody remember that Simpson’s episode when they time-travel? And Homer steps on a prehistoric butterfly and changes the course of history?) And even if you could, it wouldn’t matter because the person they have become, this real-life person that you now know and love, is different from who they were before. Moot. Point. 

BUt envy is a destructive thing. It is cousins with Anger, for one thing, but it is so consuming! Or it can be. (If we don’t stop now, we will become those parents sitting at the edge of the sandbox, comparing the sifting skills of our respective two-year-olds. How sad. Life is too short.)

 

So, aside from just doing our best to figure out what we want, and then just doing our damndest to make that happen, there is something to remember, and watch out cause if you’re cynical this is going to read as cheesy: No one else is you. That is not to say that no one else is sexier than you, or richer, or smarter or stronger or more talented or any of that. Maybe they are. But no one else is you. And no matter what the ex did or said or was (gave great head, that thing about parents and pets that is inarguably true, taller than you), the ex was not, and will never be, you. Even if the person you are with ends up making some bullshit unadvised decision to dump you, let’s say, or just not appreciate you, it kinda doesn’t matter because you are a unique fucking human being and no one else could possibly be you better than you could. 

 

So, in the meantime, figure out who the hell that “you” person is and what he or she wants, and then start taking action to get that. Here’s hoping that gives the ol’ green-eyed monster a swift kick in the pants, cause lord knows we don’t need that noise around here.