Daniel Sloss wished his girlfriend would just die.
Saving him the stress of a break-up. His 2018 Netflix stand up comedy show is very funny. Also very serious.
His basic theme: most people waste their lives with a sub-optimal partner. When at age 7 he asked his dad the meaning of life, the answer likened it to a jigsaw puzzle, which we assemble without having the box picture to reference. So we work from the corners and edges, eventually filling in the middle.
And in a relationship, the question is how the other person fits into one’s puzzle, and helps complete the picture. But Sloss — at 26 — felt that a relationship actually distorts the picture, from what one’s true self would fill in. Thus subverting the true self.
He did manage to extricate from that girlfriend he’d wished would die — in his telling, a girlfriend from Hell — but the experience seems to have poisoned his take on the whole subject. He deemed it okay to be single, and thus true to one’s self, rather than compromising it in a relationship. You have to love yourself first and foremost. He posited that if the other person doesn’t love 100% of you — that is, including all your bad points — they don’t really love you. And while you might seemingly love each other for a few months, after that initial rush, not likely.
Sloss stressed more than once that there are 7-1/2 billion people out there, the perfect partner surely among them, so why compromise with one less than perfect? Actually, about half that 7-1/2 billion are the wrong gender; most are in the wrong age bracket; or not single; or don’t speak your language; et cetera. Checking out more than a few is logistically impossible. And your attraction to an ideal match might not be mutual.
So now we’re really looking for a needle in a haystack. Sloss’s shtick exemplifies the perfect as the enemy of the good. While he held that nothing short of a 100% match would do, I’d suggest accepting 90%. Maybe even 60%.
I spent twelve years with a gal who’d soon fallen out of love with me. That made for a tortuous relationship; when she finally left me for another man, I was partly devastated, but also partly relieved. And, apropos Sloss’s talk of wasting one’s life, I did see a wasted decade. Yet it made me a deeper human being — and paved the way for a better future. After that, I was ready to accept 60%. Though I lucked out, and got 100.
I did love myself, but wanted more. Yes, singlehood is okay, but we are biologically programmed by evolution to crave connection to others. My life would be far less meaningful, to me, if not deeply shared with another.
And if another person alters your jigsaw puzzle from what it would otherwise have been, that’s not a bad thing. Your original picture was not an immutable sacred one. It was instead a work in progress; and we grow as people when our puzzle picture is changed by other people crashing into it. That, indeed, is life.
Someone can love you without loving literally everything about you. Sloss himself also suggested that the other person’s quirks you don’t love are actually part of the overall package you do love. Seemed at odds with his general message. But no two people can ever be perfectly compatible. The key is for both, wanting a mutually rewarding relationship, to accept each other’s picture, and work with it.
And while no two people are entirely alike, Sloss talked as though there’s always a fundamental incompatibility. But though we say “everybody is special,” the reality is that most people are not that special. There’s a standard model. And falling in love without a perfect match is extremely common; there’s even a bit of truth in the notion of opposites attracting. People’s differences can complement each other. Meantime there’s a basic quality of humanness that everybody shares, and part of it is that good will can overcome differentness. All this explains why most people do wind up more or less permanently in a relationship with another. It obviously must satisfy some deep human need.
Many writers have eloquently extolled the virtues of solitude and solitariness. Yet loneliness is a major societal problem; kind of an epidemic. Life is about maximizing feelings of well-being, and loneliness is a big impediment, a source of widespread pain. (It has something to do with the opioid crisis.) If the alternative is loneliness, then accepting — even embracing — a 60% relationship can make much sense.