I’ve always said that in the future I think I’ll get divorced. I’m not like planning it ahead of time, I haven’t even been in a serious relationship yet (yes gentleman, I’m single!) – but I grew up in a split household and that exposure strongly influences my marital day dreams. No pity necessary; the best thing my parents did besides have my three brothers and me is getting divorced.
The better explanation as to why I think divorce is inevitable for me is because I believe in having multiple best friends. Allow me to explain, if you will: a best friend is someone who you turn to to bitch about everything and nothing; who you don’t mind texting 15 times in a row with no response; who you don’t have to cover your pimples up for; who you trust to look through your phone because you’d never talk shit about them; whose sorrows and successes are your own and vice versa; a best friend is your soulmate.
My mom thinks that I throw around the word “best friend” too loosely, like some kind of floozy. But I can’t restrict myself to having just one soulmate BFF! I’ve got my fat camp best friends, Jewish day school best friends, and college best friends – none of whom I could ever rank on a scale of who I like the most. There’s so much pressure to have one favorite color, one favorite movie, and one best friend – but with so many incredible options it’s impossible to choose.
It’s true that my past holds a graveyard of lost friendships which I thought would be eternal; but such is life. I’ve fallen out of love with many best friends who I used to hold very dear to me. They say that the person you marry should be your best friend – your best friend who you fuck and are totally not platonic with. But if I can have numerous amounts of platonic best friends who can leave my life as quickly as they entered it, how can I have faith that a marriage will last forever? How do I know which best friend is the
right one to commit my life, mind, body, and soul to?
The answer to my seemingly unanswerable questions came to me this past weekend when I saw a play with my dad at the Club Capitol theatre. Amores Minúsculos (Tiny Loves) was the only performance he could find spoken in Spanish instead of Catalan, Barcelona’s dominant language. It’s a short stage adaptation of a comic written by Alfonso Casas.
The romantic comedy followed the story of five characters: Nacho the homosexual hunk who works at Bershka but dreams of publishing his comics; David, a heterosexual male in an unhappy relationship who unknowingly is the protagonist of Nacho’s comic; Jaime the dork in search of inspiration for his novel, which he finds in Eva, a mysterious, hot girl who claims to know the day she will die; Laura, an uptight accountant and Nacho’s best friend; and Carlos, a DJ/singer/producer who finds himself uncharacteristically falling for Laura.
The message that the play gave to its audience is that there is no “grand love” but rather “tiny loves.” There is no such thing as a perfect soulmate that lasts forever. What’s real are the relationships you fall and thrust yourself into with all your heart and body, because you’ll never know what the expiration date is. It could be as little as three days after opening yourself to that person (without refrigerating) to as long as 70 years. And if it spoils, so what? On to the next one.
A Broad on a Budget 