I think it’s been a while since I started asking myself, “What is happening to our traditions?” I happily assume you don’t consider having a family or, more importantly, marriage, as traditions. But it seems to me that Western culture has been twisting this idea around. Nobody knows what they want, because we no longer agree on traditional roles in marriage or the relationship between men and women. The average age of marriage has increased incrementally over the past 50 years.
Behavioral addiction, as a result of hedonistic cultural reinforcers, has become commonplace, it seems. My question is: “What is good in the long term?” Is marriage a flawed concept, bound to end poorly? What is love, and what is the correct definition of it?
After reading McAdams’ narrative identity theory, my ideas about many things have changed, without me even realizing it. If you look at life as a story—and divide it into chapters, units, pages, paragraphs, sentences, and words—there is a lot you can do. If you believe you’re the author of your own life, and act as if you are, you begin to realize that life is what you define it to be. If you feel bad, you are to blame. Maybe someone else did something, but you’re the one who focuses your mental energy on it and keeps it alive.
The character “Kirk Kettner” in the movie She’s Out of My League is a good example. He looks at himself with disgust, based on other people’s opinions—especially his family’s, who constantly undermine him. Just imagine you’re a child and the people around you—your family—tell you that you’re nobody. As a child, you trust your family the most, so you internalize their words as core beliefs. Years later, you look inside yourself and find yourself unable to move beyond what they defined you as. When you adopt their version of your story as your own, you’re no longer yourself—you become them.
This is what happened to Kirk in the movie. He finds a girlfriend who he believes is out of his league. But is she really? Isn’t love just belief? When you love someone, you believe they love you back. But the problem with love is that we tend to fall in love with projections of another person. You see what you want to see. You fall in love with the picture you’ve drawn of someone. But a person is more than a million pictures.
Your drawings are false until you’ve turned them into questions, long conversations, and shared experiences. Molly likes Kirk. She is stronger and seems more self-assured, but Kirk is doubtful and confused in the middle of the unknown. He doesn’t want to hear Molly when she tells him, “The ideas you keep repeating about yourself are wrong.” He cannot believe he has done this to himself. Even the idea of confronting it terrifies him. So, he tries to run away—cowardly—by suppressing his emotions and thoughts. Thank God he has friends who care about him; otherwise, he might have ended up regretting the opportunity he had with Molly.
What I’m trying to say is this: “You need to be careful about what you draw for yourself and what sentences you keep repeating about yourself. You become who you act out and what you say over time.” It’s scary, I know, because it makes you responsible for your actions—and leaves no one else to blame.
