Everybody Wants This

We are entering an age in which we the people are excited and even tantalized by watching healthy, supportive, communicative relationships depicted in our stories. This is, above all else, so fucking cute of us and shows that the time of unconsciously choosing partners that devalue us in veiled hopes of rewriting our personal history and the story of our original wound has officially jumped the shark.

This has most recently become evident by the wild popularity of the Netflix series, Nobody Wants This (created by Hot Blonde Funny Girl Rich Bitch Erin Foster.) The premise is a hot blonde funny girl with a suspiciously fabulous apartment in LA leaves behind the world of shitty dudes and dead-end dating in lieu of an ultra-charming good boi hot Rabbi. It’s an unlikely romance, except that they are equally attractive, somehow both single in their mid-40s with minimal baggage- save the hauntingly beautiful and ethnically unambiguous ex, Rebecca. 

We the audience are absolutely ingratiated by Adam Brody, as we have been since we were teens, watching The OC with our best take on beachy highlights a la Marissa Cooper. The fact that we are now more interested in the grounded-if-a-bit-neurotic Seths of the world than the broodingly complex Ryans is further evidence of our nascent healing. But to say that the relationship between Kristen Bell’s Joanne and Adam’s Noah is the gold standard of a budding healthy relationship is dead ass wrong you guys. This is just a new kind of fairytale, one in which Prince Charming is less avoidant and more of a sexy feminist hero. 

Halfway through the pilot episode I started texting my friends to tell them to watch. One by one the responses came in; they had already watched it and hadn’t mentioned it to me because they thought it would be triggering. I laughed it off, how sweet of my friends to think I’m that sensitive. It wasn’t until about 5 episodes in that I knew what they were talking about. And they were right.

Here’s the thing… I am so here for fantasy. Not all entertainment needs to by hyper-realistic and bent on exposing truth and injustice and the rawness of the human experience. Some can just be nice, cute, quippy, sweet, and understatedly sexy. This is actually so much the way I write that I plan to follow a bunch of the writers on IG because I think we should be friends. They absolutely nailed the assignment and I begrudge them nothing. However, for me, this show is anything but fantasy. I lived it yawl, and lemme tell you how it ends:

{spoiler alert for anyone who hasn’t finished the series, although if you’ve watched one ep you’ve probably watched them all because as previously mentioned, it IS fun/cute/sexy/etc.}

Noah comes after his tiny Shiksa goddess, with her rebellious spirit and her vulnerable confidence- the bane of his mother’s existence- casting aside his aspirations of becoming Head Rabbi at a prominent Synagogue. This, I promise you, is the beginning of his resentment towards her, as well as his frustration that even if she were willing to comply with the expectations and responsibilities of his status, it would never be without strain. And that strain will grate on everyone. 

What is yet to be explored by the show is the fact that, whether Noah is made Head Rabbi or not, the cultural implications of being seen as an “outsider” to his family and wider community gets very fucking old, not just to the outsider herself, but to those who will hold her flaws and her otherness against her no matter how hard she tries to show them that she is worthy of their love and respect.

Noah’s role in his family is what it is. He’s not a kid. The time to dissent from his family’s (namely his mother’s) expectations of him has long passed and he will spend his life compartmentalizing his family and his partnership, and begging both sides to try harder. The Shiksa is out-numbered and naturally wants the approval of the matriarch, and so she will either: A. try to be everything the matriarch wants her to be and pull out every trick in her spiritual toolbox to forgive and forget the wildly abrasive comments or B. Defend herself, rebel, and bite back in conspicuous and passive-aggressive ways.

These poles were written expertly in Episode 9, where Joanne brings a beautiful gift to meet Noah’s parents, but it was the wrong gift, so she tries harder and eventually there is a fallout. Then she catches Noah’s mom enjoying her gift (a charcuterie board… kind of on the nose if you ask me but…) and so uses it as blackmail and a means of exerting power over her. On TV, power struggles are juicy fun. IRL, they are goddamn exhausting.

If it isn’t abundantly clear by now, this is my story. I was in deep, devoted, committed love with a nice Jewish boy for eight years who swept into my life and caused me to give up my semi-chaotic ways. I literally met him at a bar called The Nice Guy. The line that everyone seems to be hanging on from this series is when Noah tells Joanne, after she displays pretty mild symptoms of her crazy, that he can handle her. You guys. Do you know how many times my person said this to me when I was being proper crazy? And you know what? It made me feel so much better because I had such bad shame that I was being so imperfect. But it also sort of just… reinforced the fact of it. Finally someone could *handle* me. If this isn’t a savior complex, I don’t know what is.

It’s common knowledge that when you marry someone, you also marry their family, but this was especially true of his family. They are a prominent and very respected, tight-knit Jewish family whom I loved and wanted to be a part of very badly. While they were generally kind and very generous, there was an undercurrent of mistrust and mild but apparent animosity that I couldn’t quite comprehend. I chalked a lot of it up to generational trauma and also the fact of one of them being a very famous celebrity, and so it made sense that they would be mindful of who they let in. Grandma J was the absolute best- a bright spot and my Scrabble buddy. Uncle A was testy but lovable. Aunt V was unpredictable and cagey but is the only one who still texts me, which is nice. Cousin J was batshit crazy. But it was my never-to-be MIL that really took the piss.

I remember nearly every single horrid comment she threw at me over the course of the eight years I tried, sometimes desperately, to win her love and approval. In one episode, Joanne says re Noah’s community’s disapproval of her: “I am widely liked. This is literally the worst problem I’ve ever had.” Ok yes. It’s very weird to be outwardly disliked, especially if you have a long history of being a very successful people pleaser and an affable personality. Some might even call me a delight, but who’s counting.

Much like the matriarch in the show, I think mine actually did like me, in spite of herself. And that was the saddest part. She didn’t want to let herself love me because I didn’t fit the mold and she couldn’t move past that. Every comment stung because deep down, I knew it really mattered to my partner that she love me, and she flatly refused. 

My former fiancé told me that he had gotten a girlfriend several months after we ended it and that his mother was incredibly warm to her… they got along so well that it freaked him out and he broke it off. Lots to unpack here. Firstly, Mother seems to have learned that being a dick to her son’s partner for the better part of a decade can in fact have its ramifications. Secondly, he loved the very thing about me that he ultimately could not accept: that I was never going to be what he (and they) needed me to be.

I was never going to fully observe the rules of engagement with his family because I found them incredibly constrictive and inauthentic to who I was. Hell, for a few years I had a fake job that was meant to cover the fact that I was unemployed so they wouldn’t think I was a freeloading opportunist. I even gave myself a couple promotions. My company experienced a merger that was difficult to navigate. I asked my MIL for advice about how to ask for a raise. Ok, that was probably a hair too far, and anyway it didn’t work. I think she thought me weak for needing to ask her opinion.

For the record, I was unemployed so that I could devote myself to helping him build his career and be available to travel whenever his job required, which was frequently and for long stretches of time. But this would not have been satisfactory to them, even though I had a hand in nearly every decision he made and gave him MANY of my words which, it’s worth noting, did wind up contributing to his success. This made me think of how Joanne’s life would play out, attending every service and seder by his side. She’ll have her own thing going, sure, but can anything really be more important than his job? I avoided visiting his sets because I couldn’t stand being thought of as the Director’s Wife, rather than a full on human in my own right. Not to mention the fact that many of the actors would be performing my words without having any idea. That was hard. I chose it, but it was hard.

However, all this aside, that man loved me and I loved him. And I felt lucky and chosen and not too much. We knew we were very different and we decided not to care and instead to try and embrace it. But the truth was that his roots went very deep and his familial ties were incredibly strong. The unspoken agreements that had been put in place long before he was born were not so easily set aside, even when they were in opposition to what I wanted to build with him as our own sovereign unit. We would never be our own sovereign unit. Even the subject of our wedding was dismissed time and time again because he felt so conflicted about how to handle the true merging of our worlds- of his worlds. It was a huge blow to my faith in our unity that ultimately caused us to separate.

The most heartbreaking moment in the show for me came in its final episode. Joanne follows Noah’s ex Rebecca out of his niece’s Bat Mitzvah for what seems like entirely selfish reasons, and after some mostly cordial back-and-forths, Rebecca says, “You’re going to live my dream […]. You win. I hope you enjoy it.” In that moment, I not only saw myself as the Shiksa who has made it her business to be the hottest, most fun one at the Bat, but also the failure. Rebecca is of course not a failure… she will go on to find someone who actually does want to try with her and doesn’t hoard her love and her youth with the promise of forever rotting in a box in his dresser. But in this moment, she concedes that it will not only not be with the man she loves and has put so much time, hope, and energy into… but that he will move on with someone new who will benefit from her efforts and dedication to his path.

Ok ok I’m landing the plane. What rings most true is that these characters are in love. But love isn’t ever enough is it? I can name lots of other plot points that spell disaster for this relationship if it were IRL, but why spoil the fantasy? Would any of us actually be mad if our knight in shining facial hair crashed a big important meeting to perform a religious ceremony and ask us to be their girlfriend? Yeah, we would because that is pretty not ok. But watching it happen on screen? Let’s fucking go girls.

When it comes to actual healthy on screen relationships, we still have some seeking to do… But a hallmark of non-healthy relationships is drama, and like many genres of porn, sometimes it’s better left to the professionals rather than trying to re-enact it yourself in the real world.

The final scene follows Joanne as she boards the shuttle bus to take her away from the Bat Mitzvah where she’s just told her beloved Rabbi goodbye, rather than making him choose between her and his dreams. She asks him not to come after her, because it would only make it harder which is fair. In the end, he doesn’t listen and beats her to her car where he sweeps her into a kiss and a delusion all at once. I think there could have been a stronger ending, and so I’ve gone ahead and written it.