“There is a Mr. or a Miss Perfect out there somewhere, and I am going to meet this person and everything in my life is going to be changed and be good. We put so much expectation on the other person.” Via Salon
‘The expectation in America is an adolescent expectation. There is a Mr. or a Miss Perfect out there somewhere, and I am going to meet this person and everything in my life is going to be changed and be good. We put so much expectation on the other person. There’s infatuation when we discover them and think, “This is it!” It’s perfect, fantastic. Then after a few months the love hormone leaves the brain and the reality starts showing up. So we say, “OK, I made a mistake, I chose the wrong person. I better find another one.”
In other cultures, expectations are very different. For many centuries, love wasn’t even part of the picture. Children would be married off by their parents at a very early age and it was families making close relationships with other families. This notion that everything should be coming from this one person is a very American, impossible dream.
I always say if you want to understand a culture, look at what the people do at 5 o’clock. In England, they drink some kind of hot water with an herb in it: tea time. In Spain, they kill a bull. The Americans have the happy hour, they get drunk. The French have cinq a sept, a very special thing, it’s sexual. Men and women, who are married but not to each other, after work they go to a hotel and have sex. It’s seen as experiencing pleasure with somebody else. For the French, life is about the refinement of pleasure. I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, but the cultures do provide very different reference systems.
The American disillusionment with love, by the way, explains a little bit why we work so hard.’
