Goldberg - If Someone Says You Complete Me, RUN! : Whoopis Big Book of Relationships

F or the past seven or eight years, Ive have been sitting on The View, a supposed womens talk show that deals with what women want. I have to say Ive been kind of surprised by a lot of womens responses to things said on the show. And I thought this was odd, because I am a woman, right? Still, a lot of the things I have heardand still hearon the show regarding relationships just dont make a lot of sense to me. And if what I am hearing from other women about what they want makes no sense to me, there is clearly a disconnect. So I feel I have to address this.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty, lets start at the very beginning. Thats always a very good place to start.

Weve all been brainwashed with false expectations.

Thats right. Brainwashed.

For example, when youre watching the Nature channel and see animals that have matedlions, lets say. So with lions, you know theres the pride, which is the lions big extended family or pack: the big mammy lion and the papa lion and the baby lions, and they are all together, right? They dont futz around, I dont think. The mammy lion goes out and gets the gazelle and brings it back, and she eats first and then she leaves the rest for the papa lionor the other way around. But the point is, they are one big happy family.

And penguins. You know how cute they are. The mother penguin walks across the tundra to lay the egg, and the father comes and sits on the egg, and the mother goes and swims, just like in Happy Feet. Then the mother comes back up with a draggle of food to feed everybody. And theyre all one big happy family.

You look at the monkeys. Monkeys mate for life. And whales. And wolves. Plenty of animals mate for life: Gibbons and titi monkeys. Swans. Black vultures. French angel fish (but not American angel fish, which seems backward, given the Frenchs tendency for mistresses ). The albatross. Termites. Bald eagles. Barn owls. Bats. Prairie voles (which look like little rats). Turtle doves. Schistosoma mansoni worms.

My point is that from the time youre a little kid, youre getting all these signals of what love and marriage and family are supposed to be. Some people even bring religion into it and say thats the way God intended it. That two people are supposed to be together forever.

But not every species mates for life.

Dolphins do not mate for life. They do, however, have the ability to create strong, long-lasting relationships with one another, and some species of dolphin may even travel with several generations of family members. For instance, the killer whaleactually a dolphin, by the waymay be found swimming with up to three generations of family members within its pod. However, these dolphins will mate only with partners outside their pod, in order to prevent intercourse with other family memberswhat we humans would call incest. In fact, most species of dolphins are very sexual animals and are known to mate with several partners throughout the course of a year. Some dolphin species may even choose to have sex at any time of the year, unlike some of the whale species, which hook up only during their mating season. Not all dolphin species mate equally during the course of the year, though.

Yet, given the mythology of relationships Id been exposed to, I thought dolphins mated for life. Until I did my research and learned that, in fact, most species do not mate for life.

What you may have noticed missing in these descriptions of animals that mate for life, and what the research makes clear, is that nowhere on this list is Man.

And nowhere on this list is Woman.

We, I think, are the only species that can choose when to have sex or whom to have sex with. Were not like other animals, who are doing it to procreate and get stuff done.

Except the apesthey love to fuck. They just do. I dont know why. Chimps and bonobos, in particular. They will bone everybody and anybody. Apes just happen to be our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, which isnt to say we will bone just about anybody and everybody. Although some of us will

Anyway, as we look at these lists of who mates for life, we see that humans are nowhere to be found. I think thats a big deal. Maybe if we knew that when we got together with someone or got married, that it didnt have to be for life, perhaps we would be better at it.

When I was growing up, there was this whole Leave It to Beaver ideal we were all supposed to live up to. I grew up in a housing project in Chelsea, New York, and there were all sorts of people thereblacks, whites, Asians, yellow people, brown people, orange people, gays, straights, big people, little people, you name it (if Ive left out your ethnic group, shoe size, or orientation, just insert it here)all living together.

And single working mothers were the norm. My mother raised my brother, Clyde, and me on her own while going to work every day. She was elegant and smart, but she wasnt Donna Reed.

Wait, do you even know who Donna Reed is? No? How about Carol Brady?

Anyway, my mother was better than these idealized moms. She was tougher and stronger and stricter, and it took just one look at her to know she was no-nonsense.

And if my mother wasnt Carol Brady, my elder brother, Clyde, was no freckle-faced Beaver Cleaver or Bobby Brady. If we each have a personal soundtrack following us around in life, Clydes would have been the theme song from Shaft. He was that cool.

My mother and my brother gave me everything: they loved me and supported me and gave me the confidence I needed to go out in the world and do what I do. I felt like we were normal. But for some reason, in todays world, the kind of family I had isnt considered normal.

This idea of being normal and having a so-called normal family doesnt really ring true for a whole lot of folks. If for anyone. Yet we are told thats what we are supposed to strive for.

Meeting someone and staying with them forever, or however long you live, has been ingrained in all of us somehow, and yet, up until the last century, who lived past forty? They didnt have time for more than one or two spouses. They had no choice but to stay together, because they were dead before they knew it

Okay, maybe thats too harsh, but you get my drift.

Today we live much longer, and therefore have more time to screw things up, and we do. We oftentimes set ourselves up to fail, men and women. No one is spared except sometimes maybe we give men a pass when they screw up because we figure they cant help themselves and just want to plug a holeeven though we know there is more to them than that.

As a grown-up, I kind of feel you have to look at a person as a person. Each person is their own special individual.

Awwwww.

Theres nobody more complicated than a human being. Straight, gay, black, white, or otherit doesnt matter. The position we put ourselves in is incredibly complicatedmostly because we complicate it. My search in the last several years has been for how to be in an uncomplicated situation (aka relationship).