Monophobia and Other Plagues

I just watched the movie, "He's Just Not That Into You".  Not a bad movie.  Incredibly cheesy but with some interesting thoughts buried in it.  If I had a female around right now, I would ask her many questions thanks to this movie.  I guess I'll have to wait until tomorrow.

The main question is very simple:  Do girls really think like that!?!  Seriously.  I thought I overthink things.  That question is really beside the point right now (though it does go perfectly with my "girls are crazy" theory).  The bigger, more interesting, thing was slightly more subtly embedded and fits beautifully into one of the biggest theories currently running around my head:  People are terrified of being alone!

I occurred to me in the movie when a girl got rejected by a guy and then stormed out triumphantly declaring that he wasn't the winner because he would always be alone.  I almost died laughing at her elegant combination of projecting and hypocrisy.

Think about what she was actually saying.  She was first of all implying that he was actually the loser because he would end up alone.  To clear things up, the guy was perfectly happy up until this point.  She wasn't happy throughout the movie until the last like five minutes.  He was obviously not afraid of ending up alone.  She obviously was.  The implications of her comment suggested he shared this fear.  Seemed like your standard case of projecting to me.

Let's take a slightly deeper look, though.  She was accusing him of claiming superiority by claiming superiority.  I'm doing an awful job of explaining all this, but if you watched that scene with all this in mind, it would make more sense.  In fact, why don't you do that.  This scene pretty much sums up everything I'm talking about with this movie:

That Scene I'm Talking About

The way she talks, you would think that the only thing that matters in life is finding someone.  Like that's the only way to be happy.  Yes, you could argue that I'm taking too much from this one little section, but that scene was pretty true to the entire movie.  The girls all acted like the only way they could be happy was if they fell in love and got married.  THIS is what I'm really talking about.

People are convinced that the only way to become happy is to find one magical person who redefines your whole existence and becomes you're reason for leaving.  This is even worse on girls.  They're taught from early on that their entire existence depends on whether or not they get married.  It goes all the way back to Disney princesses:

It's kinda sad really.  The "Beauty and the Beast" one is particularly troubling.  Did you ever notice that the geeky guy often ends up with at least a cute girl?  What about the geeky girl?  Unless there's a geeky guy, her ending up with someone is usually played for laughs.  How sad is that?

I'm working on a clever word for this sickness that has gripped society, but nothing I've thought of seems to do it justice.  For now, I'm just going with, "That right there . . . that's what's wrong with America."

I don't, however, think that movies are the cause of this fear as much as they are symptoms.  So the bigger question is, why are people so afraid of ending up alone?  I read a statistic once that that was the most common fear amongst single people.  What is it about being alone that is so terrifying to people?  Kelly Clarkson recently came out with a song that says, "Doesn't mean I'm lonely when I'm alone."  Why don't more people realize this?

If I told most people that I spent both my Friday and Saturday night this weekend in my dorm alone, I would get at the very least a couple of sympathetic looks.  Trust me, I've tested this.  I might also possibly get a couple "Ah, I'm sorry." one or two "That sucks." and possibly an "Are you antisocial or something?"  What I most likely would not get is an "Oh, that sounds like fun!"

But it is to me!  I am just as entertained staying home alone doing various incarnations of nothing as I am going out with a bunch of people.  I don't get lonely very easily.  In fact, I usually feel the most lonely in large groups of people.  Yet, for some reason, people seem to think that it's weird to have fun alone.  If you enjoy having alone time you're "antisocial".  I'm not always antisocial, but gorramit I need time to myself!

I can't say what the cause of the fear of being alone is.  I think at this point it's simply passed on from one poor unfortunate lonely soul to the next.  Some would argue that it's evolution telling us that we're more likely to survive as a pack than as individuals.  Whatever it is, it's a problem.

It's a problem, because it's been known to get to me, too.  Me and my antisocial self are occasionally struck with a paralyzing fear that I'm going to end up alone.  Then I go off away from people and the fear goes away.  Weird.

In "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy", one of the characters speculates that humans participate in small talk because if they stop talking, their brains start working.  Maybe that's why we're afraid of being alone.  We're actually afraid of finding out who we are.  We're afraid that if we meet ourselves, we won't like us.

I am officially issuing a challenge:  Spend an entire day away from other people.  Be antisocial for a day.  You can be as extreme about this as you want from not even seeing another person to not talking to people to just not spending time with people.  The goal is to meet yourself.  Go out with yourself for a while and see if it's a compatible match.  (What d'ya know? An appropriate song!)

You might be surprised what you find.