Thanksgiving in the Wilderness
By Kellie Powell
Jillian is a 19-year-old college freshman who is involved in a polyamorous relationship. When asked by Emily and Rita how she feels about the situation, this is her response.
JILLIAN:
You know, just once, I would like to see Hollywood make a movie that tells a genuinely realistic modern love story. A girl meets a boy. She gives him her phone number. He calls her, they start having sex. She starts to like him. He says, "No monogamy for me, thanks, I like sleeping around." She keeps sleeping with him anyway. Mostly because she knows she's not likely to do any better. And she appreciates his honesty. She figures, at least he was straight-forward. At least he told me what the deal is ahead of time, right?
So, they have sex about once a week and they watch movies and play video games together and they cook fajitas in her kitchen. And every once in a while, the guy mentions another girl that he's sleeping with, and it hurts her, but she keeps it to herself. She waits until after he's gone to cry. And she sleeps with her ex-boyfriend a couple of times, just because she's free to do so, and why not? And she never allows herself to fall in love with this guy, because to her, being in love with someone means that when you look into the future, you see them. She knows they probably don't have any kind of future. She does care about him, but she never tells him that, because that would definitely scare him away. He never says he cares about her. If he ever did, the audience would probably laugh, because it would be so out of character. But, eventually, he starts to kind of like having her around.
See, that's as good as it gets, really. That's a modern romance. The music swells under the dramatic moment when he hands her a CD and says "Here, I burned the new Green Day for you." I want to see that movie. I want to see a romance in which the surly, cynical young slacker makes no personal revelations, no drastic personality change, no big emotional speech. I want to see a movie in which the woman who loves him figures out that Prince Charming isn't going to show up on a white horse, and no one is ever going to hold a boom-box over his head for her, and she lowers her expectations accordingly. She decides, "Yeah, this guy is judgmental, angry, apathetic, and occasionally mean to me. But I'm not getting any younger." She never bursts out and says, "I care about you, ass-face, but I think you have no soul." She accepts him for who he is - not because she loves him, but because she doesn't want to be alone. There's no happy ending, per se, but as the credits roll, you think, well, maybe eventually he'll be too old to chase other women and he'll settle into monogamy, basically out of laziness. We all know two or three couples that's happened to.
So, I want to see that movie. But I never will. Because movies are not for people like you and me. They're for morons.
