Searching for utopia in her eyes
By Todd Foltz

My friend Gina changes lovers like she changes clothes. And because she was, until recently, a stripper, that's a lot of boyfriends.

She faxed me recently to let me know she had broken up with her latest beau and moved out of the apartment they had shared for six months. She has a new place now and a new boyfriend to go with it. An English major who works at the Renaissance Festival, the new guy's gallant and sweet, Gina says.

But she also confided this in her fax: She still loves her old boyfriend. Just one problem, though. "He was everything I needed, and he bored me to tears," she wrote.

In one short sentence, Gina summed up what I think is one of my generation's biggest problems: we have a perfection complex.

Whether it's a pair of jeans, a new computer or a potential lover, if it isn't pre-shrunk and form-fitted to our ideals, we don't want it. Everything must fit the precise mold we've created in our minds, or at the least be easily upgradable. Somehow, twentysomethings have gotten it into our heads that perfection is both possible and desirable.

And don't talk to us about taking the time to work it out. In an America in which young people have to work twice as hard to get half as much as they need, who has time to "work it out?" Maybe young people are unfairly expecting too much too soon. Sure, it's a little silly to expect a $40,000 job and a house and in the suburbs right out of college. But a lot of us, five or more years out of college and into disillusionment, still find ourselves doing without, and it makes us wonder why we dropped $30,000 or more on four years of school.

So it's no wonder that twentysomethings like Gina or me seek validation in the arms of a new love discovered over espresso at a trendy coffeehouse or across a dance floor crowded with writhing people sweaty with exertion and desperation. We may not have the job or the house or the car, but for a while, at least, we can have that beautiful lover.

The first night is bliss. After the electrifying first eye contact and the conversation that's so synchronized and arousing it's like a verbal tango, we flit home, heady with desire and delight. This could actually be the one, the person destined for us, the soul mate. The first date comes later in the week and convinces us of the truth. It's like we've known this person forever. No awkward silences, no yawns, no glancing at the clock. And his shoulders . . . . Her eyes . . . .

We fall into bed within another week, and a month later we playfully write "I love you" with our fingernails on our soul mate's naked back. And we mean it. Our head is spinning, our pulse is racing and no one, NO one, ever made us feel this way before. In six months one of our leases is up, and it just seems, well, right, to move in together.

This time, it will work out.

But it never does.

It's always something. He doesn't listen to her. She cheats on him. He never wants to go out. Her penchant for knives when she's angry is getting out of hand. He's too distant. She has too many personalities to keep track of.

Maybe those are just my relationships. But we've all been there. Something about the lover is imperfect. What was cute six months ago becomes annoying. And then our eyes make contact with someone else's, and this time the spark is really there. If our current lover hasn't yet fallen off the pedestal, we pull it out from underneath.

And we're ready to do it all again.

Just like my friend Gina.

It would be altogether too easy to blame Gina's roulette wheel of boyfriends on an inability to commit or on a short attention span caused by too much babysitting by television. But to do so, one would have to ignore the message American society sends to its children from the time they are born: To be satisfied is to settle.

Twentysomethings may be the MTV generation, but that doesn't mean we haven't developed attention spans. We have them and we use them. We know what we want, and we home in on it like a heat-seeking missile. But just as generals fear that missiles can be fooled by flares, we fear that we can be fooled into committing to the wrong person by settling for someone who isn't quite as exciting or voluptuous or rich.

And so, even as we exchange vows of undying love, we look over each other's shoulders in anticipation of someone better. We're not losing interest, we're simply dating strategically. And we learned it from our parents and our teachers.

Many of my friends are amazed that I come from a home in which my parents are still happily married. My parents have been through some rough spots, but they persevered. Most of my friends never had the chance to see two adults work out their differences amicably. They saw their parents trade up for a better model.

And in school, we were taught to do the same. If we got an A-, there was always an A. If we got an A, there was always more after-school clubs to join to put on our transcripts. And to get into many colleges, straight As and lots of extra-curricular activities wasn't enough. We had to show how we've volunteered and helped the community rebuild after a hurricane or dig a drainage ditch in a low-income neighborhood.

No matter how good we were, society told us we could still be doing better. Why the hell should a teen-ager's volunteerism affect his educational future? What, does everyone have to be Superman to deserve attention and respect?

That's the word. It's inplied, if not stated as such.

So if we expect ourselves to be men and women of steel, how can we not demand the same of those we take into our hearts and into our beds? We can't avoid it. But there is no utopia, and there are no perfect people.

And so the search goes on. For Gina, and for me, and for thousands and thousands of people like us. We gorge ourselves on society's ideas of perfection and spit up the remains of temporary soul mates who failed to satisfy us.

Soul mates who could have satisfied us. Had we only known it was OK for us to let them.

Todd Foltz hopes to be a bit more upbeat next week, as he has a date this Tuesday.

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