I turn on Sex and the City and it’s the first episode of the fourth season, “The Agony and the ‘Ex’-tasy,” in which they confront that classic question: do you believe in soulmates? I can’t seem to stop talking about The One, and it’s not the most encouraging topic, as this episode makes clear. Carrie gets a mailing from a dating service full of warnings about letting her soulmate “slip away.” Miranda declares that “soulmates only exist in the hallmark aisle in Duane Reed Drugs,” but it turns out that the notion is not so easy to shake off.
Miranda’s main problem with the idea of soulmates is that it makes you feel an essential dissatisfaction with yourself and your life as it is. You constantly have to be looking for that magical solution, that person whom you may well never find. Charlotte wants to believe “that there’s that one perfect person out there to complete you,” but Miranda points out the risks of this: “And, what? If you don’t find him–you’re incomplete? It’s so dangerous!” “You’re still looking outside yourself and saying that you’re not enough,” she says, in a very empowered, accept-yourself kind of moment.
But Charlotte’s rebuttal is disconcertingly resonant: “Are you enough?”
The problem of work vs. love and family comes up again and again on Grey’s Anatomy. Richard has learned to regret neglecting his family for his job (but was it about his job? or was it just that he cheated on his wife?). Derek worried that he messed up his interview for chief because he was thinking too much about Meredith. Ellis Grey was a bad mother because she was an excellent surgeon. Cristina and Burke, I thought, were going to work out, because they were both so obsessed with their jobs and it didn’t interfere with their relationship.
But then the whole wedding thing happened and Cristina was the first to acknowledge a double standard. Bailey sends her home to prepare for the wedding, and she says, “Burke’s getting married in twelve hours too, but he gets to scrub in!” She has to deal with the overbearing mothers and get her eyebrows ripped off. She comes back to the hospital to get just a moment in the operating room: “I am a surgeon, Dr. Bailey, but right now I feel like somebody else.” That somebody else was supposed to be a bride. We begin to appreciate Cristina for putting up with all this even though it’s contrary to her nature; Burke’s mother admits that she used to think Cristina was selfish until she proved her ability to be flexible “on what matters most to Burke.” Apparently what mattered most to him was that she stay home and try on jewelry instead of scrubbing in.
Saving Yourself for The One
May 17, 2007
If there is an exact opposite of having Sex Like Men, it’s saving yourself for The One. People might think this doesn’t happen much anymore–whether or not that’s the case, many adolescent girls, and probably some guys, grow up thinking they’ll wait to have sex until 
marriage. Not for religious reasons, necessarily, but for idealistic ones. Whenever I contemplate the idea of The One, I can’t help but think of the fabulously bad Marisa Tomei movie, Only You (1994): when she was a little girl, a Ouija board told her she would marry Robert Downey Jr., so she chases him through Europe to make this happen. Or something like that.
