Saturday, March 22, 2008

"I've been waiting for someone like you"

Stereotypes abound, we can nevertheless conclude that men and women are just different from each other.  There are biological differences, neurological differences and social differences.  I can certainly say that the social differences are more obvious in the dating world.  The guy should do the pursuing, not the girl (try any other way and the desired results are not guaranteed).  And for both parties, there's something they have to do to make the other person feel a certain way: like he or she is liked, like they're lucky to meet them, etc.  So I wonder, when a guy feels special about meeting a girl and a girl feels on air for meeting a guy, is it the same feeling that just happens to be articulated differently between the genders?  What does a girl say when she's starting to fall for someone as opposed to when a guy starts falling for someone?  

For him, it could be getting sprung, and for her, it's being in midair.  For her, it's "I just met someone!" and for him it's "she's so amazing/awesome/great."  Needless to say, those are honeymoon stage feelings, which are guaranteed to drop off as time goes on.  For reference, I listened to the soundtrack of "The Last Five Years" and compared "Shiksa Goddess" to "Goodbye Until Tomorrow" and tried to match it up with other personal experiences of what it's like to fall in love.  Granted they're musical numbers and tend to be over-the-top, but the essence is there.

So I played a game called,  "who's more likely to say this?" and James and I came up with the following:
"Where have you been all my life?"  guy
"Yes!" girl
"This person is it!"  guy
"This person is the one" girl
Okay, okay, so that's done a little bit in jest.  But onto the musical number analysis.

In "Shiksa Goddess," a Jewish boy is starting to fall really hard for a woman who is outside of his faith, and he welcomes it so much.  He sings stuff like, "Hey, hey Shiksa Goddess, I've been waiting for someone like you" and "But the minute I first met you, I could barely catch my breath.  I've been standing for days with the phone in my hand like an idiot scared to death."
Conclusion: the guy's general feeling is, "she is just so awesome that she takes my breath away."  There's a fixation on the qualities of the girl, bouncing off the walls and a ridiculous willingness to get her at any cost.  Chances are, he has a hard time pinpointing and articulating how he feels compared to most women.  He, of course, still has to play it cool.  
Now, the female equivalent is "Goodbye Until Tomorrow" and that is when the woman is reeling after the first date.  There are lines like "I open myself one stitch at a time," "Finally yes! Finally now! Finally something takes me away...finally he can cut through these strings and open my wings"  and she also sings, "I have been waiting for you."  
There's more of an emphasis on how he makes her feel, like she can 
be herself around him, she 
can't wait to see him again, and finally she can just let things happen with a 'yes!'  I've felt about 96% of what this song had... the chorus was extremely corny.  I didn't necessarily think, "he's such a great guy," it was more of like, "I have found someone who actually likes me and feels that way," and then the "he's so great" came along eventually.  
It'd be interesting to see if this reflected evolutionary courtship pursuits, like how the emphasis on how the guy feels is what makes the woman feel so great, and so on and so forth.  Maybe we all feel exactly the same way and just say it differently.  After all, what is falling in love if they don't feel the same way about you?  I know what it is, it's limerence.

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