Conditioned by Past Relationships…and Garnier Fructis

I have a story to tell.

(In the interest of protecting the privacy of the parties involved, names have been changed.)

There was once a girl from Los Angeles, who decided, for a multitude of reasons other than scholastic, to pick up and move to Pittsburgh, and then subsequently to Philadelphia to start a new life. This girl, LaBrando, was smart, funny, and averagely attractive, but not without her baggage. From Los Angeles she carried with her the mentally frazzling upbringing forced upon her by her stifling and overly-Baptist parents, and from Pittsburgh she carried the memory, scars, and unfizzled emotions left over from her first real relationship. A relationship that, of course, ended badly.

One of the principle issues was that he had been clingy, LaBrando’s Pittsburgh boyfriend. Let’s call him Percy. Percy had been the boyfriend that most impressionable young debutantes fresh from cotillion (which LaBrando surely was) desired. He was charming and doting – he called and texted constantly. Always attentive, always there. Always wanting to know what he could do. For Percy, it was easy to convince a girl that she was all he ever thought about.

But LaBrando couldn’t stand it.

LaBrando was an independent, future career girl. Though she cared about Percy, she couldn’t take his constant, overbearing need for contact. Over their two-year relationship it was the subject of a lot of their fights and, eventually, a primary factor in their break-up.

LaBrando moved to Philadelphia a free woman. Ready to learn from her mistakes, take on the world, and fall in love with a mature, modern man who understood that “Today’s Couple” could be separate and together at the same time.

But here’s the rub:

LaBrando never found that man. Sure, she met many men, and went on many dates with these many men, but none of them ever evolved into anything serious. What’s worse is that LaBrando started to become aware that she was pushing many of these men away with a clingy nature that, until then, she wasn’t aware she’d had. It came to a head when, after a date with an attractive 20-something and a series of text messages that he didn’t respond to, LaBrando actually used the other service her blackberry provided and called him up, wondering if she had done something wrong. His response is what did her in:

“Listen. You’re cool and all but you really need to chill. I’m not obligated to give you a speedy response at any given time.”

And suddenly it hit her: She had become the thing she hated. She had become her ex.

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Oh, that poor girl…

I tell this cautionary tale because it highlights a problem that I’m becoming increasingly aware of in single American society. Poor young ladies and gents who have been, for better or worse (oftentimes worse), conditioned by past relationships. We’re talking more than just the typical hang-ups and jadedness that comes from experience with relationships gone awry. No – we’re talking life altering, id-warping changes in personality and how one perceives reality and the people around them.

Yep, folks – it’s that deep.

Take poor LaBrando (a girl that I have no relation to or have ever met, though I’m sure she was brilliant and exceedingly beautiful) for instance. Before she met Percy, she was an independent woman who was secure enough in herself to not need the constant reassurance of her companion. When she dated Percy she hated how clingy he was with his excessive texting. And yet, he still altered her sense of independence, and a very fundamental aspect of her personality was forever changed. She herself had become clingy. So how did she become the epitome of clinginess – the proven repellent of man?

“Well, you just sorta get used to it,” Said Maureen, a co-worker of mine, when I told her about my idea for this blog post. “You hate these traits about the guy, but he’s your first real experience with a serious relationship, so as much as you despise these things you eventually began to associate them with how all guys must behave.”

Makes sense. LaBrando, being as pure and innocent as she was, had never been in a serious relationship before. And though she hated his clinginess, it nevertheless established a pattern in her mind for how men behave in a relationship. Because of Percy, whenever a guy didn’t text or call LaBrando excessively, she began to think that something was wrong. Then she, in turn, would text and call them excessively, unknowingly mirroring the very behavior she despised. As she would learn later, this pattern didn’t quite fit all men

Turns out, most men hate clinginess just as much as LaBrando does…did.

But it’s not all bad. Sometimes you can leave a bad relationship with a lot of positive conditioning.

“I find myself being more attentive to girls now, because I was such a jerk with my ex,” chimed in a customer – this conversation got very live. This guy (who was really hot, btw) had his personality altered in a very fundamental way, but apparently it was a change for the better, which can happen. Hell, Beyonce even has a song about how she’ll psychotically murder a guy because she doesn’t want some other girl benefitting from all the good things he learned from their relationship.

It’s clear that when you’re in a relationship with someone you care about, whether or not you stay together you’re affected. They rub off on you. And you always hear people say that when you going through a tough break up, it’s best to just learn the lessons and move on. But how do you know they’re lessons worth learning? How do you determine what traits are good to pick up, and which you should just leave on the shelf? And how do you control it? I’m certain LaBrando didn’t want to pick up her ex’s clingy trait, but boy did she.

I guess it’s just a matter of confidence. Yes, you should learn the lessons necessary from your past relationships. But you should also remember yourself and what it is you want out of a relationship, regardless of how your ex did or didn’t fit the bill. LaBrando should have remembered how much she hated clingy men, and reminded herself that whenever a guy wasn’t blowing up her cell phone, that it was desireable behavior, and that the pattern established by Percy in her mind wasn’t a desirable one.

Or you could go for the simpler solution: date a man exactly like your ex.

But that opens a whole other can of worms. Doesn’t it?

As for LaBrando? Well, The realization that she had become a clingy mess was more than she could stand. In a mixture of grief and panic, she threw herself off of the Walt Whitman bridge. Her body was never recovered, nobody went to her funeral, and her tombstone read: “Here would lie the body of LaBrando, but she’s busy doing what she did best – clinging desperately…to the bottom of the Delaware River.”

Tagged as: advice, men, Philosophy, Ramblings