Everything I Know About Love & Sex I Learned From Pop Culture

Last month, with the help of the glorious and all-too sexy Skye from Met Another Frog, I recruited a number of impossibly cool female bloggers to help balance out the massive amounts of testosterone flowing through this place since Ginger left. This week, I'm happy to present a post from the brain behind No One Reads the Copy. I have dubbed her The Greek Goddess of Awesome, because she is hot, funny, well-read in all areas of pop culture, and also because I desperately want to eat ice cream off her ass.

So here we go.

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I know a lot of things.

Admittedly the things I know are stupid inconsequential things mostly related to pop culture. The only time this ever proves to be actually useful and not just something I can secretly gloat or feel superior about is when I’m trying to win a free round of drinks at Trivia Night in a bar.

When girls my age were turning to Cosmopolitan to learn the feminine art of “pleasing your man” and reading guides to giving the perfect blow job, to make the all-important pubescent transition to womanhood easier, I regarded another publication as the holiest of sources for all the information I needed: Entertainment Weekly.

So as I sit here, a mild to moderately attractive (depending on how much junk you like in a lady’s trunk) perpetually single female in my late 20’s, who knows a whole heck of a lot about The Bachelor (even though I’ve never watch it – I SWEAR) and can speak eloquently about the metaphysics in LOST, I can’t help but wonder:

How did the nerdy 14 year-old who translated Shakespearean English into contemporary English for, you know, FUN, end up having every romantic situation of her adult life feeling doomed from the start? Relationships that are the source of lots of tears and self-doubt and self-loathing, and on occasion, a shoe thrown dramatically across a room? And of course, a ton of emotional and/or passive aggressive texts and emails?

Where did I go wrong?

My therapist and I sit together pondering that very question every week, and we’ve concluded that it’s because everything I know about love and sex I learned from pop culture.

And besides I’m a writer. Drama is kind of my thing.

Here is the number one (just the top one really. There are a lot more examples. But save something for the book, right?) thing that I believe has shaped my love life and ultimately made me a very frustrated person.

It’s not real love if it’s not very, very, VERY dramatic.

If your current love interest is not:

-- exorcising a demon/the Devil out of your body - Days of our Lives;
-- running dramatically across a field with his hair waving in the wind as he offers his life for yours to a Indian chief - The Last of the Mohicans;
-- plotting to steal your virginity but then falling in love with you and appearing mostly-non-creepily at the top of an escalator - Cruel Intentions;
-- defying the laws of nature itself and traveling through time to leave you love letters in a mailbox that should not in actuality exist - The Lake House (I don’t have to actually enjoy a movie like The Lake House to have it affect my psyche and expectations of a man).

Well then... I guess he’s just not that into you.

Honestly though, I still think it’s gonna happen for me one day.