*(Title graciously loaned me by its creator, the multi-talented writer-comedienne, Jacqueline Kabat http://www.jacquelinekabat.com)

All men's miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.
Blaise Pascal

I’ve found the above quote in other forms, but this version of it pretty much sums up the bleak feeling of existential angst, futility and isolation I felt after going to see He’s Just Not That Into You as my “hooky noontime movie” yesterday.

Just a hunch, but my reaction was probably not the filmmakers’ intention for its audience.

After seeing this cute, well acted, often witty but ultimately inconsequential rom-com, I felt the raw edges of a hole knawing into the pit of my stomach.   I walked out of the Lincoln Square Cinemas into the biting frost and felt the ulcer grow, reaching the bottom of my heart, sprouting cold, bony claw-fingers, and starting to tug and poke roughly at my most tender and buried parts.  I’ve known this hole well; for most of my adult life, in fact.  Since Junior High school.  Since the moment I came to the realization that, although I was supposed to grow up and become an accomplished woman who would make something of her life, whatever it was that I made, it wouldn’t really count unless I was part of a stable, successful relationship with a man.  Stable and successful, unfortunately, were not adequately defined.   As suggested by the movie, they could mean, “Any guy who likes you enough to stick around.”

In He’s Just Not That Into You, Ginifer Goodwin plays a hapless singleton who is so frantic to find a guy to like her that she misreads signal after signal.   She doesn’t choose these guys, mind you – they’re set-ups, or they choose her – but in her mind, if only just one of them would like her, then everything in her life would be okay.  Jennifer Connolly plays her friend, a wife who, having badgered her longtime college boyfriend into marriage, gets an unfaithful husband in return – unfaithful with Scarlett Johansson, to add supreme insult to injury.  Jennifer Aniston is cast as the only one of three sisters without a boorish husband to pick up after.  And Drew Barrymore wants to find love so badly that she considers a video chat holding a mug of coffee to be a “coffee date.”

What struck me so profoundly is the fact that every one of these women is living her life in a kind of limbo, waiting to be the chosen, rather than act the chooser.   Their lives, their futures, their hopes and dreams pivot precariously on the decisions made by the men around them.   Played by a group of fine actresses, these characters struggle to have hearts and souls beyond their glib lines and flattering costumes – but functioning within the constrains of the film’s plot, they are merely lovely marionettes, waiting desperately for someone to pull their strings so they can finally dance to life.

Chillingly, any one of these women could have been me at some stage of my life.   Reacting, not acting.   Waiting, not pursuing.  Paralyzed into a false helplessness and terrified of the image that still plays in my head in my darkest hours – of becoming a lonely, withered bag lady muttering aloud to passersby and pit bulls – forgotten, of no consequence, not making sense to anyone, let alone myself. 

For me, the pattern begins in 9^th grade.   I hear though the Junior High School grapevine that a boy, “Paul,” likes me.  He wants to go out. I don’t know Paul at all.  I’ve never spoken to him.  But he’s cute and popular, and I’m not.  I should be flattered, everyone tells me.  How can I say no?  I think it lasts all of three weeks.  (Weeks are like dog years in the Junior High School dating world, remember). 

Do Paul and I ever have a conversation?  I don’t remember any.  I do remember making out for the very first time in my life with him. We are in his parent’s basement with another “couple,” and Moody Blues “Knights in White Satin is playing on his father’s state of the art Hi-Fi.  When the words “Breathe Deep the Gathering Gloom” burst through the speakers, I explode into hysterical laughter, even though Paul’s tongue is still squirming deep in my mouth.  He spits, I choke.  It's a surreal moment and I feel like an idiot, but I just can't stop giggling at the irony of it all.  This guy’s tongue is in my mouth, and he has no idea who I  am! Maybe that’s why he breaks up with me a few days later.  My ego is bruised, but thankfully, not my heart.

Next there's “Danny,” who is a friend of Paul’s, also a jock, one of the popular kids. I don’t know Danny either.  I have no classes with Danny.  I have even less in common with Danny than I have with Paul.  But Danny also “likes” me.  One day I am walking home from school and Danny bursts out from an alley behind a block of stores, nearly knocking me off the sidewalk with his proclamation that he, too, “likes” me. He wants to go out with me.  Well, sure!  I mean, as long as he likes me, do I really have to know anything about him?   I should be grateful, having boys bursting out from behind buildings because they “like” me.   Who am I to refuse that kind of attention?  What kind of bitch would presume to say “No?” I keep to myself the question that is already eating away at me inside, “How can you like me if you don’t even know me”.  None of the other girls I know ever ask that question, so I guess I'm not supposed to, either.  Danny and I go out for three or four months.  He breaks up with me because I won’t go to third base, and I cry in my mother’s arms.

Fifteen years later, I ran into “Danny” at reunion.  I swear, I didn’t even remember his name, let alone going out with him.  He kept bringing up incidents to remind me, and I honestly couldn’t place him! When I finally did, I couldn’t keep from laughing.  He said, “I showed your picture to my frat brothers in college and they told me I was an idiot to dump you.”   I guess those frat brothers must have known me so very well, too, to understand what a caring, intelligent deep-feeling soul I was.   A picture is worth a thousand words, after all.

Fast forward to an ostensibly more grown-up me, age 29, just out of an ill-advised marriage to a much older guy that I had drifted into right after my mother died.  Though I was doing quite well at a very competitive career, I’d been with my ex since getting out of college, and realized that, in the real world, I still hadn’t learned anything more about dating or relationships than I knew in Junior High School.  Once the wedding ring was off and men started to take notice again, I found myself still unable to say “No thanks,” even if I wasn’t remotely interested.  After all, who was I to reject some nice man who actually deemed me worthy of his time and attention?  What if - even if I didn’t find the guy attractive – he knew something I didn’t and would turn out to be “the one”? What if this guy was the last guy on earth who would ever find me attractive again?  What if this was my last stop on the road to Bag Lady Hell? 

Newly single, I had some dreary, boring dinners with some totally unsuitable men.   To get myself through these evenings, I fortified myself with wine and turned up the charm.  I told fascinating stories.  Always the storyteller, I embellished on colorful  incidents from my life, acted out movie plots, and shared juicy gossip.  Basically, I took on the entire burden of the night’s entertainment, and I was damn good at it.  The result was, the poor guy naturally thought we’d both had a good time. He’d be dismayed when I never returned his follow-up calls.  Like a heel (though there was never sex involved), I’d disappear from sight, let the phone ring off the hook, change my routes to work, stop frequenting the same places I thought I might run into them.  The truth was, I never wanted to go out with these guys in the first place.  I had said “yes” to be polite.   I still hadn’t learned the lesson that, as a woman, I was allowed to do my own choosing.   I didn’t respond to their calls because, as a woman, I’d never learned how to assertively say “No, thanks” without feeling terribly guilty.   Instead, I chose the cruelly passive aggressive route and just ignored them.

My lack of assertiveness and good intentions turned me into the very bitch I’d been so afraid of becoming in Junior High School.

Ironically, today I happen to be with someone who Is Just That Into Me.  And I’m every bit Just That Into Him.  We’ve known each other for nine years, been together for six, and been married just under three.  He’s the sexiest man on earth, my favorite person to hang out with, to talk ideas with, and the person I’d most like in my lifeboat when escaping off the Titanic. I relish the joy of his company; yet feel perfectly fine being on my own in the world without him, alone, or with my other friends. Sharing my life with him even makes growing old seem more like an adventure than an inevitable punishment.   So in the arena of modern relationships, my current cup runneth over. 

But yesterday afternoon,HJNIY brought back a flood of hurt from years past that I didn’t even know I’d harbored…years where being myself, by myself, wasn’t only not enough – it was something to be dreaded and avoided at all costs.  I watched Ginifer Goodwin try and mind-read the guys who might be interested in her, with little thought as to who she might be attracted to herself.  Like the me of days past, she wasn't seeking someone with whom she might truly connect  who sparked something in her that made her think, “That’s someone who can add to what I’m already building for myself;" instead, her script subtext read,"Maybe that's the guy who can fill up this bleak empty hole that's always been inside of me.” I watched a film that showed men and women acting out games that reduced our interactions to cartoon-like approximations of true connections.  And I realized I’d played out much of my adult relationships in that same, pathetic way. 

It brought to the surface a pain I’d lived with but never really felt, incapable of understanding  that living a full life by myself, for myself was possible or even allowed.   Years passed, and I never earned that peace and privilege of sitting in Pascal’s quiet room, alone.

The truth was, for most of my adult life, I just wasn’t that into me – and I’m just now realizing that I came perilously close to letting a good one slip away.   The best one, in fact.

Me.