Girls' Night

Last Wednesday night was girls’ night. We book these dates over two months in advance, scheduling around speech therapy, softball, and nightshifts for the nurses (over half the members of this particular group of friends). Often these girls’ nights involve some kind of payback in kind later on, when the husbands decide that a fair exchange for a simple evening off would be a whole day of testosterone-fueled madness (usually involving nachos, Risk, and head-to-head Playstation). I’ve known these girls since my mid-twenties. Together, we sorted ourselves out into couples, not without a few missteps along the way, a few strategic swaps and trades, with all the gossip and drama such negotiations demand. And then there was the season of weddings, two or three every summer, girls taking turns as bridesmaids in hand-sewn dresses for the frugal Dutch weddings and $300 strapless gowns for the rest (the guys, of course, always looking the same in their tuxes, except for one wedding where the garter-throwing turned into a car-crash/male strip-tease of the I-want-to-look-away-but-I-can’t variety). In the past five years, we have given birth to nine babies, suffered at least five miscarriages, bought three houses, and completed three degree programs. No one is rich – some of us are struggling to get by – and no one is divorced (yet). One way or another, we’re creating our families, our lives.

Girls’ night used to involve sitting around the hot tub, painting our toenails, and talking about sex. (About not having sex, that is, with all the strategies of postponement that involves. It’s a lost art, the not having sex. A whole generation is missing out on the experience, with all the rules, and breaking of rules, and kissing. Oh, the kissing ... and the gossip! Somehow, having sex doesn’t make for nearly as good conversation as trying not to.) These days, girls’ night involves drinking coffee, munching on spinach dip, and comparing anecdotes about our husbands and children. Like Baby Ethan, just turned two, who likes to spend ten minutes each night before bed, talking about sports. Or the husband who wants to buy a big-screen TV and the wife who agrees he can do it – with the life insurance money over her dead body. The conversation, though, is a bit of an afterthought. At the risk of confirming the parents-are-boring stereotype lamented recently by Scarbiedoll and Nine-pound Dictator, the highlight of our evening is the movie. We pick out a chick flick – The Family Stone, or Memoirs of a Geisha – a movie we can’t convince our spouses to see. This month, the film of choice was The Break-Up.

I am, I must admit, a big fan of the romantic comedy genre. If you check my Blogger profile, you’ll find the ultimate classic of the genre, When Harry Met Sally, along with a few of my personal favorites, like Sliding Doors and High Fidelity. I adore the quirky British and Australian takes on the genre (Strictly Ballroom, anyone?), but in a pinch I’ll take a straight-up-the-middle boy-meets-girl flick and swallow it whole, clichés and all. The one thing I demand is that the movie show me why these two people would want to be together (aside from the fact that the characters are played by the two highest-paid actors in the film).

By these standards, The Break-Up is a good movie: as I watched it, I believed that Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston would be attracted to one another (in real life and on film), I believed that they would have big arguments and want to break up, and I believed that they should probably get back together again. (Some of my girls’ night companions were disappointed by the ambiguity of the ending, but I thought that the heavy-handed Chicago fire imagery solved that little puzzle. City destroyed by fire is rebuilt from the foundations, stronger than ever! It means they’ll get married. Sorry for any spoilers there – you didn’t really think they’d stay broken up, did you?)

One reason I enjoyed the movie so much is that it depicts a very specific kind of relationship that I have often encountered, both in real life and in the blogosphere. In Myers-Briggs terminology, it’s the SJ/SP relationship, the kind of relationship exemplified by the ant and the grasshopper: the ant works hard all year, busily storing up food for the winter, and the grasshopper lazes about in the sunshine, knowing that when the cold weather hits, he can always sweet-talk his way into the ant’s good graces. I’ve never been a huge fan of this particular arrangement, never been able to see where the advantage is for the ant. Oh yeah – the grasshopper brings his charm. He cracks jokes to while away those long winter nights, cooped up in the anthill with all that good food the ant has been storing up for the last six months.

In the film, Jennifer Aniston is the ant: she cleans the apartment, cooks the meal, plans outings to events Vince Vaughn will enjoy – and then finally dumps him because he doesn’t want to help her wash up the dishes. It’s a tribute to Vince Vaughn’s comic skills that I kept on liking him, even though he’s the kind of guy who drives me crazy in real life: he is friendly, and funny, and fundamentally selfish (before a bit of ninth-inning personal growth to preserve the happy ending). In the end, I don’t get the sense that Aniston’s character really needed him to change: she was happy enough to do the lion’s share of the work, and certainly to do all the planning and organization – what she wanted from him was just a tiny bit of appreciation, of acknowledgement for her efforts. The division of labour might not have been equitable, but her life was fuller with him in it.

So any ants and grasshoppers out there? Anyone willing to say, "My husband's personality is so fantastic, I'm willing to do all the housework"?