Meanwhile, her crush dated women of varying appearances and dress styles but only appeared interested in those with a strong sense of self. I don’t (I think) have big problems with these issues myself, but I know plenty of people who do, or have in the past including one roommate long ago who would barricade herself in her bedroom with a stack of these magazines whenever her romantic fortunes turned bad, convincing herself she’d been rejected because she wasn’t quite thin enough or quite well-enough made up. If I were the sort of person who believed in burning reading material in the public square, my first bonfire would be a big pile of Cosmo and Glamour and all their variations, aimed at women from their early teen years until they should definitely be old enough to know better, that help us be critical of all the wrong things (my happiness DEPENDS on my being a size 2!) and blind to all the obvious ones (men vary! also, they’re people! if you can’t relate to one as a friend and fellow human, nothing else about your relationship will work!).
It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to this than most. It’s the fantasy that relationships can be completely understood and managed and controlled, and that everyone in the relationship can be perfected and made shiny.īut being totally perfect and shiny for your significant other, so that they will not reject you… what *is* that? Dysfunctional neediness, not love. Much blacker.)įinally, the type of power fantasy involved here is a double-edged and scary one. Or Molleindustrized into some kind of super-dark, cynical scenario that reveals Dr Love is controlled by the interested parties who sell exercise machines and golf-training devices and yard fountains, and that all this private misery is thanks to advertisers first creating a need for high-status, high-appearance relationships, and then destroying them. I could see this thing being Bogosted into a reductionist breakdown of the whole self-help industry. This is why, for some time, I hung on to the hope that the game was joking, that the self-help book pastiche was intended as parody, and that we were going to hit some awesome whipsaw reversal. A lot of that advice was not very good, and what wasn’t inherently foolish (like “listen thoughtfully when your partner tells you something”) was often phrased as “stuff that men could do in order to get along better with their wives/girlfriends” rather than “stuff applicable to both genders.” It often seemed to be shoring up some of the extremely dumb things that women often tell themselves and each other about conventional dating, with the strong implication that men are starting from a point of essential deficiency at the skill of relating to others at all. In fact, there were little snippets of Dr. If I play Halo: ODST for an hour, I don’t walk away trying to apply that experience to my real-life encounters with alien soldiers.īy contrast, there was a lot about the self-help-book framing of Making Mr Right that seemed to suggest it was meant to be dispensing real life advice. The second point is that the lines of the fantasy are less clearly demarcated. But I am a bit disappointed, in the sense that I generally hope games that are more about relationships and daily life will bring with them some measure of maturity, nuance, and perspective - instead of which this one manages to be juvenile, just in a totally different way. I don’t think power fantasies are necessarily the Root of All Evil or anything. (In case there’s any real confusion, I just thought Simon’s phrase “ever so slightly outraged” was entertainingly oxymoronic and ought to be shared.)
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