not at all original
CLICHÉ | noun [us /kliːˈʃeɪ/ uk /ˈkliː.ʃeɪ/] | something or someone that is not at all original, surprising, or interesting because it has very often been seen before. 1
I’m not a scientist, but I think it’s anthropologically fair to say that every forty year-old man who conducts an annual rewatch of The Sopranos wants to believe Tony’s combination of bravado and neuroses appeals specifically and uniquely to him. He sees, reflected back at him, the same themes that plague the life he has built, in his studio apartment lined with all the history books he reads to feel feelings he’ll never fully explore.
He makes self-deprecating jokes upon discovering an old birthday card used as a bookmark, signed by yet another ex-believer of the empty promises he made to sacrifice his ego, to open his heart, to change, to settle down like all his friends did years ago. But, of course, he can’t. Or won’t. He chooses to invest in a chain necklace instead, a fine line tattoo, and some vintage movie posters. His individuality is somehow bound to staying the same. Repeating patterns. He sees Tony, and therefore himself, as an antihero, rather than what’s blatantly depicted in every scene - just another grown man, childlike in his fear of self-reflection.
The desire to be unique is embedded in human nature, and is, therefore, not unique at all. We are all predestined to become unorginial, no matter how meticulously we curate our feeds.
I am a cliché. I am a cat lady and I live alone. I am Irish and I am an alcoholic. I am a privileged nepo adult and I constantly try to convince myself and others that I’m paving my own way. I am a millennial white woman and I love Taylor Swift songs and pumpkin spice flavoring and therapy and Real Housewives and switching my Hinge profile to “bisexual” for a few months before settling down with a man.
And when I was twenty, I dated a thirty year old finance guy, and truly believed that I was not too young for him. I believed I was unique, because I was an “old soul”.
At some point in my preteen years, I began manifesting true love for myself. I remember lying in bed under a Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone poster, extending my right hand and placing my left hand inside of it so I could imagine the hand belonged to someone else who wanted to be close to me.
Seventh grade would be my year for closeness. Okay, nevermind, eighth grade would be my year. I would get my first kiss. It would be perfect. He wouldn’t mind my braces or my big nose or my excessive sweating, because he would know the REAL me. We would teach each other how to go to second base. We would both enjoy spending weekends compiling lists of what we planned to name our future pets. Okay, nevermind. High school would be different. Okay, well maybe the boys in college would care less about looks and popularity. They would understand me better. Okay, turns out it’s hard for anyone to understand you when you’re getting blackout drunk on a daily basis.
When I first got sober at age twenty, one of my main motivations was to find the love that had evaded me for so long. Things would REALLY be different now that I’d made the decision to stop actively harming myself and others with a dangerous addiction. I showed up to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings dressed for the club, wearing American Apparel crop tops and bodycon skirts and a full face of makeup, just waiting to be noticed.
Men already at rock bottom seemed like the perfect dating pool for me to find a willing contender. It annoyed me that so many of them were deterred by my “day count”. Only ten days sober. Twenty. Thirty. Come on, that was an eternity! Why didn’t anyone want to bring me home to their mother yet? I repeatedly told my AA sponsor that she could not understand what I was going through, because she had a boyfriend and I did not. I celebrated my first 90 days sober at a bar, using my fake ID to follow around an emotionally unavailable man. But I did not drink, and three months later, my boyfriend arrived.
My first AA boyfriend and I were both considered “newcomers” among the AA community, with around six months of sobriety each. My sponsor inadvertently set us up by telling me this thirty year old man from our homegroup had a crush on me. The man’s sponsor “fired” him for violating some rule about not dating before achieving a year of sobriety. I truly don’t think I would have been able to stay sober if I had NOT dated in the first year. I certainly wasn’t going to stay sober for myself (someone I deeply hated at the time), so it helped to have someone else to stay sober for, and to meet up with at the Big Book study for date night, while most of my peers were graduating college, exploring open relationships and cocaine.
For our first date, he invited me to The Guggenheim Museum. He had some sort of museum membership pass from the bank he used to work for (getting fired from there helped land him in AA, which I totally understood because I had recently been asked, officially, by my college, to leave campus and seek immediate medical attention). I showed up forty-five minutes late, didn’t understand anything he said about any of the paintings, and promptly asked him to buy me a brownie from the museum cafe. It might have occurred to him then that we were not both newcomers. He was an adult and I was a twenty year-old, and a twenty year-old is still a twenty year-old, with or without the booze.
Nevertheless, the relationship progressed. We became exclusive. We said we loved each other and I had no reference for the feeling, but it seemed fine enough! He bought me a Swarovski ring. I got high on the idea of being in a relationship, proving to the world that someone finally wanted to hold my hand! I had value! I had someone to participate in constant instagram photo ops with and, yes, even Vines. We celebrated the birth of his best friend’s child. We celebrated my admission back into undergrad. On our one year anniversary, I wore a purple bandage dress and sat in his lap for a self-timed pic. Then, I downed a Monster energy drink and three or four Marlboro reds before dinner. I had really made it.
Once I got a boyfriend, though, I kind of felt like… “Is this it?” After two decades? This was what I’d been manifesting? I couldn’t figure out how to have an orgasm and I couldn’t figure out how to tell him that without melting into the hardwood floor, never to return to his jumbo one bedroom with outdoor space again.
Tinder launched and my friends were making connections and making mistakes and trying threesomes. I was having dinner with my boyfriend’s middle aged step siblings on the Upper West Side, feeling slightly uncomfortable when his preteen niece said she liked my Hello Kitty backpack, because the compliment seemed to remind everyone that I was closer in age to her than to my “partner”. I was never totally comfortable around his friends and family. I could tell they didn’t respect me, and I couldn’t quite understand why. What made them so superior? So sure of themselves? So comfortable wearing colors like Camel and Charcoal?
Somewhere along the way, maybe on that one car ride when he turned down the volume right in the middle of Demi Lovato’s “Skyscraper” so he could explain to me how wind turbines work, I understood what I needed to do. I don’t remember if it was a few weeks or a few months later, but I asked my friend to come with me to break up with him (she waited downstairs). I cried and blew my nose all over my American Apparel crop top. He didn’t cry at all. He said something about not being surprised or having a feeling this would happen. Eventually he texted me that I was making a mistake. I knew that I wasn’t.
A few weeks later, I asked a friend what she thought my now ex-first-boyfriend might be telling his friends about the breakup. “Probably just that you’re too young and not ready for a relationship”, she said. Huh. I’d never thought of it that way.
Years later, in getting to know a new roommate, I regaled her with the story of my second failed relationship, with my second AA boyfriend, who was not ten but eight years older than me. My roommate said, as if agreeing with me, “there’s something inherently wrong with men who date much younger women”. I had not, until then, understood my romantic history to be proof of a commonplace social construct. I felt my deeply complicated experiences suddenly condense into one, simple, trivial truth. I was just the younger woman. A cliché in a bandage dress, reeking of cigarettes and Marc Jacobs Daisy perfume, desparately trying to skip ahead to the next chapter of adulthood, as if I could somehow just BECOME thirty by osmosis, and avoid the pain of being too old to be considered a kid, but too young to be respected as an adult, deeply believing I knew everything about the way the world worked and not understanding why the world wouldn’t listen.
Of course, it was not that simple. Nothing is that simple. I walked a completely unoriginal path in my own, original way, wearing Steve Madden sneaker wedges, and I was not alone. I love bonding with other women about all the cliché paths we’ve found ourselves on, and the ones we will likely stumble into again. About all the ways we have been the same, and completely original, all at once. I wonder if the older men of my past have been able to find similar comfort in cliché community, or if they’re still out there, somewhere, convincing themselves that the twenty something girl they’re bringing home for Thanksgiving is “different”, “an old soul”, “likes Scorcese movies and listens to Radiohead” and “somehow, coincidentally, doesn’t present any adult challenges or needs”.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/cliche