Life's Not a Rom Com, You're Not a Horse, and You Don't Need a Cowboy to Tame You

Breaking news: We’ve discovered why none of your relationships work out, and it’s not because the two of you didn’t really fit, or that either of you did anything to slowly diminish the goodwill you established early on by being selfish, lazy, or totally human in some other way. It’s because you were dating men instead of warriors. Excuse me—instead of “goddamn warriors.”

Furthermore, we’ve located a man out there who finally gets you, has always gotten you, and who exists purely to understand you like no other man before him would, or hell, could. You know who you are. Writing at Elephant Journal, Kate Rose reports:

You are one of the wild ones, and no matter how you tried to hide that fact, you can’t be anything other than what you are—and that’s okay. You are just as you are supposed to be, magnificently wild in all of your chaotic beauty.

I know you’ve had your heart broken and I know that you don’t understand why it always seems to never work out, but I’ve finally figured it out:

You don’t need a man, you need a goddamn warrior.

Hm, go on.

This warrior of yours will crave your strength, and your intensity. He’s going to look at you and not see something to tame, but something to just fuckin’ admire. This warrior of yours won’t be someone that you can manipulate or play with as you have in the past, so honey, don’t even try—and trust me, you’re going to love him even more because of it.

So sick of dudes trying to tame my intensity.

Because you aren’t just a woman, you’re a goddamn goddess.

Is that right? Huh. Well, I’ll be. And what’s more:

Your fierceness is going to bring him to his knees every single time he looks into your gorgeous eyes.

Funny thing about this is that I would think that any guy who fell to his knees just looking at me was either scammin’ or a total cheese ball. Though I admit: it would be a cool power to have. To recap:

How to Bring a Warrior to his Knees

1. Be a goddess

2. Have gorgeous eyes

Okay, moving on:

Because baby, when you and this warrior of yours meet and collide—it’s going to be a love set on fire.

Good thing I have renter’s insurance.

Let yourself still wander naked under the full moon, and drink moonshine with the stars. Let yourself feel the pull of the wind on your heart, and the sun toward a new journey. Because this warrior is going to love you because of your wild—and he’ll want you to keep it.

You’ll be in this together now, this amazing, crazy, chaotic, wonderfully heartbreaking life—because it takes a warrior to love a goddess. And it takes a goddess to show a warrior what real love is.

But it takes a village to show a goddess what a warrior looks like, or something.

Well, there are lots of ways for things to go down in the game of love, and I suppose this is just one of them. (If there are any goddess-warrior pairings out there, please drop me a line, I’d love to interview you.) Furthermore, maybe this is how “true love” works and I just don’t know it. Where you get to be wild, and find someone who loves your wild, and it’s like something out of a country music video or a rom-com where your dream cowboy comes out of nowhere to tame you like the undomesticated horse you are, or like, Thelma and Louise but like, a happy ending with positive relationships with men.

For all its good intentions of instructing frustrated singletons to double down on being just pathologically themselves, stuff like this can be just as damaging as all the other stuff out circulating in the literature of how to find “the one.” The idea of a Perfect One, let alone a singular dream warrior-cowboy Perfect One, is—to begin with—deceptive. There are a lot of people you could have perfectly fine existences with on this earth. The people it didn’t work out with can sometimes be jerks, yes, but more often than not they aren’t; they’re just people who weren’t the best fit.

Moreover, the person it does work with is going to be great, sure, but not perfect, and certainly not the warrior to your goddess, unless somehow you both literally are. It’s not the case that only exceptional people can find love. We are all deeply flawed regulars, and we’ve got to sort shit out in our non-exceptional way in order to find something that can eventually become exceptional, and wonderful. And it will still be hard and shit, too.

What I’m getting at here is that there are generally two options in the world of (pretty heteronormative) self-help-ish find-your-true-love writing. One blames you, the other one blames your partner. One blames women, one blames men. One says you need to change every little fucking thing about yourself because you are so wretched. Lose weight. Find your sex spirit. Be more attractive. Be busy. Get better clothes. Let your hair down. Embrace the submissiveness, yadda yaddaa. The other says you don’t need to change a goddamn thing because you are a goddamn goddess who sees that you are goddamn perfect and the issue is no man is man enough to handle the potent force of nature that is you.

The first option’s not great—but the second’s not either. You’re great and all, I’m sure, but are you a goddess? Are you really so incorrigible that the best analogy for your personality is that you’re a wild horse? The problem with relationships is not a severe lack of warriors or cowboys to do the taming. It’s lack of two humble, accountable people willing to recognize a great fit and do the work. Anything telling you couldn’t stand to do a little work on yourself because you are so perfect is also bullshit. Everyone needs to do a little work, right? Maybe a lot? Case by case, anyway.

And I get that women deserve some time away from heavy criticism. Dudes could be told for another thousand years to stop wearing cargo shorts, learn some self-awareness and read a goddamn book of poetry every now and again. But the answer is not to make women into goddesses of difficult perfection who only need a superior type of guy to “get them.” Everyone is weird and different in some way, and everyone should be “gotten,” but it’s a two-way street involving particular sets of flaws. Don’t hate yourself, but let’s not self-mythologize like assholes either. Someone is putting up with you also.

Nevertheless, I get why this wild-woman-goddess-warrior thing is so appealing. If we are generalizing, I’m a “wild woman” too, for sure. I am way too opinionated and outspoken and demanding and unpredictable and all that shit. But I have come to see that humility is a far more important attribute in a relationship than pathological individuality. In order to demand anything from anyone, you’ll have to be willing to scrutinize yourself too. In most cases, the first thing you do to make a relationship succeed is work on being less difficult—and that’s probably more important for people that consider themselves “goddesses” or “wild women” or warriors, even, than anyone else.

Less viral but more reasonable than this post would’ve been something that said said: Hey, those dudes it didn’t work out with were just not right for you in one way or another. You probably just need to hold out until you find someone who is more suited to you, plus emotionally mature, plus lives in your town, is not already married, is ready for a relationship, and timing and circumstances line up, and who, right before you really got to know each other, didn’t fall in love with someone else. Hope you guys can appreciate each other!

But that’s not gonna soar through the Internet on a viral rampage of silvery mist through every wild woman’s personal Facebook page. But it’s hella more true. Good relationships are pretty quiet things. They are not spectacular explosions. The times they feel like that are important but anomalous, at least for those who aren’t goddesses and warriors but people—flesh and blood.