“So, how’s Joy?” I asked Dave, an old university friend I’d bumped into after two decades. We were catching up on new jobs, hobbies, and long ago relationships.
Dave and Joy had met in Psych 101 and were the perfect couple. She was funny, smart, and great company. We’d all long envied their relationship.
Dave sighed. “What happened?” I asked.
“You know, yada, yada, yada…and then it ended.”
“But you seemed so great together. How did yada, yada, yada turn into nada, nada, nada?”
Dave told me that he and Joy had been watching the film Juno and when Juno suggested Paulie go out with Katrina De Voort, a horrified Paulie replied: “She smells like soup. Her house, her family — they all smell like soup. I can’t date someone who smells like soup.”
Joy laughed her weird laugh, but Dave didn’t.
“I hadn’t realised it before, but Joy was a little soupy,” he told me.
“You broke up with the most perfect woman because she smelled like soup?” I asked, my jaw dropping.
“Why didn’t you just tell her, ‘No soup for you?’”
It turned out Joy didn’t actually smell like soup, but there were several little things about her that had started to grate on Dave: her weird laugh that Dave had first found adorable but then began to resent, and the way she chewed her food annoyed him.
He broke up with Joy.
That was 15 years ago. When he next ran into her, he discovered that she was married with kids, had a successful career and was really happy.
“I’m single and miserable,” said Dave. “You know, everything we learnt about relationships we learnt from Seinfeld.”
“Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” I replied sharply.
“Actually, there is. I blame Seinfeld for losing Joy,” he said.
Every week, our group of friends would gather in front of the TV to watch Seinfeld. It was our ritual.
We laughed till it hurt at their antics, revelling in their chaos.
After we parted, I wondered if Dave was right.
Was Seinfeld to blame for my — and a generation of fans’ — relationship flops? Had we unwittingly absorbed their superficiality?
Jerry broke up with women over the tiniest reasons. He made a voice to mock his girlfriend’s belly button with his friends. She found out and made him choose between her and the voice. Jerry chose the voice.
He broke up with a woman just because his parents approved of her. He dumped a woman because she ate her peas one at a time, another because she was a sentence finisher, and he sent a woman who had “man hands” packing.
I ended a good thing with a girlfriend whose “crime” was being too nice.
Maybe those petty things are our subconscious recognising incompatibilities, I tried to rationalise.
The truth was that we had absorbed Elaine’s “sponge-worthy” mentality, constantly evaluating whether someone met our impossible standards.
Seinfeld, the show that was famously about nothing, bucked the sitcom formula where characters must overcome an obstacle to learn a life lesson.
I realised that I had been learning lessons from a show where the whole point was not to learn a lesson.
No wonder the lessons I had learned were so wrong. Seinfeld is not a model for how to live your life.
It is an example of how not to live your life. Jerry was always looking for the mythical perfect woman, which meant he never gave anyone a real chance.
Perhaps if we’d been fans of Friends, we would have had a healthier love life.
Ironically, there is a lesson to be learned from Seinfeld after all.
In The Opposite episode, the hopeless and hapless George says, “Every decision I’ve ever made in my entire life has been wrong. My life is the complete opposite of everything I want it to be. Every instinct I have in every aspect of life, be it something to wear, or something to eat, it’s all been wrong.”
Jerry observes him carefully and responds, “If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.”
George follows his sage advice, and yada yada yada, he ends up as an executive for the New York Yankees.
So, if you want relationship lessons, do the opposite of Seinfeld: Embrace the weird laugh instead of resenting it. Protect your partner’s dignity instead of mocking their belly button.
Focus on what you love about them instead of cataloguing their flaws. Look for reasons to stay, not reasons to leave.
Dave lost Joy because he forgot that love isn’t about finding someone perfect. It’s about finding someone imperfect you can’t imagine living without.