My Dad’s favorite TV show is Seinfeld. I grew up with Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer on the TV almost every night. When our family first cut cable we’d wait for the start of each month with anticipation because we knew it meant ten “new” episodes of Seinfeld would be streaming on Crackle. What I really like about the show, and what makes it stand out from other sitcoms of its era, are how awful its characters are. The Seinfeld Four are not great people. They are constantly ruining their own lives and the lives of those around them due to the wonky beliefs and selfish antics. I think that some of my favorite shows utilize characters like these people to show us the worst of ourselves and not only make fun of it but hold those patterns and behaviors that we all exhibit up to the light.
It is for this reason that I have always found George to be my favorite character. I think that his worst traits overlap with a lot of my worst traits. We are both balding, neurotic, whiny people. And for a while we were both unemployed and living with our parents. All of the characters in this show are funny, but none of them disgust me quite like George Costanza because I know that the terrible situations he gets himself into are caused by patterns and ways of thinking that aren’t as foreign to me as I’d like.
Season 5 Episode 22
My favorite episode, as you might guess, is a very George-centric episode. Season Five’s Finale, The Opposite, finds George flipping the script on his own instincts and doing the opposite of what he would naturally do. He starts off ordering a different meal and approaching a strange woman and by the end of the episode he’s sitting on top of his dream job, giving salutations to strangers, and advising the Yankee’s on their batting stances. George goes from being the down on his luck loser of the group to being the leader all because he ignores every instinct that he’s ever had and does the opposite.
Season 26 Episode 7
At 26 years and 7 months, I’m having a very George-centric episode. Like Mr. Costanza at the beginning of The Opposite, lately it has felt like “every decision I’ve ever made has been wrong”. I am unmarried and recently single at that. I have a job that I do not like, one that has so far shown little potential of becoming what I wanted for it as a career. In both regards I feel like my instinct has lead me to take the last two and a half years and just flush them down a toilet. And much like George I too have spent the morning thinking things over, though not at the beach because once you’ve been caught in a rip current she just doesn’t have that allure anymore.
Work
I’ve talked about my job and frustrations on this blog in detail already, so I don’t want to spend too much time on that. While that part of my life frustrates me, there are still wins there and to a certain extent I still feel a solid amount of control. My freelance work is slowly but surely picking up, and I have other irons in the fire that I’m hoping will take shape before too long. While it is frustrating, success in that regard hasn’t felt like the hopeless expedition it has in months past. So enough on that topic, because what I’d really like to dive into is a bit more personal.
Singleness
Singleness is not something I’ve ever aspired to. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to be a husband and especially to be a father. If my past job experience can tell you anything, it’s that I have a big heart for children and having between 2-4 of my own has always been a desire of mine. I am not content being solo and I know that my heart greatly desires both romantic and familial companionship. Yet those two things seem to be held aloft like a carrot on an ever lengthening stick. As my thirties get closer and closer, I find myself anxious about the timeline I’d imagined for my life slowly burning away at both ends.
Compare
My parents got married when they were eighteen. They had a kid when they were nineteen and twenty and had me when they were twenty-seven. My older brother was engaged to his now wife when he was my age. My little sister got married two years ago and is due to have her first child within the next month. I look at their progress down the road I’ve wanted to travel for as long as I can remember and find myself sitting in a vehicle seemingly void of an engine.
My twenty seventh birthday is a few months away and I haven’t even checked a single one of those boxes that my parents had at my age. For a while I thought I was close to being on par with my brother and that hope vanished a month ago. My sister beat me by years so that’s already a firm L in my book. I look around at my family and I feel like kind of a loser. Like they all had this thing put together ages ago and I haven’t even opened the box yet.
Contrast
I didn’t really date until I got to college. High School Collin hardly knew how to talk to people, let alone girls. High School Collin also didn’t know when to cut his losses and simped on a friend for well over two years. There was no way that marriage was ever going to be a possibility for me by the age of eighteen.
Collegiate Collin shed his awkwardness and came to the realization that you can just talk to girls. There’s no secret formula or passcode, you just have to open your mouth and start speaking. There were flirtationships, talking stages, and romances throughout but nobody who ever felt like “the one”. So college ended and so did the ability to enter that stage of life before my little sister did.
I entered Florida thinking I could at least be on par with my brother. I was twenty-four at the time and being engaged by twenty-six didn’t feel improbable. Then I spent the remainder of twenty-four being abused and all of twenty-five in a relationship that had an expiration date long before it finally expired. I’m not going to be on par with my brother and considering I’m now back at the tee shot I’ll be lucky if I make it in under a triple bogey.
Singleness Pt 2
Marriage and family are strong desires upon my heart. They are things that I have pursued greatly yet that pursuit seems to be no more than a never ending lesson in patience. I just got out of a year and a half long relationship and I find myself stuck between moping and being angry that I wasted so much of my time and set myself even further back.
I don’t like being single and I’m not a huge fan of single Collin either. He’s morose yet clingy, needy, and a tad whinier than he ought to be. And if this blog stopped at the last two paragraphs I’d have to change that “tad” into a much larger quantity. But this post isn’t about singleness or comparing myself to my family, it’s about Seinfeld and my favorite character George Costanza.
Instinct or The Opposite
My first instinct when this relationship ended was to be like George, to wallow a bit and think of all the poor instincts and decisions I’ve made that lead me to that mental state. My second instinct was to wonder if perhaps every instinct I’ve ever had was wrong just like his were. Whenever we go through periods of great shock or struggle there’s always an impulse to “do the Opposite”, to reinvent ourselves and latch on to something drastic. While I definitely felt a pull in this direction, I think that train of thought leads only to trainwreck. George Costanza didn’t become a different person in order to succeed, he merely suppressed the instincts he had that were counter-intuitive. Despite doing “the Opposite”, George is still George at the end of that episode. He might be a more fulfilled and more successful George, but he’s still very much the character we’ve come to know over those first five seasons.
As the weeks have gone by and I’ve had a chance to make peace with the hand I’ve been dealt, I’ve paid a lot more attention to the cards that make up that hand. As much as I do not enjoy being single, it doesn’t feel quite like the death sentence it did even a year and a half ago.
Co-Stan-Za
I feel much more actualized than I have in the past. I know my own weaknesses, but I have a much greater confidence in my strengths. Like George Costanza in a later season, I understand that a lot of the reason why the people who like me like (and not just romantically) is because they got to know me. I’m not an extrovert and making a big first impression is nothing I’ll ever be great at. Sit me across the table from someone I’ve never met and I’ll talk for hours but plop me in a room full of people and tell me to make a friend and I will retreat faster than Fox News on January 6th. The people I’m closest with are close to me because I was consistent and persistent and while it takes me a bit to let people in, the endearing parts of me aren’t seen until that really happens. Like George Costanza, the appeal of myself is like a commercial jingle. It’s nothing at first but you hear it a few times and suddenly it’s stuck inside your head.
Even Steven
In the background of George’s pursuit of The Opposite is Jerry’s inability to ever truly fail. He loses a gig and a new one comes knocking right after. Elaine throws his $20 out the window and he finds another in his coat pocket. While his friends teeter-totter on the social see-saw, Jerry is a reminder that equilibrium exists somewhere. I felt reminded of this a lot the weekend that Emberly and I broke up. The same day that we split I got to spend filming and editing with a group of videographers I really like. As I started to spiral romantically I got another freelance project I’d been wanting for some time. As my relationship ceased, friendships I hadn’t had time to pursue had room to grow.
I’m not satisfied being single again, but I know that I am not the same person I was before my last relationship came to an end. I’m not going to enter these coveted stages of life at the same time my parents or my siblings did, but I think that there is freedom in finally taking that L. I don’t really have anything to compare my path forward to now. Because of that I think I am finally aware of what it means for that path to be mine and not to be something I want to mirror someone else’s.
I know my own strengths, I know the parts of me that people love, and most importantly I love those parts of me too. I know that despite the ups and downs, that there is an equilibrium out there too. Doing “the opposite” isn’t about being who you think you want to be, its about knowing your place in the situation and ignoring the instinct to be a passive participant. So if nothing has worked out for me with tuna on toast, I’m ready to take the risk on a chicken salad on rye.
Collin Willis 