Sometimes we are one and then we are the other

I know you who know me are laughing out there. Felix, shmelix. You know I'm an Oscar and you know I married one, too. And we're proud of it, we are. Some of our favorite courtship stories are the ones that come out of our Oscar tendencies. Like when I invited him over for dinner and was very nervous about the whole thing, despite the fact that "dinner" consisted of boiled spaghetti and warmed-up Ragu. I lived then in an old lumber magnate's house with a bunch of women and he lived with a bunch of men in the attached "servants' quarters." I had set the table, was boiling the water, and was just about to pour the Ragu into the saucepan. I was chattering a mile a minute and trying to get the lid off the jar when the jar and the lid and all the thick red sauce went flying out of my hands and into the big open heating vent on the kitchen floor. Oh my! Despite my scrubbing that long vent as best I could, every time the heat kicked on the whole place smelled like a Ragu factory.

And then there's the story of him camping alone in one of his favorite state parks. He gets the fever to camp in all seasons, winter to fall, and he throws whatever he needs into his vehicle and heads out without much planning. This time was no different. We were dating then and I hadn't committed a thing yet. He missed me. He grabbed a stack of brown paper towels from the trail center and sat down and composed for me a long, winding, hilarious and endearing letter. On like 17 sheets of brown paper handwipes. Then, on his way home, he mailed the wad to me at the next post office. That was definitely a deal-maker.

Television plays up these Felix and Oscar stereotypes and we begin to count on them. Will and Grace. He's the metrosexual, she's the splendid slob. Adrian Monk, the OCD-addled detective who solves crimes with precision. Monica Geller Bing, the dustbusting overachiever. Lucy Ball, the chocolate-stuffing, Dezi-loving, clumsy ditz.
But in real life, I'd venture to say we have a little bit of the opposite in each of us. I may be able to turn my head from a half-inch of dust on my bedside table, but I loath a dirty fridge. And I loath dirty things in it, like the black crust that forms on the ridges of the salsa jar. And I like my clean towels tri-folded, so they're smooth and tight in the linen closet. And my husband can't stand spills on the stovetop and counters. And he's one of those men who keeps a well-stocked shoeshine kit in the bathroom--and uses it often.

Literature is better than TV at tracking the nuances. Neatness can indicate depression or it can signal freedom to do what someone has been wanting to do his or her whole life. Sloppiness can symbolize love or it can symbolize loneliness. We can be one way and then we can be another. Nick Hornby writes this up brilliantly in his novel High Fidelity.

Many times a happy couple lets it all hang out, too preoccupied with each other to worry about appearances. The main character Rob describes his shared flat with Laura, before the break-up:

". . . the half-read Julian Barnes paperback on the bedside table and the knickers in the dirty-clothes basket. . . . Women's knickers were a terrible disappointment to me when I embarked on my cohabiting career. I never really recovered from the shock of discovering that women do what we do: they save their best pairs for the nights when they know they are going to sleep with somebody. When you live with a woman, these faded, shrunken, tatty scraps suddenly appear on radiators all over the house; your lascivious schoolboy dreams of adulthood as a time when you are surrounded by exotic lingerie for ever and ever, amen . . . those dreams crumble to dust."

And then, after Laura leaves him:

"Tuesday night I reorganized my record collection; I often do this at periods of emotional stress . . . When Laura was here I had records arranged alpabetically; before that I had them filed in chronological order, beginning with Robert Johnson, and ending with, I don't know, Wham!, or somebody African . . . Tonight, though, I fancy something different, so I try to remember the order I bought them in: that way I hope to write my own autobiography, without having to do anything like pick up a pen . . . I like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves . . . But what I really like is the feeling of security I get from my new filing system; I have made myself more complicated than I really am. I have a couple of thousand records, and you have to be me . . . to know how to find any of them."