Fetching the Dictionary

Pretty Lady is delighted that her fan base tends to be Persons of Quality. She feels that she must be doing something right, to attract such a number of earnest ladies and gentlemen, desiring to become better ones. Thus, perhaps, she is preaching to the choir when she hauls out the dictionary, for a precise definition of one of the most under-considered words (in her opinion) of both the current and previous centuries.

integrity n 1: an unimpaired condition: SOUNDNESS 2: firm adherence to a code of esp. moral or artistic values: INCORRUPTIBILITY 3: the quality or state of being complete or undivided: COMPLETENESS syn 1 see HONEST ant duplicity 2 see UNITY

Pretty Lady's extensive personal experience has led her to the empirical observation that if you haven't got this, you're screwed. Pretty much.

The important thing to observe, as you are contemplating the three sub-definitions of this deep and mysterious word, is that all three of them apply equally, in consideration of character. One must be, at the same time, sound, incorruptible, and complete. Also honest. Do not forget honest. One must first be honest with oneself, before one can be so with others.

But hang all of this philosophical exploration. What you really want to hear is the juicy details of why Pretty Lady didn't marry any of those jerks.

Much has been made of Pretty Lady's Terrible Taste in Men, but little consideration has been paid to the details of this terribility. Pretty Lady has one Achilles flaw--she can't STAND being bored. She requires a partner who keeps her on her toes. She prefers the company of one curly-headed anarchist who traipses the hills of Mexico with random blonde women, airily spinning theories of psychology and social philosophy off the top of his head, to a truckload of Wealthy and Upstanding Echo Chambers. This is NOT because she has an abiding interest in anarchy, or hiking, or compulsive womanizing; she just needs to be intellectually challenged. To be Predictable, with Pretty Lady, is to be Toast.

So Pretty Lady went from the Social Activist S/M Bondage addict, to the Emotionally Abusive Buddhist Monk, to the Curly Headed Womanizer, to the Angry Atheist. All these men had three things in common--enormously high intelligence, a habit of thinking outside the box, and a fractured psyche. The third element was what torched the relationship. One cannot relate wholly to another person when one is busy avoiding oneself.

This does not have to be so.

You see, friends, the true personality of an individual never adheres to stereotype. The nature of a human is to be deep and contradictory. The difficulty comes in when one attempts to rigidly adhere to a code, any code, while roughly suppressing most of one's psyche, or ignoring it, and letting it atrophy. This is the true reason for those hordes of automatons who parrot the party line ad nauseam, whatever party it might be--Democrat, Republican, Fundamentalist, or "yes, dear." These people are simply too lazy and frightened to think, and Pretty Lady despises them all.

None of these are in present company, she trusts.

No, the trap Pretty Lady has consistently fallen into is to get engrossed, not in the complications of a smart fellow earnestly trying to understand himself, but those of a smart fellow, seriously messed up. Avoidance of one's own deep mental fractures can provide, roughly, a year and a half's worth of fascinating and labyrinthine tangles, before the tape starts its repeat loop. It is not a coincidence that a year and a half is roughly the half-life of Pretty Lady's relationships.

So what to do? How do you tell which complicated, striving young man is worth the effort, and which is a bright but avoidant loser?

Pretty Lady postulates the Occam's Razor:

petty adj 1: having secondary rank or importance: MINOR, SUBORDINATE 2: having little or no importance or significance 3: marked by or reflective of narrow interests and sympathies: SMALL-MINDED

When Pretty Lady looks back over her life, the first Red Flag has always been when somebody got petty with her. When the Angry Atheist refused to visit her apartment because parking might be difficult, despite the fact that parking was equally difficult (and earlier) in his neighborhood. When the Curly Headed Womanizer walked too fast on the way to the theatre. When the Pretty Narcissist barked at her for folding back the last page of an ancient science magazine. When the Psychotic Ex threw a tantrum because her friends talked about something that didn't interest him.

Pettiness is a sign of avoidance. Because when someone goes nuts over which movie to see, a stain on their clothing, an aversion to feathers, it is never about that. It's about some huge gap in their mental landscape which they are desperately trying to conceal. It's about a deep-seated fear of commitment, an unwillingness to assume responsibility, low self-esteem, poisonous envy, or existential terror. Petty people are dangerous. They will throw you into the jaws of their dragons, in order to avoid slaying them themselves.

Which is unutterably foolish, because then they are left with the dragon and without Pretty Lady, who makes a profession out of coaching people through the basics of dragon handling and slaughter. But one must never equate "intelligent" with "rational."