What About Baggage?

I almost hate to mention what spurred this post...but my desire to seem professional motivates citing this source...

I receive the eHarmony newsletter via email.

Whew...I'm glad I got that off my chest. In all honesty, I swear it's because I filled out one of those free personality profiles one night when I was bored...and now they send me stuff in my email, and I'm too lazy to ask them to stop. This particular issue caught my eye because it had several dating/relationship articles that I thought sounded interesting. Being the aspiring relationship guru that I am, I opted to peruse Dimensions (this is what they call their little bit of literary whatnot). After I finished an article titled "The Ex Files: How to Get Over Your Baggage and Get On with Your Life," I started to wonder if this "Dr. Warren" really knew what he was talking about. I'm a huge skeptic to begin with, and no amount of couples' success stories is really going to convince me that I should listen to his babbling.

Yet. This topic is very close to my heart. My dad and I have had many a discussion about "what is it about women and holding on to their baggage for dear life?" After hours of yapping, the best conclusion we've come up with is that women are spaghetti and men are waffles. This, according to my dad, is the newest catch-phrase--taking the ideas of Venus and Mars to a whole new level. I'll venture a tangent to explain: men compartmentalize. They have all these little squares of syrup and none of them have to mingle with any of the others. Women, however, are spaghetti because anything you add to the mix gets all sorts of gunked up on everything else (this explanation is especially potent with my accompanying hand motions, but you'll have to do without them for now). Anyways, point being, if a woman has hurt in her past, she can't seem to confine it to one noodle. Sauce gets all up in all the noodles. And you can't just start throwing stuff out or you'd have no noodles left, which only further encourages your anorexia, also not a good thing. Besides, this whole "packing analogy" is really difficult for me. I mean, if you've ever seen me at the airport, you know that I am anything but low maintenance. Every time I travel, I plan to downsize some, but it never seems to come to fruition. And now with all these anti-liquid regulations, transporting my lip-gloss collection is more complicated than ever. Still, I do see a glimmer of hope: my travel rule is "Never pack more than you can carry." Testing proves that there is a direct correlation (excuse the science-talk, I just finished my lab report) between my increasing buffness and the amount of baggage I can truck around with.

Alas, according to Dr. eHarms, baggage is something that can be organized, downsized, and eventually eliminated. According to my dad, you should just get over it. In other words--baggage can be sectioned off, cut neatly, and swallowed with a glass of milk. Which is all fine and dandy if you are a waffle.

On behalf of all the spaghetti in the world, I propose that we get a second opinion...from a chick. Sure, the article has some awesome ideas for learning what it means to understand your past and the effect it has on you. Yes, people should recognize the hurt for what it is, forgive, and put it behind them. But this isn't a case for getting rid of baggage altogether. In a kind of sick but also charming way, your baggage helps make you the way you are. It doesn't have to be all that bad. Here's some additional hints that I would add to Dr. Warren's five-point plan:

1. Pack efficiently: sort through all the crap you've got and figure out how to organize it just a bit. Rolling clothes instead of just folding and piling them is an army trick I got from a friend of mine. Know what kind of crap you have and see if you can arrange it in a way to make it make a bit more sense.
2. Downsize what you can: a little of me dies inside when I say this, but three different kinds of lip gloss will be plenty for the road ahead. And toss the hair appliances--go for the wet-hair look. It's hot right now.
3. Hit the gym: if you've got a lot of crap to haul, better buff up those arms and shoulders. Go with what you got--God hasn't given us more than we can handle, right?

Now this all brings me to a final ThoughtRantTangent (check that--combining three words instead of just two): I may actually be entering the life-stage where I don't hate on hook-up websites. Last weekend, while watching 10 Things I Hate About You on TV (where they bleep out words...which I always find slightly distracting and rather amusing) with my friend Katie and two of my roommates, a commercial for eHarmony came on the television. Alli spoke up: "You guys--we are the demographic they are catering to...the pathetic, single women watching movies on TV on a Friday night." According to the other commercials, we are also single mothers (kids' toys ad) and fat (Weight Watchers). Kind of depressing, really. But I don't think that you have to be ridiculously loserish to glean from the dating advice and methods of others. Last summer I read a book called How to Get a Date Worth Keeping, which I pre-judged as the most un-Christian dating book ever. My post-judgment came out opposite. The book has a lot of good ideas about viewing dating as a normal part of making friendly connections with people--instead of as the scary monster we've turned it into. I think eHarmony and it's competitors are on to something similar: it's O K to meet new people and get to know them. In today's world, courtship can't work like it used to because your parents (or you) can't do the intensive background check that was once possible. You, likely, didn't grow up around these people. Dating or the websites that promote it are a form of "background check" in a social situation. Not to take away all the romance of relationships, but doing a bit of research on the subject before your let your emotions get carried away is a pretty good preventative strategy for keeping the baggage count low.

My last thoughts: love God and keep traveling. Happy trails!