In any case, I was going through all the animal pairings, monkey-pig, hippo-tortoise, cat-dolphin and the requisite video footage that showed them bow-leggedly ambling after each other in companionable fashion, when I started to think that all of them didn't resemble a friendship in the conventional sense of the word.
They were all remarkably one-sided, for one thing. Take Owen the Hippo and Mzee the Tortoise, for example. The footage opens with someone saying, "The relationship was very much Owen's initiative". Which is kind of the saddest thing you can say about a hippo. And really, the clip is all about Owen following Mzee around, Owen nudging a Mzee that is actually starting to do a very good impression of an embarrassed tortoise, Owen nibbling at Mzee's feet.
And the trend continued with The Cat and The Dolphins, where really, the dolphins did all the work, leaping up from the water to kiss the cat, while the cat just kind of batted disinterestedly at them from high, dry land.
After an initial WTF, it dawned upon me. What I was watching wasn't all that far removed from human relationships, after all. In fact, the whole unhealthy dynamic going on vis-a-vis Owen and Mzee was what most human friendships are like.
Allow me to explain by borrowing from an episode of How I Met Your Mother. In one of them, Barney advances the Reacher-Settler theory. In every relationship, there's a reacher and there's a settler. One of you is too good for the other person but has decided that I need to settle down/I want children/I just need a reliable way to get laid regularly - and so, that person becomes the one you settle for. In that episode which I am sure was the cause of a gazillion couples' spats around the world the week it aired, it'd referred to romantic relationships.
And really, that's nothing that we have a problem with. But consider for a moment a far more disturbing expansion of that idea to the platonic realm. With every one of your friends, you're either settling or reaching. And that's troubling, because in this twisted world, we are sometimes more comfortable being ourselves with our chums than with our romantic partners.
That's the way the cookie crumbles, though, and in your heart of hearts, you know it's true because you've been there. Do you have a friend whom you always have to text first, a long, slobbering and overly hopeful text that she replies to several hours late with curt, one-syllable answers? Reacher. Do you have a friend whom you ask to lunch last, after everyone else you can think of can't make it? Settler.
The thing is, it's not really that awful a reality. Everyone kinda gets it - that on the grand totem pole of social interaction, your hippo is my tortoise and so on. When it starts to go wrong, though, is when you suddenly and rudely discover a long way into the relationship that you, my friend, are the reacher.
Discovering it late can be for a number of reasons. One, you could be so alarmingly socially inept and self-absorbed that you've fooled yourself into thinking that you and your friends are equals. It's like how the fat girl actually thinks that her skinny beautiful friend keeps asking her to go to singles bars with her because of her conversation.
Or two, you both could have actually started out equals, but with time and mismatched speeds of ageing, one of you has gradually coasted to a station in life where you need the other person less than she needs you.
I'm using 'she' a lot because this is usually more of a problem with girls, who from the time they meet till the time they say, "Ciao, darling", are actively sizing you up in terms of future usefulness, current and potential social standing and threat level. Guys are lucky if they can figure out that another guy is mad at them. This is why the term 'frenemy' was coined by girls. Only something as warped as that can come from the gender that thinks stilettos are a good idea.
A frenemy is only made when the settler-reacher gap is too small or too wide. When it's too small, the reacher in the relationship labours under the delusion that she can turn herself into the settler of the two if she just tries a little harder, loses a little more weight or gets a better husband. When the gap is too wide, a frenemy is made because the reacher is unable to ignore the disparity in awesomeness and resentment ensues. The settler, of course, being so long used to her superiority of being a settler, will brook no dissent. And then what happens usually involves lots of tears, passive-aggressive Facebook status updates and smeared mascara.
But I digress. What I mean to say is, if you're the sort of person who seems to be perpetually mistreated or used by the people around you, the sort who is always more excited to see the other person than the other way around, then it's time to make peace with the fact that you're the reacher. It's not the end of the world, because you can always surround yourself with more hippos instead, and you can be the standoffish Mzee the Tortoise to their adoring Owen the Hippo. Sometimes, the solution to not being an Owen is to stop acting like an Owen.
So, the really tough question to ask yourself is: Are you Owen? Are you a big, clingy hippo?
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