Women and expectations of passion. What?

I don’t even know what that phrase means. What expectations? Whose expectations? Passion for what? I can tell you right now, this is going nowhere positive.*

Let’s start by lowering all expectations to zilch. If you’re a child of the 80’s, forget everything you learned from the Enjoli commercial. Yes you can “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never-ever-ever-ever let him forget he’s a man”. But do you really want to?

Aren’t you worn out from bringin’ the bacon home? How ‘bout while you are fryin’ up the bacon, he heads to the bedroom with his laptop and reminds himself he’s a man? Then later he can rub your feet while you lay on the couch. That’s more like it. Ahhh, real life—boring and lacking in the passion department more times than not.

In fact, I think I’d be okay if “passion” were removed from the dictionary. Then there would be no expectations of it. Most of us just do what we need to do at home or work and don’t have the luxury of spending our days searching for “our passion”.

You do your duty

Daffy duck summed it up nicely in a profound statement from season one, episode 6 of The Looney Tunes Show, “…It’s your duty. You JUST do it. You-do-your-duty.” When my grandmother traveled here from Italy [third class all the way]; walked off the ship onto American soil; and was then “processed” for a week by Immigration, she did not say, “Nowah I’ma gonna finda mi pashionni!” She just did her duty.

She worked in a NYC garment factory [sweat shop]. I’m certain it was not her “passion”. But it did enable her bring home the meatballs and cook them up in a nice red sauce [So, so good, that as a child I’d ask for meatballs every Christmas. Nope, never got them—too hard to wrap I guess].

The icing on the cake

Maybe you have discovered your passion and life has met all your expectations. Yay you [and I mean that]. Just shut up about it. Don’t ask me what my passion is and don’t suggest that I need to find my passion to be happy or successful.

I love eating cake [just eating it, not baking it]. You could call it a passion for eating cake. If I built my life or career around it, I would not be successful. I would be huge and in need of triple bypass and an aortic pig valve. My kid has a passion for World War II history and Japanese sci-fi monster movies. Psychologists call it “restricted interests” not “passion” and it’s a problem. On the flip side, my lack of interest or “passion” for anything in particular [except cake] is termed “mild-to-moderately depressed”.

So just to review: let’s shut up about “passion”, do what we need to do without expectation, and aim for “content”. Anything more can be icing on the cake, or just a container of icing, or maybe even a full sheet cake from Costco.

*The opinions you are about to read are subject to drastic change on any given day and at any given moment, dependent upon my mood.

**Speaking of old perfume ads, check out this exceptionally disturbing Love’s Baby Soft commercial (circa 1975)