Volume 50, Issue 14: Editor’s Desk
Her Favorite Colo(u)r
CARLO JAVIER // EDITOR-IN-CHIE
“We found love in a hopeless place,” – Rihanna
I met this girl at McDonald’s nearly six years ago – not in the lobby lining up for value picks, but inside, in the kitchen. I was a crew trainer and she was a new hire.
At the time, no one would have thought that we would end up together. She was in her own steady relationship, while I thought I embodied what my colleague Justin Scott describes as the Holy Trinity – “young, single and good-looking.” Of those three, only one still applies to me today.
Eventually, her relationship status changed, mine didn’t, but my BMI did. Nearly three years after we met and countless text conversations later, we ended up dating. Evidently, it took a long, slow burn for a spark to manifest, but here we are.
I have always been fascinated with the accepted cultural norms that surround heteroromantic relationships. At the same time, little insecurities have always clouded my then life as a single person. While I didn’t go around Tinder putting “5’7 on a good day” in my bio, being on the shorter end of the height spectrum has always lingered in the back of my head. Not to mention many other factors that could affect one’s dating choices: be it heavily serious elements like race and ethnicity, or important, but seemingly trivial things like the ability to drive – or even the luxury of a car.
It is a terribly minute detail, but my girlfriend is ever so slightly taller than I am. She drives and I don’t. We also come from different backgrounds, her of being British and First Nations descent and I am a Filipino. We don’t even listen to much of the same music, nor do we watch the same TV shows.
Conversations about dating, or even about finding matches tend to centre on the hunt for commonalities. And yes, the things we share do bond us, but let’s be real, these commonalities that bring people together are ultimately just on the surface. I’m far from a relationship expert – that title falls to our news editor, Christine “got too many dates” Beyleveldt – but if the things we share bring us together, could the differences that we learn to appreciate be the locks that keep us together?
I think that the value of differences is an increasingly more valid question to ask, particularly considering our ever more polarizing social environment. If an office or a group of friends can coexist in harmony in spite of differing opinions on a myriad of things, then I would think that a partnership should have no problems in combating such a challenge. D’Angelo and Lauryn Hill did once say, “Nothing Even Matters.”