TIMER

I watched the movie TIMER last night on netflix instant play. It’s a romantic comedy with a science fiction element. I’ve been avoiding romantic comedies lately, they are too predictable, and they predictably make me feel depressed.

In the movie, there is a new technology that people can implant into their wrists, which is a timer that counts down, days, hours, minutes, until when you will meet your soulmate. Your One. And then when you see each other it beeps. According to the studies, 95% of people are happy with their eventual soulmate. Of course this can be both liberating and debilitating at the same time. Would we have relationships? Treat relationships differently when we have such a timer? Would you allow yourself to fall in love, make detours from your destiny?

The protagonist Oona (a very cool name) is nearing thirty, and she is in a panic that her timer has not started counting down, and so she goes around finding guys that have no timers, dating them, and then taking them to get a timer installed (and then they discover they are not soul mates and part ways). Her sister Steph has a timer that says she will meet her soulmate when she is 43, so meanwhile she is trying to pass her time by having meaningless sex.

Something about their predicament resonates with me… and reminds me of all my single girlfriends… we are not the young college girls we were, and thirty does not seem that far away from where we are standing- there is something scary about that number, maybe it’s that when we were little girls, 9 or 10, we imagined that everything would be settled by the time we were 30. (because that seemed really old at the time, and it’s a round number.) So we probably had this picture in our little heads of having a good career, nice husband, a house, a dog, and possibly even a baby.

And for some of my friends, they are on their way to that reality. But then for the rest of us single gals, things are still a confusing mess: we date a bunch of guys wondering if we are wasting our time and the other person’s time, we leap into relationships giving our best, but nevertheless getting our hearts broken, and we keep hoping for that magical someday when we will meet a person who is right for us.

As for me, sometimes I don’t feel I know myself well enough, or know what I want well enough to recognize my soulmate(s) when I see him/her. And I don’t know if that idyllic picture I painted for myself when I was younger is what I am aiming for.

But wouldn’t it be nice to have a timer? It would take all the guessing and disappointment out of this process. I would not have to wonder whether or not I’d be single forever- if that was my destiny, I would know. Wouldn’t that make life easier? The movie shows us that although with the TIMER the dynamics of dating have shifted, humans are still complicated, and the timer doesn’t necessarily make life easier.

And I guess if we look at life and love in the context of ONE soulmate or ONE destiny it makes everything else seem like detours. But if we didn’t have this process of learning and getting hurt, life would be much less interesting. As Mikey says in the movie: “Life is all about detours.”

And gradually, I’ve come to recognize that life is not a romantic comedy, the goal is not a happy ending. The only ending to life is death, and before that every moment is precious and contains all the wonderful confusing qualities that are rarely captured by movies of this type.