Mike, The Loudmouth Geek

Why Rachel Should Say No.

This is not to say that I think she will say No, because the writing of her character has been so all over the place that I can’t begin to guess where they are headed with this. This is just why she should say No.

(I’ll preface this by saying that this isn’t a load of Finn/Finchel Hate because for the first time in a long long time, I actually felt for the dude.)

Getting married, getting engaged right out of high school is almost always a bad idea. Sometimes it works out, but overwhelming majority of the time it just leads to heartache and misery because when you’re 18 you aren’t done becoming who you are, hell most of the time you’ve barely gotten started, so to say that I know that this person is the one I want to be with forever… you can’t know that about yourself if you don’t know who you’re going to be.

Rachel has a dream for herself that she’s wanted since she knew what it was to have a dream for herself, a dream that defines her in a great many ways, and even as recently as “New York” the dream was alive and well. Finn has no idea what he wants out of life. He didn’t know what he wanted before his world got turned upside down and now he really has no idea.

Conversely, Rachel doesn’t really know who she emotionally because realistically she’s only ever been with Finn. She dated Puck for a week and they were both using each other to replace someone else and she was with Jesse but really they were both using each other as well, he to help Shelby get close to Rachel and she to once again make Finn jealous. So Rachel doesn’t really know that Finn’s the one for her because she’s never really had a lot of other options.

In Lima, Rachel is an odd girl who is obsessed with Broadway and has a strange fashion sense and is a social outcast due at least in part to being the child of a gay couple in what’s generally understood to be a fairly homophobic town. In New York, none of that applies. There are thousands of people in New York every bit as obsessed with Broadway, people dress far more strangely than she, and pretty much no one gives a shit that she has gay fathers. In New York, Rachel… well she’s Lea Michelle, a very pretty, very attractive girl with an amazing voice and a boatload of self-confidence. She’ll have many, many other options in New York and I honestly think that a girl like Rachel who craves attention, who’s been mostly denied that her whole life would have a lot of trouble saying no to that.

Then there’s Finn. At this point, with football gone, with no sense of getting any sort of performing arts scholarship coming his way, with no idea about his future, and his sense of the past ripped away from him, it makes sense that he would want to cling onto Rachel, but that doesn’t make it a good idea. Right now Finn is living for Rachel and you can’t do that. Another person cannot be your whole life and you be part of a functional, happy relationship. It doesn’t work like that. You have to be your own person with your own dreams before you can be with someone else. His proposal, as sweet as it really was kind of boils down to “My life really sucks. Please marry me so that my life won’t suck anymore.” and that doesn’t work. Marriage shouldn’t be a last ditch effort to hold onto the one good thing in your life.

They also don’t really fit together personality wise in the long run. Rachel’s needy and Finn is aloof. (Yes, he is. I’m trying not to bash the guy but he has twice in the last five episodes failed to remember/consider Rachel’s veganism. That’s some pretty hardcore disregard for her feelings.) That’s a problem. They’re both pretty self-centered. Rachel is, or has been shown to be, pretty short tempered sometimes and Finn tends to get jealous when other people pay attention to Rachel (Brittney Spears costume, Prom), which is a very, very big problem for someone dating/engaged to/married to someone who has dreams of being a famous Broadway star. If/when she makes it in Show Business people will pay a lot of attention to her for exactly the reasons that always set Finn off.

Besides being in love with one another, they don’t really have a lot in common. Even their shared love of music is only a tangential connection since Finn is Classic Rock while Rachel is Broadway and Showtunes. Two genres that really couldn’t be much more different. Finn like sports and working on cars (or at least he did in “I Am Unicorn”) neither one of which gels particularly with Rachel and her girly girl personality. (And yes, she is girly, half the things she owns are pink, she wears skirts and dresses almost exclusively, and decorates her locker with her boyfriend’s picture. One can be girly and still be driven to succeed.) Sadly, as unromantic as it is to say, love alone is not enough to sustain you for decades to come.

In short, they aren’t, at this stage in their lives at least, in the right places to be thinking about engagements and marriage, and it would be irresponsible of the show to suggest otherwise. It would be one thing for Mike and Tina to get engaged when he graduates at the end of this year (though still not a great idea imo) since they will have been in a fairly stable relationship for two years by that time, but this is the third time Finn and Rachel have been together in three years and they’re only at seven months and they fight a lot.

I realize that the show is just a TV show and a satirical/farcical one at that, but underneath the bombast and silliness the show has always had, or at the very least striven to have, an emotional honesty at its core. And the emotionally honest truth is that Finn and Rachel are not ready to be married or even really to be thinking about marriage. They have for too much work to do on themselves as individuals and as a couple before they are ready for that, and the show owes it to its audience to say that.

My opinion, anyway. Thoughts? 

This documentary I found to be completely fascinating and very interesting, but then I’m the type of person that finds documentaries fascinating. If you are not this type of person or just a ridiculously huge Pixar fan, you might very well not.

I, like presumably most people, thought that Pixar was just this complete overnight success story that made a couple of shorts and then just started turning out hit feature film after hit feature film. I was pleasantly surprised at how wrong I was.