She always judges his musical choices, but she can’t seem to help herself. He just happens to pick such dumb bands, and then he sings their pitiful lyrics at high volume, and apparently on repeat, until she can’t handle it anymore and flies into a rage. It’s a rage aimed more at his choice than at the music itself. You see, she doesn’t think she can be with a guy who has such poor taste in music. It’s the one thing at which she considers herself a purist, and as time moves along she finds herself judging him more and more for it.
Of course it doesn’t help that she grew up listening to bubble gum pop, like Britney Spears and ’98 Degrees. She finally broke free from its stranglehold, and she told herself she was never going back, not for anyone. Not ever. But it’s tearing her apart because she likes everything else about him. He’s considerate, funny, built like a Greek God (she’s not saying which one), and passionate about life. These are all things she prizes highly, and they make her want to give him a pass on the music.. if he would just stop singing it.
And he doesn’t even just sing bubble gum pop either. It’s not just Hannah Montana and Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s the rap music, the death metal, and the dubstep. She knew absolutely nothing about dubstep until he brought over the latest Skrillex CD and it was just four words over and over and over again, set to a driving beat that also kept repeating. He cranked up the volume and screamed along with every one of those four words over and over and over again until she had gone numb. She banned Skrillex from being played around her without headphones. But he kept screaming it, which was maybe even worse.
Her own tastes have changed over the years. She likes to think they’re more refined, but in reality she’s merely traded in the glitz of pop for the mellowed out adult contemporary her parents used to love. Sometimes she finds herself wondering if she’s simply gotten old and forgot to let herself know, but other times she thinks she has matured and he has yet to catch up. She’s tried playing some Will Young and some Celine Dion for him, but he always gets this blank look on his face, like he doesn’t know what to make of it, like his body is still there but his brain is somewhere in Wonderland.
She realizes it won’t work, this tiptoeing around each other that they do, because she knows that as surely as she judges him for his music he is also judging her for hers. And somewhere down the line, when her heart has healed, and when the Celine Dion love songs are finally deeply imprinted on her brain, that’s when she’ll move on. That’s when she’ll hopefully find someone she can sing with, someone who will know her songs by heart.
Sam
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