Some background for those of you who are missing out on the most hotly debated love triangle in the country: Jim is a salesman at a mid-size regional paper distributor. He’s your archetypal all-American guy: tall, with a disarming smile and a penchant for pranks. Jim faces an amorous dilemma with two female co-workers, Pam and Karen.
Pam is a cute, cardigan-wearing receptionist who shares Jim’s love of pranks and is his best friend. Karen is a hot, suit-wearing saleswoman whom we actually haven’t got to know very well, so it’s hard to go beyond that. Did I mention that Jim and Pam are in love with each other? That may be an important detail in the story.
Jim confessed his feelings for Pam, but she shut him down because she was engaged to someone else and didn’t want to break off the wedding. Jim ended up with Karen on the rebound, and now Pam is single. On the surface for Jim, this seems like a choice between two women. In actuality, it’s a decision between two ways of life.
Karen embodies the superficial comfort of playing it safe. She’s sexy, stable and comes with the eternal nagging question: What if? What if things were different? What if Jim had had the courage to go after Pam?
Jim and Pam would be perfect if they ever got together. Everyone knows this (even those of you sorry saps who root for Karen just because she’s hot).
Why, then, do we end up with Karens in life? We’re afraid. We can’t escape this high school prom mentality of trying to find a date before all the good ones are taken. We have a fear of ending up alone.
These fears transcend romance: In kindergarten, what did you want to be when you grew up? A Rock god? A movie star? An astronaut? (Yes, yes, astronaut was mine – I am a dork and I am not afraid to admit it.) Now, what do you want to be? A lawyer? A dentist? An accountant?
Why do our ambitions change? Is it the realization that becoming a rock star is unrealistic? Or is it the sobering fear of being alone among broken ambitions that come along with trying to do something outstanding with our short lives? Why do we play it safe? Why are we so afraid of failure?
Our culture has an overriding focus on winning. Winners get championship rings and magazine covers. Losers get a few parting glimpses from the camera as they sulk back to the locker room in disbelief.
Our tendency to worship winners and cast aside losers creates a gilded reality where we strive for perfection: perfect grades to get the perfect job to buy the perfect house to raise the perfect family in. We’re suffocated by these expectations because they leave us incapable of facing failure. Because we can’t stare down defeat, we go on to lead perfect, risk-averse and meaningless lives where we never challenge ourselves.
Pam represents failure. She has rejected Jim twice and instead dated someone who is horribly wrong for her. But she also represents the reward of risking it all for happiness in life. She and Jim truly understand each other, they just haven’t been able to admit it to one another at the same time.
Jim, I beg you: Please go after Pam again. Don’t leave yourself (and all of us) with the unhappy task of wondering, “What if?”
Benjamin Johnson is a senior physics major. He can be reached at katsuo@umd.edu.
