Love the one you're with?

For a long time, I maintained that the song Escape (more commonly known as The Pina Colada Song) is the saddest song ever written.

Think about it: A guy who's tired of his lady (we'd been together too long; like a worn out recording of a favorite song) responds to a personal ad. Despite the fact that he has a girlfriend, he agrees to meet up with the woman at a bar in Southie. He gets there. She walks in. And who is it? His own lovely lady. And she says, "Oh. It's you." Then they laugh for a moment, and he says, "I never knew that you like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain, and the feel of the ocean, and the taste of champagne." To me, the guy sounded like a total douche. He didn't know anything about his girlfriend. They both tried to cheat on each other via the personal ads, and then found each other. Sad, sad, sad.

But then I realized that there's an even sadder song. Two sadder songs, in fact. I realized this during my third year in law school when I was canoodling with AIDS Boy (the boy who convinced himself I gave him AIDS, when he didn't have it -- I clearly didn't, either). I realized it when he told me that the reason he was marrying his fiance, despite the fact that he cheated on her at least thrice, was because she was the "least crazy" woman he'd ever dated.

He was settling down because he thought it was what he was "supposed" to do. He was marrying the girl he'd been with since he was sixteen years old for the same reasons he'd gone to law school instead of film school: (1) His parents wanted him to; and (2) it was the path of least resistance. It was expected of him. It was the right thing to do. Somehow.

The two of us were driving around town once, having eaten lunch and on our way to The Puppy Center (to look at baby Golden Doodles). A song came on:

And if you can't be with the one you love
Love the one you're with;
Love the one you're with.
Don't be angry, don't be sad,
Don't sit cryin' over good things you've had,
There's a girl right next to you
And she's just waiting for something you do...
Love the one you're with.

It fit him. I told him so. "You're marrying this girl just because you you figure you should love the one you're with." He agreed, sort of. He told me how he wanted a wilder woman, a woman who doesn't dress in twin sets all the time, who's less conventional. This soliloquy, of course, ended with the predictable: "I've never met a girl like you before." Which can be a compliment, it's a statement that can make me all melty at times. But not from someone who's engaged. But since he couldn't find a wild woman, a fun woman, an open-minded type, since he always attracted the twin-set-and-pearls type, he was marrying the girl he'd been with for nearly a decade.

Love the one you're with.

In that moment, I decided that Love The One You're With is a sadder song than Escape.

Then I got home and downloaded the song. Or rather, I downloaded a little ol' medley of two songs. And I pondered these lyrics:

You can't always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes, well you just might find
You get what you need.

Whether my friend got what he needed from Twin Set Fiance, I can't say. But that little medley struck me as a marriage of the two saddest songs ever written.

Because after all, if you can't always get what you want, you may as well love the one you're with.