Fifty Percenting
How a Barbra Streisand Cover and the Film Down With Love Help Me Think About Love
by Keeley Young
Sometime earlier this year [April 25, 2024] I discovered a Barbra Streisand cover of “Fifty Percent”. It’s a song from a musical entirely unfamiliar to me entitled Ballroom. The song, at least in Streisand’s case, begins with a conversation between two lovers—the man confesses he must cancel plans because he has to honour the priorities of his children and, by association, his ex-wife. Streisand, in character, begins an emotional string of lyrics about how no matter the heartbreak of coming second, or third, she would prefer to have some percentage of his love as opposed to a complete one hundred percent of someone else’s.
I heard this song for the first time and collapsed into the arms of how perfectly I connect with its lyrics. A song about falling in love with someone no matter the complications. Being grateful for the moments you have, the percentage of a person’s heart and love you possess. When she sings, ‘Though I may hold him all through the night // he may not be here when the morning comes’ you have to understand the nuances of loving someone who is just out of reach, even somewhat. “Fifty Percent” came to me when I was in the midst of a relationship earlier in the year, and without knowing it, I had opened a box of emotions surrounding my ideas around monogamy. As quite a romantic, affectionate person, I grapple often with the idea that I want passionate love, that I want to be someone’s person, but I have my own reservations, too. Most of my serious relationships have ended somewhere around the time I start to feel uncertain, a tad depressed, around whether my partner is enough for me romantically.
When I am single and unattached, I can flirt with whomever I want. This is a crucial part to understanding what I talk about when I talk of the concept, in my head, of emotional non-monogamy. As an aegosexual man—someone who doesn’t have sex, but is horny, to put it in simple terms—I don’t think about polyamory largely for anything physical. Physical intimacy is something I am patient with, for myself and as an expectation of others. Because of the various holdups I have around being comfortable being physically intimate with someone, I have a track record of taking my time to snuggle up to a person. To kiss them, to hold their hand in mine.
When I think about my discomforts in a relationship around exclusivity, I’m thinking about the emotional. The connection, the flirting, the exposing of emotions. In a relationship, you give yourself over to your partner, not in some creepy, deranged sense, but because there’s an expected truthful intimacy to the sanctity of everything a relationship represents. All this to say, romantic relationships with labels like boyfriend/girlfriend/partner are burdened with societal expectations that drive me somewhat insane. I am avoidant of getting into relationships out of the expected fear I will come to regret my decision because the expectations are unrealistic for me personally.
In “Fifty Percent”, Streisand sings, “but he says he loves me, and I believe it’s true // doesn’t that make someone belong to you”. I like the concept of mattering to a person without specific labels. Terms like partner come with the weight of being specifically important to the other person, and I couldn’t possibly deny that this weight doesn’t give me reservations as someone with a lot of anxiety and depression. I like to believe I mean something, that I can be special to a person without a label, but the very notion of becoming special to a person in an affectionate sense in embedded with social expectations. From a world view, the stronger the intimacy, the stronger the connection and the ties. Even if plenty of people get married despite how little of a connection they possess with one another.
People go on dates, get serious, and eventually get married and have a life together. As someone who fawns over romantic storylines that aren’t problematic, and as someone who frequently writes queer romance, it isn’t a gasp of shock-horror that I inherently want this so-called life together. When my feelings for someone become more ingrained, more serious, I do start to subconsciously think about what I could possibly have with someone. More recently, I think about the simple, largely-unchanging things: more time well spent, introducing him to my friends, getting introduced to his. Family Christmases and going on vacation together. Becoming more serious in a relationship means finding a special person that will stick around for longer than I could ever expect my friends to. No matter if I am irritating, annoying, or strange beyond belief, the idea that someone finds these things endearing is enough to make me THINK about a future with someone.
“Though you don’t plan to fall in love // when you fall you fall”. Despite my best interests to stay comfortably outside the realm of thinking about romance, I connect with these lyrics because I inherently know the truth in how you cannot avoid your own emotions. You can bottle them up to a degree, struggle against the cracking glass, but eventually, you must confront your own emotions. I fear for getting into another relationship because I cannot expect someone else to adhere to the complicated terms-and-conditions of orbiting around me. I fear for getting into another relationship because if someone considerate does come along and listen to my pains, the throes of my depression and anxiety, there will be a tear that splits the relationship. This is my assumption. Because I seemingly cannot be happy forever.
The topic of my complicated relationship thoughts has arisen back into my brain for a number of reasons. For one, I finished a rewatch of a film from 2003, Down With Love, which follows Renée Zellweger’s Barbara Novak and Ewan McGregor’s Catcher Block as they attempt to out-play one another while falling in love in the process. Barbara Novak is a women’s self-help novelist who liberates women from the idea of having to fall in love in order to have sex. A concept men have already seemingly weaponised against them. At the conclusion of the film, Barbara proclaims she “cannot possibly be a Down With Love girl” — that she couldn’t be the sort of woman to have sex without any attachment to the man she is having sex with. That there is passion regardless in the act of intimacy. Certainly for her. That Barbara Novak was a mere façade to pretend she could be a Down With Love girl who could restrain her feelings.
At the end credits, I was overcome with a smattering of feelings, although thankfully, gratefully, I didn’t burst into tears. Rooted in the back of my mind, I was thinking about the feelings I have for someone right this very moment. We have becoming more intimate, more affectionate—although I get to amuse myself knowing I am making him sexually-frustrated. I confessed everything about my aegosexuality to him, talked about my complicated feelings around intimacy, certainly heightened post-sexual assault, and I found myself helplessly so fucking attracted to him. But we have both talked about how a relationship is not something we want.
You start to ask yourself, as if asking him, what are we?
I think about how I could imagine a relationship with anyone working. First, I think, exclusivity as a controlling hand has to be unwritten. Gays and their disdain for monogamy is a prominent stereotype of the community, but as someone who isn’t exactly ever going to be looking for a random hook-up, the stripping away of exclusivity, to me, is about the removal of extreme pressure. Less pressure for my partner to be the centre of my universe, although when I’m the one falling in love, you’re about to be absolutely adored. But when I need my space, I want to be granted it, and when my partner is inevitably busy existing as their own person, I want to be able to potentially go flirt with someone else for three seconds.
This is why I simply stay single.
A key concept discussed within Down With Love is the core of jealousy that comes with not being a person’s only. Ladies’ man Catcher Block fools around with multiple women at once, and truthfully, yes, his problem is telling each of them they are the centre of his world, when in reality, they are all burning bright stars in his galaxy. We’re conditioned, I think, to believe that a serious, committed relationship means you have to guard yourself off to only feel properly vulnerable to one person. You can have close confidants, therapists, family members that don’t annoy you senseless, but the romantic and the affectionate belongs to your sole partner. It presents something overwhelming—if this person is unavailable to be there to support you and comfort you unshakingly and committedly, you end up looking a little like how I was sitting in my therapist’s office in April. Likely, around the time I first heard “Fifty Percent” too.
My personal reflections on monogamy revolve around this specific issue—jealousy brings out a desire in us humans to matter in a controlled sense to another person. None of this is to say monogamy is a flawed concept that should be dismantled, and I am certain there are plenty of people with less active brains and less chaotic desires for attention that means monogamy works wonderfully for them. But as much as I cannot be a Down With Love girl, I struggle to be an All-in-on-Exclusivity boy.
Exclusivity requires dedicated attention and at least a morsel of guilt. If you stray from the path, stray from your monogamy, you feel the pangs of your betrayal manifest, regardless if you’re a cold-hearted serial-cheater or not. Exclusivity means I place an extra plate of stress on an already-overwhelming and elaborate plate-structure balancing on a pole on the centre of my scalp. I worry all the time whether I will be adequate only for my partner, or otherwise, if they will prove to be adequate for me. I retract away from certain conversations with certain friends, prompting myself to stay away from even the suggestion of emotional cheating. One person can have the whole of me, but if I cannot have the whole of them, I can accept compromises.
Mental breakdowns over my future romantic life achieve nothing, although I can understand the complexity of what I ask for in a partner:
I. A queer man with good hygiene and a decent grasp on how to use the English language.
II. A man who does not need sex from me to be with me.
III. Someone who can tolerate the various extensions of my pain, including the physical stuff [head, stomach, throat] and the anxiety and depression.
IV. Someone comfortable with not being exclusive.
V. Oh, and he needs to make me laugh.
Certainly, there are other extents to how complicated it would be to audition to be my significant other, but the second-to-last point is something I continue to orient myself around. Exclusivity is the terrifying monster, dragonborn, flying around overhead threatening to scorch my depression with its tongue. No matter the amount of therapy, I cannot seem to escape the knowing that I require different people in my life for different things. How desperately I do love the idea of someone to call mine, without being controlling or creepy, but to me, there’s a sense of certainty around wanting the breathing room. I cannot imagine myself spending frequent nights with other men; I cannot see myself meeting someone who interjects into the relationship and starts to seem like a more promising opportunity. My fortune-telling skills are green and underdeveloped, but I see how I act even single.
Life is short, life should be lived, yet the pulse striking me back is the worry around having my cake and eating it too. Getting everything I have ever wanted, and then some. You are told to not be selfish, and yet, if I die miserable and alone I’ll consider my life worthless. Unless I had a solid however-long with a man who understood me completely, enough for me to speak everything down to the zippers.
In “Fifty Percent”, Streisand sings “and I’d rather have fifty percent of him // or any percent of him // than all of anybody else at all”. In Down With Love, Barbara Novak-aka-Nancy Brown doesn’t sing it, but speaks on how she couldn’t be with Catcher Block after ousting his rouse as Major Zip Martin because she can’t see herself filling into the proposed type. The housewife, the married woman, a real vacation from the type of woman described in Novak’s bestseller. These two things—a song from the 1970s and a film from the early 2000s—speak to how I am approaching love and romance moving forward. Perhaps not completely, or solely, but my adoration in particular for these two “takes” on connection are proving to help me understand what I want out of falling in love with someone.
These thoughts on getting more serious with someone have arisen again because it’s virtually impossible to not think about being in love. I am an utter ball of emotions, and I see myself as a very passionate person—the recent release of Wicked – Part One has become a key part of my personality at the moment, but, too, I get so easily attached to people when I realise their presence in my life feels like something vital. As comfortable as I am outside of a relationship—as comfortable as I have become being single—it’s pointless to deny the thoughts I have around commitment. These self-described commitment issues I label to myself really do stem from the reflex flinching I have around exclusivity. Maybe I do make new friends, new connections, often, but if someone has stuck around in my life for a while, it’s because I just absolutely adore the person. I’m a little picky. I could see myself with the same partner, but I still have the baggage of being a little too needy to process through if I wanted to stick to generic straight-person exclusivity.
Being unattached to a person, in a label sense, means I can be sort of preferential towards one man but not risk completely ruining our dynamic by getting into a relationship with him. Have enough men in my head that could cause a breakdown as it is. Being unattached to him, without a label, means I can flirt with other people and not feel guilty. Only slightly annoyed I’m not flirting with him.
There is definitely a commitment gnat living inside my bones, sharpening its teeth. Although maybe that implies the commitment gnat wants to gnaw through my bones and turn me into a blob of jelly, which is not necessarily how I see things. I think the gnat merely yearns for the sort of true connection you can come to expect from a relationship. We just have to become allies about it.
So, what have we learnt today?
I. Barbra Streisand’s cover of “Fifty Percent” is legendary, I expect it to be somewhere near the top of this year’s Spotify Wrapped [reader, it was], and I will pretty much always skip the first fifty seconds of it because I don’t care for men who think it inappropriate to treat me properly.
II. Down With Love reminds us not everyone can be a Down With Love girl, although the mere concept of having sex without being in love is truly something I support with all my being. I simply just get attached to people and I still have elements of my intimacy issues to process. And I do not have sex.
III. I am getting more comfortable with the idea of approaching a serious relationship with the want to talk about exclusivity being off the table. And that’s not so terrifying.
IV. It’s not right to think yourself unlovable because you’re different.
[the last point is so important because you're about to read a piece about how I want to give up on bothering to find someone who will be affectionate towards me because I feel not worthwhile in the slightest.]
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“why bother"
sometimes they want to cajole me
into telling someone a fantastical something
like I am regaling a fairytale, a myth
that the things inside my body are being mistaken
and I should be righted,
maybe by a better man.
I have these complicated feelings around
getting into a relationship because
unlike anyone simply ordinary
I don’t believe people mean it when they say
they want to be with me.
who could love this piece of fucking shit
with a list of boundaries that could be cured
when I mope around in therapy.
who the fuck.
dreams try to mould around me.
I start to see my unwillingness to just pretend to want sex to be
one of my worst flaws. why don’t I just be normal.
I’m sorry for not being fucking normal.
eventually, the artist has painted its picture.
problems cannot be solved if you bump into walls the entire time you’re inhabiting them.
it’s a problem, I suppose, being afraid of monogamy.
it’s a problem, I suppose, being frightened every man couldn’t be intimate if he had to slap down his boner when he inevitably wanted sex from me.
it’s a problem I don’t just accept my loneliness.
cry to someone invisible.
pretend it’s all a godly mistake,
putting this soul into this body, paired with this mind.
I’m going to be miserably alone sometime, in the next month or so, laying on the floor underneath the ceiling fan. Thinkin’ about how dumb it is to have feelings for men who so very obviously must want to have sex, and instead of spending time with the right sort of man, they would have to settle for an exhausted idiot who gets defensive about his aegosexuality because it’s either that or he’ll worry someone else will come along and double-up the trauma.
I should retire from the thinking and feeling. The wanting to be affectionate thing.
Boys don’t deserve my bullshit.
I hate that coming to better terms with my sexuality means I have to come to better terms with some knowledge that I’m a nuisance for trying, for wanting what I do, for giving someone blue balls because I make-out with them just right and tongue their ear. [If you've never given "ear kisses" before, you're doing the affection thing wrong.] I hate that coming to better terms with how I can be comfortable means a part of me is awaiting some gasp of shock, some “you’ll grow out of it.” Some “what a waste of a perfectly good dick, perfectly good mouth, perfectly good ass.” I hate that parts of me think it a perfect waste for anyone to get to know me as anything but the gay little friend with all the fucked up little issues.
I hate the assumption that any new feelings I experience for someone new are worthless to a degree. how can he want me when I cannot do xyz.
how can he see any part of me that is not the colossal mistake of bad genetics
I hate wanting him to understand me and hold me when the defensiveness is attempting to permeate like kindergarten class lice.
things could be worse.
with some persistence.
I hate finding myself regrettable,
but all I am is regrettable. right?
why bother
why bother
why bother
why bother
why bother if only part of the myth can be retold.
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