In life, MJ’s romantic relationships weren’t so different from the rest of us – complicated. While few people really know what deep human longings made Michael tick, we do know how he lived and how, like us, he longed for love. He has said that his song “Childhood” is the most autobiographical:
It`s been my fate to compensate,
for the Childhood
I`ve never known…
Let’s try to imagine for one minute that Michael Jackson was neither rich, nor famous. Let’s imagine he was just one of us, a baby boomer who suffered from too many narrowly spaced siblings and not enough mommy to go around. Now imagine that he was also put into a kind of child labor that reaped confusing rewards – adulation for something that came easy. And, finally imagine that because of his job, he missed out on some important social peer-to-peer emotional and sexual learning.
Yet he comes of age. Unlike an average guy, he enters the land of no “NO’s” that world without boundaries that demands some internal controls for basic survival. He tries to connect with pretty girls who share experiences similar to his child labor and isolation: Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields. And finally, he marries the ultimate prize, his idol’s daughter, Lisa Marie Presley. He was trying to find love in peer relationships, except he had no true peers. I mean, what was he going to do, head out to a TGI FRIDAY’s for happy hour to meet a girl from the suburbs?
Eventually, the issue of family came up. I mean, we are on the planet to reproduce, right? It should be noted that Michael’s string of failed relationships pails in comparison to an average alpha male with a little cash. The divorce rate is past 50% and the number of men (and women) who never get to the altar at all is increasing. Average guys who have difficulty making an emotional connection with a woman, or who control too much, or who are just too narcissistic to share, aren’t a whole lot different from Jackson. Except we fondly call them Baby-Daddies and Dead Beat Dads. It appears that many of Michael’s contemporaries hope that spreading their seed will be enough to help them meet evolution’s goal – to create surviving offspring. And, it’s working quite well for many of them because they are depositing their seeds with resilient women who manage to be a mother and a father when the situation calls for it.
In some ways, Michael was much better than a Dead Beat Dad. He was there for his kids. Of course he had a rich man’s solution for how to deal with the problem of a difficult “baby mama” – he bought her compliance. Tell me that some of his contemporaries don’t wish for that luxury.
