#11-2. Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story

"Hey, I got accepted in the band club!"
"Umm... I did quite well in this test."
"Have you never heard of 'Daft Punk'? They play really good electronic musics."

It was my first semester in KMLA. I was suffering from the sense of inferiority, among numbers of friends who seemed much smarter than me. My roommate was one of them; whenever she said something, I gazed at her in jealousy and envy. She was a member of a popular school club, she was often considered as one of the most good-looking girls in our wave, she did well in her classes, she knew lot more about music than I did. Every single act of her made me feel nervous; the feeling, soon, started to be expressed at my attitude toward her. Whenever she talked about her band club -- when is her debut stage, what music she is going to play, who praises her that her guitar play improved a lot -- I pretended I was busy, and didn't have time to talk with her. When she was chatting with boys, I disturbed her on purpose.

Looking back, I was just so childish and immature. But what that experience taught me is that balance is a crucial factor in human relationship. If one person is too superior, the other feels restless -- "Is this the right place for me?" "What is so superior of her?" "Why am I thinking these things? -- she's my nice friend!" all those complicated, mingled thoughts. This, exactly, is what is happening between Ron and Sarah, in "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story".

Ron and Sarah are very different; Ron is "effortlessly attractive, a genetic wonder, tall, slender, symmetrical, and clean". Sarah, in contrast, has "ugly face, like a wart hog's, thick, rapid voice, dumpy, off-center wreck of a body", and there are "a few women who were more unattractive than Sarah". Ron is a young, somehow-rich lawyer divorced with a beautiful fashion designer wife, whereas Sarah is a Rumford Press worker, recently divorced with "husband who was a bastard and stupid". There is nothing in common between these two characters except they both experienced unsuccessful relationships. Yet, amazingly, these two becomes lover.

Their relationship, however, is unstable from the start. When Ron invites her to his house, and asks her to sleep with him, Sarah hesitates and answers, "I don't know ... You and me... we're real different. ... I gotta go. I gotta leave now." Ron also "won't go out in public" with Sarah, in embarrassment to admit that such a good-looking-man is going out with an unattractive woman. At the end of their relationship, Ron cruelly abandons their relationship, cursing "Go on and leave, you ugly bitch".

To anyone, it is clear that Ron's stance in their relationship was superior, while Sarah's was inferior. Throughout their relationship, however, it is mostly Sarah who approached to Ron first. It was her, for example, who starts the relation by sitting next to Ron at the bar and initiates a conversation. Though Ron is interested in knowing someone different from him, and responds to Sarah's approach, he rarely acts first; it is, again, Sarah who starts their second conversation, who quibbles over their relationship (inquiring Ron about not going out with her in public, for example), etc. During such of her active approach, Sarah must have felt anxious about Ron's passive response -- she must have suffered from numerous questions, such as "Why isn't he showing stronger response?" "Do I love him more than he loves me?" "Am I not his lover -- just someone who follows and irritates him?". All these questions drives Sarah to be impatient, nervous to Ron, which creates more and more conflicts so that it ends their relationship at last.


"The Most Beautiful Woman in Town" also deals with similar topic; Cass, the most beuatiful woman in town, goes out with the narrator, one of the ugliest men. Although this story ends with Cass's death -- another "end" of relationship -- it is evident that the relation between Cass and the narrator is more stable than that of Ron and Sarah. To suggest a possible cause, Cass, the superior, is the one who approaches first to the narrator, the inferior. Compared to Ron and Sarah's relation, which the inferior approaches the superior first and therefore felt all more inferiority that she alone is expressing too much attention to the superior, Cass the superior allows the narrator opportunity to see that the superior also has weak points and needs to lean over the inferior.


"Balance", without doubt, is an important factor in human relationship. Once one starts to feel inferior to the other, the questions arise endlessly so that one cannot stare the other without envy or nervousness any more. This is what happens in "Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story". To minimize the effect of unbalance, it is important for the superior to show that he/she also has inferior points that needs to be comforted by other -- as Cass did in "The Most Beautiful Woman in Town".