I’ve always found the concept of developing crushes on random famous people to be one of the funniest and yet vaguely mortifying things we as human beings do. According to the Internet, this is a fairly universal phenomenon, but I always hate it when it happens to me because what the hell? These are strangers. That said between discovering and falling in love with the How Did this Get Made? podcast and my rampant love of pretty much everything Mike Schur creates (weirdly, apart from The Office), sometime around 2019 I developed a vicious super-intense crush on actor/comedian Jason Mantzoukas.
This specific crush should not be surprising. I seem to be far from alone in it but also, in terms of JoEllen crushes, Mr. Mantzoukas checks a lot of boxes. Bearded, quirky, kind of chaotic, he would fit right in with a lineup of dudes I’ve dated. Then there’s that the fact that listening to the podcast exposed me to actual knowledge about him that made me feel less weird about some of my quirks– from my need to watch everything with captions on, to my intense love for and encyclopedic knowledge of Gilmore Girls, to my random obsession with packing cubes. Add to all that the way that his sense of humor pretty much mirrors that of multiple men I have dated (seriously, whenever I listened to the podcast with my partner from Oregon, said partner would crack jokes that Jason would then immediately make himself) and the fact that he seems to be fairly emotionally intelligent (Fun tidbit: my publisher actually tried to contact Jason when we were approaching folks to blurb my second book) and you have the recipe for a big huge crush1. I understood that, embraced the crush, and it became something of a running joke with my friends.
Due to that running joke, a couple of months back a friend sent me a link to a video announcing the newest season… wait! sorry, it’s British, the newest SERIES of the British show Taskmaster in which it was disclosed that Jason was going to be a participant. As I had recently discovered the show on a visit to a partner who likes it, I was excited about this development; it was two things I like put together! So when the series started airing, I watched every week.
Here’s where it got weird. About halfway through, I started to notice that I wasn’t feeling that crush feeling anymore. It was like suddenly, after YEARS of thinking Jason Mantzoukas was super hot, he just did not do it for me anymore. I still enjoy him, I’m still a fan, I’m just not feeling that “I want to bone that guy” thing anymore. I explained it to a friend as “it’s like when you meet someone and your first thought is ‘wow they’re really hot’ and then you become friends with them and after a couple of weeks, it’s more like ‘That’s Sean. He’s a nice guy. He talks about Nintendo a lot’.” There’s nothing wrong with Sean, you just spent some time around him and, while everything about him is exactly the same as when you met him, you don’t have that attraction feeling anymore.
While I recognized that this had happened, I wasn’t quite sure exactly why it had happened. Because let’s be honest, I had had this crush for a very, very long time and Jason Mantzoukas is part of a weird amount of the media I consume so it’s not like watching Taskmaster made me suddenly see more of him than I was used to. Where did my crush go and why did it happen so abruptly?
Then, one day when I was watching Taskmaster on YouTube (which is the way to watch it if you are in the U.S., FYI), I got distracted and when the episode ended YouTube went to the next recommended video which was an interview Jason did about doing the show. I let it play and that interview not only made me realize what had happened to my crush on him, but it caused me to have a huge revelation about the men I’ve been attracted to over the course of my life, how that pattern has not served me, and how abandoning it might actually help me get over this thing I’ve been experiencing where I feel like I may never want to have another relationship again.
In the interview with Seth Meyers, Jason talks about how when he was doing Taskmaster he made it his mission to just destroy shit. His exact words are “destroy, dismantle, engulf in flames.” This was not lost on me when watching the show and actually it kind of bugged me. He would be doing the tasks but also completely trashing the set. I get that it goes with his whole comedy persona “wacky wild agent of chaos” thing, but for me (especially the part of me that worked backstage in theaters) I just kept thinking “dude somebody has to clean that shit up” and watching him do the interview, it dawned on me: I have spent my entire life attracted to men who, like the persona Jason tends to put out there, could be described as “chaos Muppets”, and as such, I have spent my entire life, putting myself in the position of being the person who has to clean up.
It’s not always smashing the stuff, but it is always “What is it that’s really weird about this guy? Let’s embrace that, defer to that, and excuse anything that might be upsetting or bad or inconvenient that comes with it!” So sometimes this means being on edge during a scary drive because he can’t stop popping his head out the window like a dog to better enjoy the view (and he’s driving!) other times it means accepting that he stopped listening halfway through the thing I was talking to him about because he noticed a shiny thing and now he’s going to run off and engage with it because SHINY THING! and I wouldn’t want to reign in that curiosity, other times still it means whatever is going on with us MUST come to an abrupt stop because he wants to climb a tree/explore an abandoned building/something else that makes me feel not very safe, but I’m expected to go along with it because FUN!
What these things have in common (apart from the fact that now that I say them out loud, a lot of them sound like symptoms of ADHD) is that they put me in the position, repeatedly, of having to swallow my own feelings to accommodate characteristics that I had convinced myself were universally good, but that were frequently at best benignly thoughtless, and at worst kind of selfish and rude. I’ve spent a lot of my adult life absorbing the emotional gut punch one gets when someone you care about stops listening to you because something cooler or more interesting is happening. I accepted the idea that I must just be being too anxious or overly dramatic because obviously the thing they’re doing is totally safe or cool and fun and I’m just making too big deal out of it. I thought that if was really a cool girl who belonged with this fun, quirky guy, I would just go along with everything and not harbor a pesky desire to have my partner continue to engage with me the way they were a moment ago instead of dropping everything to follow their latest whimsical/chaotic whim.2
Now, it sounds a lot like I’m saying chaos Muppets are bad people. This is not what I am saying. Most of the ones I have loved are still in my life in some capacity— they are just not good partners for me. That said, I have seen some of the chaos Muppets who I have been drawn to go onto have very successful relationships with partners who are nothing like me. I have sat back and watched in awe while shaking my head and thinking “oh my God I would have ended up killing that man with my bare hands” as their partners navigated the quirks with ease, because their dynamic is different and works. I think my own history and mental and emotional needs make it such that I shouldn’t be in relationships where I need to be the stage manager. I need to not have to keep everything organized for everyone and constantly state and restate the boundaries to maintain order. I need stability and consistency and I need to not feel like I’m fighting or begging for it. The chaos Muppets in my life were generally great people who didn’t know that I was frustrated and resentful and really struggling. It was simply that the nature of who they were and who I was made us incompatible as partners. Seeing that now is like lifting a weight off my shoulders.
Last month I wrote about some realizations I had had about relationships and having this new revelation right after that has left me wondering how much my feeling that it’s always easier to live life on my own was informed by a history of pursuing relationship dynamics that actively made my life harder. By chasing chaos, have I been inadvertently been playing the game on a harder-than-necessary mode? It’s certainly worth thinking about. Especially as, in retrospect, I know I have had healthy, stable relationships with fun, off-center guys who were a bit less into utter mayhem. I love me a quirky turkey but I think for me it’s a question of intensity and I need to know my limits. On the Muppet scale (totally a real thing): more Gonzo, less Animal.
I don’t have a grand conclusion about what comes next in terms of me and men and relationships, but this does feel like a step. I don’t know what my next step is, but I do know that when I sat down to watch this series of Taskmaster, I never imagined it would end up somehow altering the path of my life. Apparently it has and that’s pretty cool.
Shout out to Taskmaster and, of course, Jason Mantzoukas. While there’s not really a good-sounding way to say “the way you conduct yourself on-screen made me realize I’m no longer attracted to you or men who act like that” the fact that that is true really just makes me a bigger fan than ever. What’s up, jerks?
- Honestly, while HDTGM is a comedy podcast about discussing bad movies, I have somehow managed to find some degree of… I guess comfort in each of the hosts. Paul Scheer talks about his kind of weird childhood in Long Island leaving my brother and I to discuss how we were on the other side of NYC in Jersey having a very similarly weird childhood. Additionally, June Diane Raphael has spoken about the experience of being a younger-than-typical adult orphan in a way that made me feel seen and heard and way less alone. I may be way too attached to this podcast. ↩︎
- I realize this entire description is intensely colored by years of anger and resentment and really demonstrates why I should not be in relationships with chaos Muppets. Please keep reading because I swear, they are not bad people and I do not hate them. ↩︎
