One of the wellsprings or chief motivators of Nancy Meyers’ romantic fantasy films (It’s Complicated, Something’s Got to Give, The Holiday) was…I feel that candor is allowable now…the apparent fact that her 20-year marriage to and creative partnership with the late Charles Shyer ended bruisingly, due to infidelity.

Imagine if Meyers were to write and direct an Ingmar Bergman-type film about the collapse of her marriage under this duress.  I don’t think she has it in her to make such a film, mind, but if she did it would really be something.

I related to Shyer as a dude acquaintance in various ways, and it wasn’t just the moldy strawberries.

One of them, I’m now starting to believe, was a vague sense of low self-esteem in the early chapters —- a bad teenage mood pocket that adversely affected our psyches. Suffering the derision of classmates for being odd or different — that shit can really stay with you. Not to mention the alcoholic dad factor. I don’t know if Charles’ dad was a bit of a boozer, but mine sure was, and we all know what that leads to in terms of self-esteem among kids who had to live through that emotional shitstorm.

I just explained to a friend this morning why I was so sexually…uhm, energetic in my ‘70s to mid ‘80s heyday, and then again in the ‘90s and aughts and even into the early to mid 20teens. 

I was kind of a hound because I had no sexual self-esteem as a teenager — because I was regarded as an oddball dweeb who looked funny and behaved oddly and lived internally through movie worship, and I certainly wasn’t regarded as attractive as far as many teenaged women were concerned.

That downish, depressive self-image was so awful and internally ravaging that it felt truly glorious to renounce that image when I started to get lucky in the early ‘70s, and especially when my shameless slut-whore Studio 54 Lemmon 714 quaaludes period kicked in during the Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter administrations.

Roughly 175 rhapsodic transcendent celestial starbursts between ‘75 and 2015 or thereabouts.

It really wasn’t about being macho or cynical or being some kind of reckless purveyor of gymnastic sporting events, but about a truly wondrous and nourishing renunciation of my grim teenage life. Every time I got lucky I felt and meant it sincerely. I was never a cad. My vulnerable heart was always on my sleeve.

I’m presuming that Charles was a nerd like me in his early youth, and maybe felt some of the same things during his teenaged torture era.  I don’t know very many of his biographical particulars, but he lived a somewhat similar journey, I’m thinking.

I might be completely or mostly wrong, but my gut says otherwise.