Foobonia and Points West.

Since we're about a week or so away from the revelation that Ted married Irene because he believed that since Connie had moved on, he had to as well, let's remind ourselves what function she actually did play. When first introduced, she seemed to be little more than a cipher meant to absorb tactless comments about being the other woman. A year and a half later, she was pretty much a mnemonic device who existed to remind us that Ted seemed to be incapable of realizing that his stupid alley-catting around might present a problem for the women he stepped out on. When last heard of, she seemed to play the part of a reminder that Ted never did quite understand this at all and somehow managed to blame his misery on her for not knowing that since the women he coupled with in his campaign to alter the gene pool in the Golden Horseshoe meant nothing at all to him, she too should find his sex with them as meaningless as he did.

You'll notice that there's not much room for a personality in there and, as his Liography indicates, it seems to be that one wasn't a requirement. When you translate words like "efficient" and "practical" into English, what you're left with is the disturbing image of Ted engaging in the moral equivalent of marrying a Dictaphone. Hell, Lynn even as much as confessed that Irene was meant to be little more than a plot device to show us that anyone who'd dare to not cower in fear when Elly rants like a God-damned maniac is bad meat in a can and unfit to live in the world of steady, regular life. It's much like how Warren and Paul were both completely unsuitable for Liz because they had the evil capacity to evilly take John aside and evilly tell him "Look, Skeletor, I'm twice your size and sick of your pompous and ignorant beefing about stuff you don't know jackshit about so any more of your damned attitude and so help me, I'll break you in half." Just as Anthony is a great guy because he's the only person on the planet someone like John could own, Ted's inability to stay married to a fireplug in a dress is there to remind us that he's too self-absorbed to have mature relationships. 

The interesting thing about this particular Christmas is that we're pretty much at the end of the horrible revenge fantasy soap opera thing. That's because we finally get the component needed to make it right: Connie revealing that she has traded up from Ted. While it's a while until we actually meet Greg (and get reminded that Elly sees him as a saviour because he keeps evil Ted at bay), what we do learn is that Connie is on her way to a happy new life while Ted gets to wallow in despair because he Let A Good Thing Slip Away.

This seems to be why it is that his attempt to do a sort of rebound thing fails. After all, it's one thing for him to actually marry his secretary because he has no option left. Making it work out and making him learn his lesson would be too much like not kicking him when he's doing and not getting all angry at the real men who didn't buy what Lynn's selling. This means that even though he does seem to have settled down, his yearning for a freedom that's a lie is always supposed to hamper his chances at real happiness.

The interesting thing about the upcoming week is that we're going to be dealing with the Grade Z soap opera plot-line that always seems to take place whenever Ted makes the scene. What happened this time is that our boy reacted to his having to pay the price for being a jackass by driving to Thunder Bay to make a fool of himself begging Connie to take him and his weak bullshit back into his life. No matter how often she refuses to entertain the notion of having the simpleton mess with her emotions and no matter how clear John makes it that he's got no one but himself to blame for his heartache, our boy is probably only now realizing that his many weaknesses have made his love life a hideous chaos. To reveal why this is and why he, unlike someone else I can think of, is a bad person for being slow to admit that a woman is a person too, let's remind ourselves of what we do and don't know about him.

First off, let's deal with the fact that his name is inconsistently spelled. While in the real world, it's a reminder that Lynn doesn't keep notes, in the strip it can be explained away as a reminder that we're looking at the world through Elly's eyes. The same woman who got the details of his one and only marriage all wrong because she doesn't much care can't be asked to get the man's name right.

Second, we have to remind ourselves that he spent most of his life under the thumb of a domineering meat-axe of a mother who expected him to be her slave as a means of paying her back for having to endure the unnatural horrors of coitus, pregnancy and childbirth. His need to pay fealty to Evil Scottish Old Person meant taking her slut-shaming and need to find fault in any woman that might take her little boy away far more seriously than a man should.

Third, the Liography establishes as a fact that he was a born follower possessed of the need to impress an unworthy and ridiculous hero. While his classmates grew up and moved on with their lives after graduating high school, Ted saw it as a worthy goal to honour the memory of a reckless, antisocial clod who actually didn't die before his time despite being sixteen years old by not really growing out of the notion that a woman is a reward for having a penis.

Fourth and most important, there is the established fact that Ted cannot admit that he's been a jackass, cannot sympathize with the damage he causes and thus either claims to have been manipulated or dismisses the complaints of the women whose lives he plows through as being the humorless ravings of someone who takes life too seriously.

If you've been paying attention, you'll realize that he sounds a damn sight like the Delicate Genius. What seems to have happened with him is that unlike Mike, he never actually dated the woman Mommy thought was there to bring her pretty grandchildren and a daughter-in-law that wasn't a threat to her baleful domination of her son. My guess is that when she was on her death-bed, the last thought on her mind was the hope that said woman would somehow find her way into Ted's arms so that life would work out properly and forget the life she'd made for herself.

You'll have noticed over the years that John really doesn't seem to think much more of his sidekick Ted than Elly does. As we've seen and are going to see, John is the first one up at bat mocking the Hell out of the man when he gets mauled by life. About the only thing that he loves more than rubbing it in that Ted screwed himself real good when it came to his failure to be the man Connie needed is hectoring him about how his puerile stupidity cost him his marriage to Irene. It would seem that most of the time, John needs to have Ted around so that there's someone who can always make him feel superior.

Of course, being an affable buffoon John can look at and say "Thank GOD that that ain't ME!!" isn't the only reason Ted is still in his address book. Simply put, John needs to have someone in his life who can tell him that no, he isn't an indolent, puerile, passionless buffoon husband without empathy, remorse or the ability to learn from experience screwing his life up by insisting on not admitting that everything he believes about women and their role in the world is self-serving horseshit he should be ashamed to have ever believed. The other men he knows tell him to his face to join the human race; not good ol'No Normal Woman Will Have Him Ted. Ted is right there stuck in the dead and best forgotten past with him.

Given that Ted is the only person in the world who honestly believes that ass-scratching total Piltdown Man is far too generous and understanding, it would seem that his leading export is an unjustifiable feeling of superiority. After all, if Elly had found a less moronic meal ticket, John would still be a bachelor on the prowl.

As I've said before, John takes far too much pleasure in Ted's misery. Elly's friends might think of the poor shmuck as a beastly lowlife whom Connie needs to be rescued from but they're content to simply hold him in contempt. They don't feel the same need to twist the knife in when telling Ted when he screwed up as John does. Then again, none of them have the same need to deny that Ted makes a good case for having waited to have married as John does. John needs to have living proof that he had to settle down when he did and the deluded idiot living like he's still in high school is it, baby.

That being said, it's not just giving thanks that he has living proof that settling down is where it's at that makes him pal around with Ted. He also comes in handy when he wants to talk about something and not have a distorted version of it repeated back to him by a crazy woman jabbing her finger in the air about something she doesn't actually understand. It's bad enough that Elly's paranoia and truculence run away with her when it's just the two of them talking; I can only imagine how much it must suck when Elly has to deal with second-hand information. Since Ted tends to talk down to women, John can say things without penalty.

This leads us to his other use: watching Elly get pissed off at him. He knows for a fact that Elly hates him like no one else because he doesn't admit that he should live in terror of her ragerespect her opinion. Watching Elly scream at Ted is always good for a laugh because the dodo doesn't get why he's being yelled at.

You might that that Ted's life is bad enough considering that the toxic idiot that his friend John married has far too much influence in both their lives. Not only would his relationship with Connie have gotten a lot smoother had someone not gotten her even more focused on marrying than she already was, he can't rely on any sympathy from John because he believes Elly's version of events. While our lying eyes might tell us that he's so hung up on Connie that he doesn't know if he's coming or going, we're told that he's a shallow jerk stringing her along. Since Lynn never seems to have realized that what she thinks is obvious to her would be obvious to everyone, what we're left with is a confused man whose sole mistake is trying to please too many people being cast as a heartless jerk because the sitcom mutant his old drinking buddy married hates him.

What must really sting is the realization that Elly rarely gets her facts straight. I know that I like to talk about the "I QUIT MOTHERHOOD!!" series a lot but I think that it's germane to the discussion. This is because Elly only thought that April had flipped her off because she wanted to see it. It's like how she used to insist that Mike's simply wanting to know what Mommy was saying meant that he was trying to be a defiant little jerk pushing her buttons; she wanted to see that so that's what she saw. Simply put, Elly wants to see signs that Ted is a jerk because she's a belligerent yahoo who likes to be angry. She could no more give Ted the benefit of the doubt than she could publicly admit that she goes into a blind rage for the sake of going into a blind rage. When you combine this with her child-like inability to understand adult relationships and social norms that get in the way of her winning and her need to nail herself to her cross, what generally happens is that John has to figure out what she means when she spouts her belligerent hokum.

This is why marrying a dullard who doesn't like to think comes in handy. Anyone who knows John can tell you that the person who confirms his biases for him stands the best chance of being believed. Since he thinks that Ted can't be taken seriously because he didn't do what THEY said and witlessly marry a fruitcake so he could have a free maidsettle down, it only stands to reason that Elly must be right about his being a jackass. Since John is a very lazy man, it's sort of obvious that he isn't going to find out what happened for himself. He's also a very stupid man because he can't seem to realize that someone who claims more knowledge than they should really have is usually making most of it up.

It's not just keeping themselves safe from having to realize that April isn't a spoiled little child who doesn't know about the real world that keeps John and Elly at pains to keep her in the dark. They also have to keep themselves from having to realize that Mira Sobinski isn't some horrible monster who wants to enslave them with her family politics. What Mira is is someone a lot like Annie or Connie who simply doesn't feel the need to panic about the possibility that Elly Patterson doesn't like her.

This, I should think, is why her ambitions are bad while Gordon's ambitions are good; Mira's ambitions don't have as their basis a healthy respect for the opinions of others....or, as we say in English, the possibility that what she's doing might make a paunchy pea-brain with anger issues screech doesn't alarm her much. This is also why Ted, Becky and Thérèse are pure evil: they don't care if a screaming lunatic might be angered by what they do.

Okay, I know I promised that I was going to put a full stop on the whole Connie and Ted thing but Lynn's vague comment about maybe marrying them off so we could 'prove' once and for all that he's not husband-and-father material might well have been fairly entertaining because of what Lynn thinks that a husband and father should be. In her world, a real father is a stern, distant, unapproachable figure who can only ever interact with the small, strange people that he, for some reason, shares his living space with when it suits him; this means that Ted would probably do something wrong like be there for Lawrence when it was inconvenient and say crazy things like how children don't only cry to make parents feel bad. We might also well see him not paying lip service to adapting to serve Connie's needs; he might actually reform and be the sort of failure people feared Anthony might become: a man who was willing to take his wife seriously. Heck, their marriage might well have been healthier than the Pattersons which would make him pure evil in a black polo shirt.

The other curious thing about John's reaction to all the mess Ted is enduring is how grimly delighted he is when his sidekick suffers. John grins malevolently when Ted hears about Phil, laughs his ass off when he gets divorced and chortles in malicious glee when he learns that Connie is engaged to Greg. The reason for this seems to be fairly simple; as we've seen over the years, Ted has the nasty habit of questioning John's decision to get married to the first woman he dated more than once. While it's true that John makes not-so-funny jokes about wishing he could have changed his mind, he really doesn't like the idea of having whatever he has with Elly questioned; Ted's being pummelled by the mighty fist of ham is thus his well-deserved punishment for not accepting that Hallmark and cheese rule the Patterverse. By that, of course, I mean he's going to spend the next twenty years or so treating a confused man like vermin because he'd rather not admit that he might have made a bad decision in haste.

As you will recall, Lynn likes to talk about how, back when her first husband was cheating on her, his girlfriend was laughing at her behind her back. Since Connie was transformed from a straw feminist antagonist into the single Lynn who was stuck with a child, it makes sense that this person be somehow turned into a background character: Ted's very temporary wife, Irene. Lynn more or less gave the game away when she had Connie take Elly aside and tell her that back when she and Ted were dating, Irene was pretty much the 'other woman'. Ted's reaction to her finally breaking it off is somewhat telling; when John called him out on his philandering ways, our boy stood there like a goof and said that none of the other relationships actually mattered. What this tells me is that John is the most mature adult male in the strip; Phil, as I've explained, is a member of Robert Ringer's Diaper Corps and Ted is way too high school for his own good.