Designed To Beat The Benz

This week a man I used to love dearly sent me a message informing me that he is married now. I congratulated him and told him I was glad he found the one for him. He said I will find someone too one day. I told him I was not looking and he responded by saying, Sorry! I was slightly amused by his response since I was not looking when we first met so I told him not be sorry, because I wasn’t. Our conversation continued to other topics and after it ended I couldn’t help thinking about life, love and relationships and how unpredictable and deceptive they can be.

Looking back it was simply amazing to see how relationships I thought would definitely work like the one I had with him, didn’t and those I thought wouldn’t survive a day have. In many ways this year has been a year of incredible love stories – many of which I have been fortunate enough to bear witness to and even be a link to in some small ways, while others have unraveled spectacularly at the seams others have come together in the most exquisitely beautiful ways.

This particular conversation touched me because it was a moment of saying goodbye to an idea, to a life I once led, to a hope I once held so dearly and so close to my heart. I realized as I unpacked his emotional trinkets that I had been carrying him with me all this while, I wasn’t aware that I had left the door slightly open, a little bit ajar, just in case I was wrong about him. His message was calling me to wake up to the reality that this particular dream, the one where we end up together in the end will never come true and that it was in all honesty never real to begin with, it was just simply a mirage.

So I began this week to wash and fold the laundry of our relationship, emptying my suitcase of all items I had kept safe, pieces of colourful clothing which never quite fit, from the white sandals, the orange jacket, the pictures, the memories, the music, the promises to have and to hold, forever. The shoes were a size too small and the jacket was two sizes too big, but I wore it anyway, hoping that I would one day grow in the jacket or that my feet would somehow shrink and I would be Cinderella. The illusion disappeared. After packing away what was never mine and handing the items over to charity, a beautiful moment of nostalgia overwhelmed me and a memory of a clever ad emerged as if from a dream. One of the most amazing and ingenious advertisement I had ever seen between the luxury cars BMW and Mercedes-Benz. Chrisannes Kousas a South African marketing student wrote about it in her blog House of marketing. And it goes like this:

“There is a coastal road in Cape Town, South Africa, called Chapman’s Peak. It is considered to be one of the most beautiful sightseeing attractions in the whole of Africa. The road winds through spectacular coastal-mountain scenery, with cliffs sinking into the Atlantic ocean on one side, and steep mountains towering over the road on the other side. Despite its beauty, this road is a notoriously dangerous one to drive on, as it consists of 114 sharp, meandering, bends in the road. Several years ago, a gigantic coastal cleanup campaign was launched, and a helicopter pulled 22 car wrecks out of the water adjacent to Chapman’s Peak. A well-known story in the area resurfaced: it was the tale of an Irish businessman who lost control of his Mercedes-Benz when driving along this road in 1988, and plunged 100m down one of the cliffs. Miraculously, he not only survived the accident, but crawled out of the wreckage with hardly a scratch on his body. Mercedes heard about this story, and were so impressed with the safety features and stability of their car, that they decided to base their new advertisement on the story. For the advertisement, they drove a Mercedes off the road in the exact same location. In the TV advertisement, the Mercedes plunges off the edge of the cliff, but then the driver survives, to illustrate the phenomenal safety features of Mercedes-Benz. BMW noticed this ad, and ingeniously mimicked it. A week later, they showed a BMW driving along the exact same stretch of road in the rain, however, when it reached the point at which the Mercedes plunged off the cliff, the BMW negotiated it safely, and continued driving along the road. The catchphrase” Would it not make sense to drive a luxury car that beats the Benz? The line referring both to the bends on the road and the Mercedes Benz which failed to conquer the road.”

The BMW rebuttal was a moment of awesome inspiration. I have loved it since school days. I identify with BMW and the fact that I have survived this and other romantic interactions so far without falling off the cliff is testimony to the fact that some people are just simply designed to beat the bends. But more significantly and to quote actress Kerry Washington (because she puts it brilliantly) “I realized that I don’t have to be perfect. All I have to do is show up and enjoy the messy, imperfect journey of my life”.

#love