I've Got a Match
"I’ve Got a Match" by They Might Be Giants never truly resonated with me—until life twisted this song’s lyrics into my reality. As a teen parent who married young and watched a 16-year relationship slowly unravel, I've come to find profound personal significance in this seemingly simple song.
Reflecting back, a better version of me would have been honest with myself and those around me, and maybe things would have been more amicable. I’m hesitant to write much more on the subject of my last marriage because it involves another person but it is INTEGRAL in explaining how this song’s impact grew as my marriage’s complexities deepened.
I want to share a pattern dynamic that developed in my last relationship. This song grew in significance for me the more complex this dynamic became. Let me know if this resonates for you.
In my last long term committed relationship, there came a time that I began to feel out of place. Something wasn’t connecting the way that I needed and instead of verbally communicating those feelings and exploring any possible reasons for the growing distance, I internalized it all and tried to keep the relationship status quo.
a cycle of misunderstanding.
With this, a new problem arose; intimacy (both emotional and physical) lives or dies with communication and vulnerability. My extreme effort to evade the uncomfortable conversation and protect the other’s feelings (or myself from their reactions) turned into a very noticeable difference in the way we related.
Out of fear of rejection, hurt, or concern (or all three) my partner, who had been left in the dark as to how I was feeling, began to take notice and possibly over compensated, or firmly embraced the relationship until I collapsed. Let’s look at the lyrics to the chorus of this song:
You think it's always sensitive and good
You think that I want to be understood
I've got a match, your embrace and my collapse
Eventually, I didn’t want to be heard or understood anymore. I didn’t want to try to work through anything and I had been denying that anything was wrong to myself and to my partner that the blame was being placed on me. I was being told that many of my inconsequential actions were the cause of our problems. That anything my partner did or said that I felt negatively about only happened because of something that I did to trigger that.
a breaking point.
For so long, I believed 100% of the issues I was dealing with were my own. When truly they were split somewhere down the middle between the two of us. I did not want to be there and I was afraid to say so because I couldn’t trust the reaction. Shit, I couldn’t even trust my own perception of the situation anymore. I just needed out and it wasn’t going to be pretty. As the lyrics describe below:
Which one of us is the one that we can't trust?
You say that I think it's you, but I don't agree with that
Let’s talk about the song. “I’ve Got a Match” is a wonderful song with a beutiful, understated chord progression. Sure, it sounds like a love song, and it is, but not that kind of love song. To me, this is a song about the volatile relationship dynamics when someone is feeling the pressure building, leading up to a break-up or divorce and the other can feel that something isn’t right. According to “this might be a wiki,” the chorus of the song is likely a play on an old joke:
“Excuse me, Sir, have you got a match?”
“Yeah, your face and my ass.”
a moment of clarity.
In the midst of the turmoil and roughest part of that relationship, there was one very small moment of this song that helped it all click for me. 5 little words that John Linnell sang just before the Chorus one time:
“Even when we get along.”
Sometimes, something can go wrong but the relationship is actually going great. Conversely, sometimes a moment can feel really positive even though the relationship is completely broken. Being able to differentiate between the two is challenging and requires an inward journey of introspection, probably therapy, and healthy communication between you and your partner. It isn’t easy but there are songs like “I’ve Got a Match” in the world to help feel seen and heard as you figure it out.