Are We Settling for “Tool Relationships”?

On Monday night, Tool Academy 2, ended another season on VHI.  If you are unfamiliar with the premise of the show, girlfriends  send their significant others  with hopes of salvaging their fledging relationships for their “diamonds in the rough,” to the show . These men usually have issues with honesty, fidelity, communication, faithfulness , maintaining employment and earned discontent from their girlfriend’s family. In addition,  they are competing to maintain their relationships and for $100,000 to not be expelled as a “Tool.”  A “Tool” on this show is a very unflattering term for someone that does not know how to treat his girlfriend and acts like for lack of better terms “a jerk” to the fullest definition.

For over two months, these couples work on repairing their faulty relationships through therapy and challenges that pertain to issues everyone experiences in relationships.  However,  I wonder are a lot of people in these types of “Tool Relationships,” where all of the core values we are supposed to have learned in childhood and adolescence vanished?  Have men and women become so laxed in relationships that immaturity, infidelity, no employment and the Pinocchio effect of lying on the regular is okay and has become the norm?

If you think about it, there is a lot of reality TV  and talk shows talking about this kind of behavior.  If anything, it makes for interesting  tv programming, conversations, and television fodder.  Tool Academy  is unique because you see a progression in terms of the men, couples and the flow of the show .  Even though it is beneficial,  it is also sheds a dark light and represents  on how people are almost, “settling and tolerating, this  type “ toolish” behavior.   Almost everyone I think  has dated a “Tool,” in their dating life, but the  real question is  are people accepting this type of behavior as the norm for the 21st century relationship standard?  Or, versus seeing what it should be seen as,  an example of how men or women should not be treated in a relationship.   Food for thought- we should all want more for ourselves in a relationship than the line they say when they are expelled from the Tool Academy.  “I am sorry, but you are just a Tool.”

Reagan Sinclaire