Tired of "It's Complicated"

“It’s complicated.”

If I had a dollar for every time I heard the phrase, I’d be a rich woman.

The phrase has become trite and clichéd and is beginning to elicit the same reaction from me as fingernails scraping down a blackboard.

Seems as if I hear that phrase a couple of times—if not more—every single day.

Talk shows, movies, television, conversations with friends, those two words are everywhere when talking about problematic relationships.

How on earth, I wondered, did those two words become part of our daily conversation in just about every country?

Origin of It’s Complicated

Did it begin with the Meryl Streep/Alec Baldwin movie of the same name in 2009? That’s the one where the now-divorced couple develop the hots for each other and embark on an affair.

No, it goes farther back than that according to an in-depth analysis of the phrase that appeared in The Cut. The article is quite witty as it details the history of this commonplace phrase.

Perhaps it came from responses to a Marie Claire poll in 1976 where 42 percent of French women bemoaned that juggling a spouse and a lover was “complicated?”

No, farther back than that because the phrase appeared in a 1919 newspaper article about a married entanglement where a married man married his girlfriend, without first divorcing his wife. The reporter described the situation as, “It’s complicated.”

In 1915, W. Somerset Maugham‘s novel Of Human Bondage used “complicated” to describe the situation facing the character of choosing between a wife and a mistress.”

That still isn’t as far back as the phrase goes. According to Kory Stamper, a Merriam-Webster lexicographer, who was quoted in the article from The Cut, the phrase dates from the late 1800′s when used by Henry James in The Tragic Muse with a character saying, “…it’s awfully complicated.”

Takeaway Truth

So there you have it. Even the origin of “it’s complicated” is complicated.

I’d love it if we could express the bewildering entanglement of of a romantic relationship with a new phrase.

Got any ideas?