Someone to Have and to Hold? Get Out of Here!

In the last episode, they should, of course, all get married. To each other preferably, to minimize the damage to the gene pool.

Such a marriage would be illegal, but then any marriage would be implausible: If the main characters of “Seinfeld” have convinced us of anything, it is that they are each preternaturally incapable of being in a relationship that is not based on a mutual contempt of human frailty and a comedic reverence for the Pez dispenser.

Not a solid foundation for a third date, much less a lifelong commitment. Which explains why those darn third dates are few and far between. Jerry, with a time-honored day-rate approach to romance, will break up with a woman if she is tall, if she is short, if she is perfect, if she exhales more than three times per minute. (“All that carbon dioxide, who needs it?”)

Elaine has her own peculiar relationship rules by which she once dumped former New York Met Keith Hernandez because he smoked a cigarette (thereby removing herself from the Plausible Female Lead category forever) only to later pin her hopes on men who were married, penniless and/or openly gay. And George, who should be grateful that any woman in full possession of sight and hearing would let him sit next to her on the subway, actually, though inadvertently, killed his fiancee, so certain was he that a better one waited ‘round the bend.

If these people had their own country, the national banner would be a red flag.

What, exactly, is wrong with them?

“They don’t want to get married,” says Ellen Fein, co-author of “The Rules.” “Jerry needs a new form of therapy; he is completely unattainable. The whole first date, he’s sitting there thinking, ‘Her part isn’t straight, I can’t believe her part isn’t straight.’ A ‘Rules’ girl would walk away instantly.”

“If a man loves you,” adds her co-author, Sherrie Schneider, “he would like that you have big hands.”

George, the two agree, is a classic subscriber to the Groucho Marx school of club membership; he doesn’t like anyone who would ever like him. “If he got married,” Schneider says, “he would change his mind the next day and spend the next 30 years complaining about his life. Then he would be happy.”

As for Elaine, neither Fein nor Schneider has any patience at all with her. “She is not a ‘Rules’ girl,” Fein says. “She hangs out way too much, is too much one of the guys. She has no mystery, no allure, she just blurts out whatever weird thing she’s thinking.”

“If you’re serious about getting married,” Schneider says, “you don’t hang out in someone’s apartment all day. On a Saturday night, Elaine should be at a singles dance, she should be on singles ski weekends, at Club Med, busy looking for a partner.”

(Memo to Jerry Seinfeld: Elaine at Club Med--worth an hourlong episode?)

*

But hanging out is what these people do, their raison d’e^tre, hanging out and judging others. (Elaine: I hate people. Jerry: People! They’re the worst.)

If these people had their own country, the national hero would be Alice (“If you have nothing nice to say, come sit by me”) Roosevelt. Spinster.

“What these characters capture is our growing level of confusion about what it means to be an adult,” says David Blankenhorn, president of the Institute of American Values. “These are people living the lives of college students, except that they’re in their 30s. They seem clueless about adult intimacy and marriage, they are not authoritative about anything. They seem to think they are above it all, or at least off to the side, poking fun at the grown-ups.”

If it sounds like Blankenhorn takes this pretty seriously, he does. His institute just recently held a conference titled “Whatever Happened to Grown-Ups?” at which Kay Hymowitz delivered a lengthy and rather absorbing paper on what teens learn about marriage from television and magazines.

In it, “Seinfeld” is used as a prime example of “postmodern post-adolescence.” “Living on their own but unsettled . . . their ill-defined limbo is the very essence of their identity. When not stalled in front of the TV . . . they drift in pleasurable vacancy around the city. . . . They drop in on their friends as casually and frequently as students in a college dorm.”

In other words, a lifestyle about, well, nothing.

But Hymowitz and Blankenhorn think that a disturbing little something lurks behind that smirking nothing.

“The show reflects the baby boomers and their perpetual celebration of adolescence,” Blankenhorn says. “These characters can’t get married because, historically, marriage is the most significant ritual of the transition to adulthood. Being an adult means making choices. People no longer want to make choices. They live in a state of ‘omni-potential.’ No options are shut off--you may decide to move to Colorado and be a ski bum, you may become a short-order cook and write a novel.” Or, say, run off to Europe with your therapist (Elaine) or become a hand-model (George). “This is the thinking of an adolescent.”

*

There is a certain charm about it all, Blankenhorn admits, but he cautions the characters and whomever they may be influencing: “You see a guy in his late 40s and he’s on his 117th girlfriend and that’s just not a pleasant thing. Fifteen years from now, these folks will be a lot less attractive, and then what?”

Well, certainly the line between “good naked” and “bad naked” might seem a bit blurrier, being a “face painter” or “bald by choice” not so bad.

“That’s the point, isn’t it? In real life, you just trade in one set of tics for another,” says Gloria Jacobs, senior editor for Ms. magazine and co-author of “Re-Making Love: The Feminization of Sex.” “As a woman, it is a little hard to see women [on the show] criticized because their hands are too big or their laugh is too loud--of course the men are judged just as harshly. It is interesting,” she adds, “to think of having that kind of license, to dump someone just because of one tiny thing.”

If these three had their own country, the national anthem would be “Another One Bites the Dust.”

It is interesting, perhaps, because most of us have kept the wrong people in our lives for too long, people to whom we have given the benefit of the doubt only to realize in hindsight that we should have hit the road the minute we saw that back-bedroom shrine to Supertramp or the first time he mispronounced the word “nuclear.” So would our lives be better if we too were able to mercilessly reject a potential suitor because she shushed us when we talked while watching TV or because he is a “close-talker”?

Nah.

“Most people don’t want to dismiss other people,” says Lillian Glass, author of “Attracting Terrific People” and “Toxic People.” “I think the characters are really dismissing themselves.”

Her diagnosis? That ol’ ‘90s bugaboo, Low Self-Esteem.

“Elaine dates a great guy and picks at him,” she says. “That’s abusive and hostile. She definitely has parental issues. Jerry is more passive aggressive, a real puer eternis [eternal youth], but still it’s a hostile act. And George doesn’t think he deserves anyone. They’re all very dysfunctional, very toxic, which is why they get along so well. I mean, who are they to judge anyone? It’s not like they’re in the upper echelon of the community. If they were, they wouldn’t have time to sit around and obsess.”

So what does that say about us, that for seven years we’ve been glued, as a nation, to the antics of toxic, dysfunctional, low self-esteemers?

“It’s like the talk shows,” Glass says. “We all have some of these tendencies, some of these feelings, but these characters are over the top. The fascination is with the most pathological, the most anxiety-provoking. It’s like watching the talk-show guests in a sitcom. Except they have all their teeth.”

If these people had their own country, its president would be Jerry Springer. OK, OK, maybe Merv. After all, Kramer still has that furniture.

Which is fortuitous since Kramer, who is so off the connubial charts that even the experts hesitate to comment, wins Most Likely to Wed, at least according to some of the writers.

“Oh, Kramer will get married,” says co-executive producer Gregg Kavet. “In fact, he’s probably been married and just didn’t think it was important enough to mention.”

“Jerry won’t, not for a long time,” says Andy Robin, also co-executive producer. “He’s looking for the female equivalent of Superman, only after a few days, she would be too super.”

“George has been very lucky,” adds Kavet. “The idea that he has been mildly successful with women . . . even if he never gets married, he’ll have nothing to complain about.”

“Elaine’s problem,” says Robin, “is that she’s fallen under the spell of three dunderheads. She spends way too much time with these guys.”

So what about the original premise--if not an illegal quadrangle, then at least Jerry and Elaine? Nice, neat, they could move to one of the Five Towns with a pullout for George and an over-the-garage studio for Kramer. Portrait of an American Family.

“The writing staff suspects that this is what people want,” says Robin. “And so it will never happen. It would be way too incestuous at this point.”