Posted on 12/22/2005 8:37:43 AM PST by Sonny M
DEAR ABBY: Several of my friends and I were bemoaning our status as single women in our late 20s/early 30s, and discussing an article we had read in The New York Times about how smart women are less likely to get married. We'd all like to find Mr. Wonderful and be married. But if we have to curtail our professional success, financial wherewithal and IQ to do it, how can a person even begin to do such a thing?
I have a feeling you'll say to be ourselves and it will all work out, but thus far it has NOT worked out, and we're starting to worry. Personally, I think we'd be better off to take jobs as "administrators" in a large company somewhere and hope for the best.
Help, Abby! What's the answer for smart, fun women who have their acts together? How can we best poise ourselves to find true love while being true to ourselves? -- LOSING FAITH IN FINDING MR. RIGHT
DEAR LOSING FAITH: The truth is, there are no guarantees that ANYONE (male or female) will land a mate. It isn't easy these days because people are commitment-phobic. And this applies to individuals at all economic and educational levels, not just you at the top. Pairing off is often a matter of luck and timing -- being in the right place at the right time.
Eligible members of both sexes can be found in places of common interest -- places that are intellectually rewarding, culturally stimulating, athletically challenging or financially advantageous. As to whether you should downgrade your job level in order to appear less "threatening," I guarantee that if you don't take financial care of yourselves while you can, you will regret it later. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you could fool some of the bachelors some of the time, but you couldn't fool all of them all of the time.
There are worse things than not finding Prince Charming, and one of them is spending your life pretending to be something you're not. So my advice is to stop reading defeatist newspaper and magazine articles. They'll only make you desperate, clingy and depressed -- and none of those traits is attractive to either sex.
DEAR ABBY: My husband and I recently had a baby. We chose a mature, Christian couple to be our child's godparents. However, my brother-in-law is infuriated over the fact that he's not the godparent. He has disowned my husband and wants nothing to do with us. Behavior such as this in the past is part of the reason he wasn't chosen. However, I need to know this: Did we have an obligation to choose him as a godparent? How should we handle his immaturity and controlling behavior? -- NEEDS TO KNOW IN OHIO
DEAR NEEDS TO KNOW: A godparent can either be a relative or a close friend, and you were not obligated to choose one over the other. Your brother-in-law may be hurt that he wasn't chosen, but his subsequent behavior has been so childish that it's apparent you made the right decision. The way to handle his immature and controlling behavior is to forgive him for it, and go on with your lives.
CONFIDENTIAL TO EDWARD PHILLIPS IN MINNEAPOLIS: Happy Birthday, baby brother! I hope you're enjoying your special day.
Enjoys long walks at sunset and cuddling in front of the fireplace.
Seems every personal ad in the paper has a line similar to this one.
Because that's too great an age difference, in my opinion. More than 10 years, when one party is in her teens or twenties, means they are pretty much different generations.
"What about those of us who absolutely didn't meet anyone who would have been husband material?"
As a guy, I have to ask, how could that be? There are scads of potentially great husbands out there.
Probably the best husband I ever saw was also the biggest nerd I ever knew. Could it be that you were looking for too much?
Dear Losing Faith,
What you do for a living and how successful you are do not define who you are.
Who you are is what we men see and I suspect it isn't up to snuff.
Sounds like an ad for a puppy.
"She's not blaming men"
Sure, she is. In her view, men are too contrary to be attracted to women as intelligent, successful, and rich as she is, the dirty b*stards. Can't they see how wonderful she is?
I'm looking for a conservative Catholic. Hasn't happened. Or in any case, the few that I've met have been busy persuing Ms. Arrogant Liberal, for no reason I can fathom.
My fault, right?
OK, the others are right...these threads aren't good fer me. If a woman isn't married by 25, she's obviously got somethin' majorly wrong with her...or so these threads would have one believe. And I don't buy it.
"I wonder what these ladies' definition of "Mr. Wonderful" is."
A gay man that likes sex with women!?!
Phooey. You can't even quote it, you have to make up your own inflammatory example of what she thinks.
"Because that's too great an age difference, in my opinion. More than 10 years, when one party is in her teens or twenties, means they are pretty much different generations."
I wonder if the differences between generations these days are as deep as they're painted. Rolling Stones or Nine Inch Nails? These clothes or those clothes? Tofu or hummus? These are trivialities.
Besides, this business of restricting age differences hasn't really been working all that well, has it? Perhaps the practices that prevailed throughout recorded history really were better.
"You can't even quote it, you have to make up your own inflammatory example of what she thinks."
It's an accurate paraphrase, faithful to the original.
Assume most girls don't get married at 17 any more (because how many guys are ready? Or are they supposed to marry 30 year olds?
So...what you're saying is, those of us who didn't have the foresight to marry a guy old enough to be our father when we were 19, we missed the boat?
OK...
A woman over 30 has a better chance of being struck by lightening than finding a husband.
[Something tells me these broads are being too picky.]
Well actually, you have here an ex-Manhattan Democrat who founded one of New York City's major Internet companies in 1997 (with the crash I was able to keep $120,000 and the clothes on my back). While I was a paper millionaire, I did date some women who wouldn't have daed me otherwise (I remember one rather shallow heiress who referred to our hypothetical children as "little dot coms").
"Sex in the City" unfortunately does describe the Manhattan single scene, at least in terms of those who are smart enough to go to to parties such as the annual September Boathouse Party in Central Park. Too many neurotic and anorexic liberals wearing black and smoking cigarettes.
If they had put my Manhattan experience in a "Sex in the City" episode 5 years ago, I would be some guy in a tuxedo who turned the heads of the women but kept walking because I saw cigarettes in their hands. Or...if I stopped to talk with Cynthia Nixon...and she made a remark about being ashamed that Richard Nixon shared the same last name...I would politely laugh and then take my leave and move on (but not before telling her that I felt Nixon was one of the greatest American presidents).
There was one Harvard MBA I was on an Internet date with. She was great looking. But when I asked her what her experience with Internet dating was she said "There was one guy whom I had a very good time with and we made plans for a 2nd date. But I called just before that date and told him that it probably wasn't going to go anywhere serious so I cancelled." She then told me "He got so angry and called me all these names and I was very shook up. How can people behave like that." I said "Granted, it must have been unpleasant to listen to someone you just rejected in such a manner...but, if he was a pleasant enough guy on the first date, there was no reason, considering the last-minute aspect of your doubts, for you not to at least let him buy you the second meal and secure him as a friend or friendly acquaintance. It was too late to cancel altogether and expect him to take the complete rejection like a little mouse."
Well, she was totally floored. She couldn't believe that I was even partly taking his side...that I was trying to give HER advice on how to behave with men.
What was going on was that I was being told, ahead of time, that the world in any hypothetical relationship between us, would be defined in the way that SHE determined, not in the way common sense and etiquette would require, and certainly not in the way I would like her to or advise her to. In HER world, a woman can cancel a second date seconds before the date happens, and the man would be expected to be a mouse and think nothing of it. The woman said that "No explanation was required" for the man. She said that he continually and eventually, in their phone conversation, rudely asked her to give him a reason and she felt no obligation to tell him. I was like "Sorry, but minimal manners are common sense. You could have answered his question, you could have lied to make him feel better, but you insisted on making him understand that he had no right to question the surprising rejection he just got. Why would I want to date you if you could do that to me at a moment's notice?" She was shocked that I was rejecting her because she had rejected someone else.
I highly recommend to all males: On a date, always ask a woman if she is on speaking terms with at least most of her former boyfriends or would, at least, civilly speak with an ex if she ran into him at a public place. Any talk of more than 1 "stalker" in a woman's past is a red flag...talk about it to find out if she simply wouldn't let a guy have the last word or something else having nothing to do with emotional problems on the part of the ex.
Sadly, even if a woman's "looks" made her an innocent victim of real stalkers in her past...her attitude about those experiences could still make her "damaged goods" if it rubs off with the gentleman who wants to get to know her now.
Another big issue in big cities in the USA is unnecessary paranoia about males being potential serial killers - that ruins a woman's twenties and leaves her single and competing with less paranoid younger women down the line. The excessive paranoia isn't universal in the USA but it is particularly bad in downtown Boston, downtown Seattle, San Francisco...which happen to tbe the most liberal cities. It isn't an accident that the paranoid cities are liberal. I was once with a colleague in Boston at around 10PM at night when we stopped at a "don't walk" sign where my favorite friendly grocery checkout clerk happened also to be standing. She, a coed at Boston College, was totally frightened that I started speaking with her outside at night although we were so friendly during the day and it should have been clear that my well-dressed friend and I hadn't stalked around the grocery store waiting for her to get off work.
When I asked her "What is with the fear? You know me." She answered that a rapist was known to be stalking Brighton. I said "But all the women describe him as Hispanic". She indignantly replied that this was a rather racist thing for me to say.
I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I was being told that there needed to be "Equal Opportunity Paranoia" about men being criminal rapists. White guys in business suits are to be feared and cringed about even if all the posters on the telephone poles depict a poor man in jogging suit. I told her as my friend and I went in a different direction "the rapist could be 200 yards up the street. You should get some common sense." If she is single ten years from now, it will probably be because she ran away from the husband she otherwise would have had.
Contrast that with this story. Two years ago I was in Munich Germany where I suddenly wanted to meet an attractive woman walking in the snow ahead of me. But the only place where I could stop her and ask her where my hotel was, was in front of the only porno theater in Munich. I figured, as a New Yorker, that the place alone would guarantee that she would be paranoid and scared of me the way a woman would have been on 42nd street near the Port Authority Bus Station 15 years ago.
But she was from a small town in Switzerland and had just moved to the big city and didn't know about feminism and paranoia and liberalism. She smiled and started a conversation and then called me her "Christmas Angel" for having suddenly "appeared" in the snow just before Christmas.
It was like a scene out of the movie "It's a Wonderful Life".
I will always regret that her phone number was destroyed in the wash. :-(
But a great lesson to women from this would be: Guillessness is golden. Paranoia is a turnoff.
Funny enough, a quasi-repeat of that kind of scene just happened again in Munich yesterday. I was waiting in a crowd for the S-Bahn. A young Bavarian woman kept looking at me and smiling. I asked her about the train and determined that she was Bavarian. But, since I live in a much bigger and socially colder city, I couldn't imagine that such an attractive creature would decide she liked me on a subway platform...it didn't matter that I was really well dressed because I had been really well dressed in Boston when I got the opposite treatment years before.
When her train arrived, she looked back as if she was looking for someone in the crowd. That person was me. As the doors closed, she smiled and waved.
I should regret letting those doors close...but I know that great women tend to be geographically in the same area at certain times in history. If I were in San Francisco right now, I would be horrified that I just missed getting to know the only friendly woman in Northern California...but southern Germany is jam-packed with conservative women who trust men and tend to like me from the moment they meet me.
It is like "Brigadoon" here.
Another piece of advice for women: Men prefer women who fall in "love at first sight."
Advice to males: Stay away from liberal cities. If you have a great job in a Blue State...get a better job in a Red State. Dating amoung liberals is an exercise in nihilism. It isn't worth trying. At least on weekends, leave cities like Boston and go up into the small towns of New Hampshire or Quebec where real women live.
"I'm looking for a conservative Catholic."
Have you tried getting someone to sponsor you to a military base chapel for Mass?
"the few that I've met have been busy persuing Ms. Arrogant Liberal, for no reason I can fathom."
A conservative Catholic pursuing a liberal woman? He should hie himself to a monastary for some flagellation, post haste.
"My fault, right?"
I don't know. I did not make an accusation; I asked a question.
"OK, the others are right...these threads aren't good fer me."
Or perhaps the discomfort is a signal that they are potentially good for you, that there's something nagging at the back of your mind. (Sorry; in one period of my life I studied to be a headshrinker.)
"If a woman isn't married by 25, she's obviously got somethin' majorly wrong with her...or so these threads would have one believe. And I don't buy it."
Depends on what you mean by "wrong." Many of the women who do not marry young refuse to do so because of feminist dogma. There is definitely something wrong with them.
However, it's vanishingly unlikely that there would be no exceptions, and I think everyone recognizes that.
It's your words, and you're trying to pass them off as hers.
The truth on this forum is, if a woman expresses any fears or doubts about finding a mate in life, if she exposes one insecurity about herself or her search for a man or happiness in life, there are many here who will pounce on that weakness like a wolf on an injured calf and call her a man hating bitch.
And yet, when I read their posts, I see the same insecurities, the same uncertainties, the same faults.
This "us" against "them" attitude is the problem. And if it's wrong for one sex, it's certainly wrong for the other.
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