The perfect mate for Maureen. She would hardly even know she is dating a man.
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.
I'll take all of that I can get. If I'm not being too pushy please remember my daughter Autumn also. Harder on her than on me I'm afraid
I sympathize with your plight. If you find the frustration too great in finding true love, give me a call when you're in my neck of the woods, and I'll treat you to an evening of insincere yet believable love. If you want sincere, I can do that if you bring along an equally smart, single, and attractive female friend.
With respects (in the morning),
The perfect mate for Maureen. She would hardly even know she is dating a man.
If your so smart honey what are you doing reading the Times?
I guess the point I see is that if a woman wants a career and children she had better have the children first. Again see 218.
>>They'd probably try to tell God what to do.<<
Hillary and Bill Clinton and Al Gore die in a car accident and suddenly find themselves in heaven.
God addresses Al first. "Al, what do you believe in?"
Al replies, "Well, I believe I won that election, but that it was your will that I did not serve. And I've come to understand that now."
God thinks for a second and says, "OK, very good. Come and sit at my left."
God then addresses Bill. "Bill, what do you believe in?"
Bill replies, "I believe in forgiveness. I've sinned, but I've never held a grudge against my fellow man, and I hope no grudges are held against me."
God thinks for a second and says, "You are forgiven, my son. Come and sit at my right."
God then addresses Hillary. "Hillary, what do you believe in?"
Hillary says, "I believe you're in my chair."
While I agree with Jen that there is little that is attractive about intentionally seeking out someone who is way outside your own age and experience, I do agree with your sentiments posted above, and I've certainly seen marriages work where there is such an age difference.
It ~is~ about becoming who you will be together, not about meeting someone who fits perfectly and remaining unchanged by them. I think Jen knows that (she's a good friend of mine) but I wonder if many others, who gnash and marriage and have had it fail on them, do. It's not about finding someone who will fit into your life without any interruption in who you were. It must very necessarily change who you were as a single person to who you become with a spouse.
Let me provide one example. I married my wife when she was 22. She had no advanced education but was brilliant in every way I can think of. I am college educated, 5 years older than her and try to be very well read. I had never beaten her at a single game of scrabble. The woman was absolutely brutal at that game. She'd routinely thrash me by more than 50 points. She was a very good wife to me (other than that)
"There's nothing wrong with a single woman having a good job and saving up some money, but if her career comes first, she'll be a spinster."
Just ask Condi.
Well said!
LOL...right on! Dowdy is not only dumbed down but she's never going to find a smart man among the libnuts she chooses to stalk.
BUAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHHA!
"Most men want to have a wife who needs them and who loves them enough to stay home and take care of the really important things, making the house a home and bearing and raising children."
MOST men? Not in my experience. Besides, Donna Reed died several years ago.
"I'd be very happy with a witty carpenter!"
LOL..so would I. Lately, I'd be happy if the object of my future affections would be handy in the yard and the house, at the very least. I don't care what his income is...but can he paint, mow lawns and repair most home appliances?
:)
Will Someone For God's Sake Marry Maureen?
Maybe She'll Shut Up
November 21, 2005
I read with ashen resignation that Maureen Dowd, the professional spinster of the New York Times, will soon birth a book, no doubt parthenogenetically, called Are Men Necessary? The problem apparently is that men have not found Maureen necessary. Hell hath…. Clearly there is something wrong with men.
I weary of the self-absorbed clucking of aging poultry.
Why is Maureen hermetically single? For starters, she is not just now your classic hot ticket. She’s not just over the hill, but into the mountains, to Grandmother’s house we go. She probably gets more daily maintenance than a 747, but she still looks as though a vocational school held an injection-molding contest and everyone lost. That leaves her with only her personality as bait. The prognosis is grim.
Was that ungentlemanly? She makes a career of being disagreeable about men. What’s sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose, say I.
Reading her unending plaints, one concludes that she is deeply in love—with herself, and too loyal ever to cheat with a man. Behind her writing you always hear the little voice, “I’m so wonderful, so elite…why doesn’t somebody marry me?” (Well, Maureen, I can give you a few ideas. You’re a pain in the ass….) “I’m so smart, I’m so powerful, I’m so, sooo elite, so talented, so…special.” As, in their way, are ingrown toenails. “I’m successful, shriek. Men hate me because I’m smart. They feel threatened because I’m so wonderful.”
Actually, Maureen, you are no more threatening, or appealing, than somebody else’s gym socks. I suspect that men don’t like you because you aren’t likeable.
Now, precisely why are you so wonderful? Clearly you aren’t stupid. You are a competent if sophomoric writer. Dummies can’t do that. But I’ll tell you what, Sweet Potato: I don’t think I know anyone who would want to go out with you. As best I can tell, should you have an original thought, it would need counseling, for depression and loneliness.
Smart women are an attraction of Washington, at least the parts off the cocktail circuit. They made fifteen years in that wretched city bearable for me. I knew women with serious brains, golden-girl biochemists at NIH, a gal who ran a federal positron-emission tomography lab, weirded-out computer techs, startlingly good writers and chicks who had popped scores you wouldn’t believe on tests at NSA that aren’t supposed to exist. They’d eat you for lunch, Maureen.
Now, I know that people at the New York Times have ample self-esteem, and indeed come coated with it to a depth of inches. How about we have a little understanding here. In journalism as in politics, advancement has little to do with merit. Have you checked the contents of the White House lately? Dan Rather and Connie Chung are pinnacles of anything at all? I’ve been around this game as long as you have and I know how the scam works. Getting to the upper ranks of journalism is a matter of luck, sexual sharing, brown-nosing, and staying carefully within the bounds of the regnant politics of the newsroom.
You are journalistic glitter, Maureen—Reporter Barbie, a literary Streisand. While working for the Times is perhaps nothing to be ashamed of, I’d keep quiet about it.
Maureen’s agonizing does however provide exegesis of the American female mind at a curious moment. Again and again their question seems to be, what form of pretense is needed to achieve marriage? Must I feign sex-kittenhood? Be a calculated suck-up who always laughs at his jokes? Hide my brains? The underlying idea is that they must commit some fraud to attract a man. This of course implies that they aren’t attractive without committing fraud.
I’ll give them that.
Those of us who have wives from Mexico, Thailand, the Philippines, Chile, or China view Maureen as being a very strange creature indeed, perhaps expelled from a geothermal vent. (“Hi! I’m Fred. What’s your phylum?”) Like Maureen, so many gringas don’t seem to know who they are, what they are, what they want to be, or how to get there. I think of a tinkertoy construction made by an insane two-year-old: a lot of protruding parts that don’t fit together.
By contrast foreign women are psychologically coherent. They are sexy because they are women and like being sexy, not as a Vaudeville act or marketing tool. Resentment is not their primary emotion. They love their children and regard raising them as a pleasure, not an imposition of which they are ashamed.
If you read Maureen and her littermates, you realize that they are those most uncomfortable of women, heterosexual man-haters. For example, Maureen, from her new book:
“Men, apparently, learn early to protect their eggshell egos from high-achieving women. The girls said they hid the fact that they went to Harvard from guys they met because it was the kiss of death.”
Who would marry that? Yet it is classic Maureen, snotty, catty, hostile. As for her own Kevlar ego, there’s this, from her interview with Howard Kurtz:
“Even after a decade of writing a New York Times column, she admits to being ‘very thin-skinned’ about criticism. ‘I'm just not temperamentally suited to it,’ Dowd says. ‘The first couple of years I spent curled up on the floor and crying.’”
Oh.
The drumbeat of animosity is never missing from her hetero-anguished feminism. Men are vain, frightened, immature, unreliable, treacherous, fascinated by gewgaws, obsessed with sex, and unfaithful. Several questions arise. If men are so bad, why does Maureen want one? What kind of men has she been running around with? Those closely resembling herself, it sounds as if. Most to the point, why would any man want anything to do with such a woman?
This confusion and hostility has made the American woman into an internationally acclaimed shrew. Yes, there are degrees, and perhaps more exceptions than examples, but talk to white men from Washington to Hong Kong and you see the same shudder.
These gals are wound too tight. Recently I was aboard a highway bus in an American enclave in Mexico. A gringa wanted to get off where there was no stop. The driver didn’t understand her. In Mexico they speak Spanish, a point which apparently had eluded her. She began yelling at him abusively. (Verbatim quote: “You’re the worst! You suck! You’re the worst!”)
They do this. People notice. A friend somehow found himself talking with a gringa who had one of those puffy little white dogs you could buff a truck with. He said, “Cute little thing. I’ve got a real dog.” This mild witticism set her into yelling.
My wife would be very surprised to hear this. That woman is as smart and sharp as the Good Lord makes 'em.
This "smart women aren't married because they intimidate men" line is just a self-consoling piece of crap that Frau Dowd tells herself as she moves further and further into her barren years.
There's a phrase that the Mexicans have for that: "body of desire, face of regret."
If Watson and Crick were basing their insights on her work, they should have cited her. They didn't. Instead they vigorously campaigned to discredit her. She had no idea they had seen her work.
It depends on who you wish to believe - However, if you read some of their work you'll see they were unnecessarily nasty in what they said about her.
pls see # 317
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