SMART SINGLE WOMEN DESPAIR OF EVER FINDING TRUE LOVE (Dear Abby, reference to Maureen Dowd)

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.

[Some men find good lives with ~shock~ women their own age :~D

And I am one of them. I am not saying it is a good thing. I am just saying it is the wave of the future.]

If it is a trend and wave of the future, it is a liberal trend, a leftist wave. The white male patriarchy intends to keep its entitlement to marrying "a younger woman". All efforts to harm the interests of the white male patriarchy, in this case by encouraging "age equality" more and more, are liberal/leftist compared to the traditions of the real "Old Europe". But there is another, American, dimension to this issue:

I know that, in the last century, the American pioneer tradition abandoned the "sophisticated" European concept that a man should work hard until he is 30, establish himself financially, and then look to the new "crop" of 18-19 year olds to get married. The American pioneer was given a same-age wife to move west with so they could both establish themselves together. Nothing was published in the American press about how many of these young pioneers who got rich out west...left their wives and kids in Denver and ran back home to Boston where they married the 18 year old debutante they hadn't been good enough to get when they were 18 themselves. So you get the myth that Americans should marry each other when they are young and poor and grow old together.

This "same-age bliss" concept is respectable for those who have it. I understand the tradition. I wish it could have happened to me. But it didn't. And because it didn't happen to me (marrying someone at 20 who was 20 and growing old together), I have no reason to support such a tradition anymore.

Sure, when I was 20, I was loudly outspoken against the idea that women my own age would date older, more established guys. I was livid at the very idea. But now it is in my interest to feel the opposite. Now I feel that 20 year old men should be ignored by 20 year old women while they look for older guys.

When I was a US soldier in my twenties...nobody in America (pre-911) wanted to date US soldiers (and church single groups were then empty). Liberal women didn't respect the job and conservative young women were looking for a richer guys. I, therefore, didn't come into my own until I was 30.

But at 30 I would then come to face to face with the shock of seeing American parents try to stop their daughter from dating me because I had supposedly become too old. These are people whom I thought I had been defending. I had gotten out of the Army after 4 years of service, in which I hadn't been "successful enough" for their daughters...and then I was "too old" although I was only 30!

It is like a soldier who ages out of his twenties while serving...may as well have been crippled in combat...the age and experience he gained in the military is an embarrassing "negative"..."thank you, but my daughter would be happier with the skateboarder down the block" and we'd rather not accept the fact that she was flirting with you and kissing you and really isn't interested in the slacker with the skateboard.

I remember one 40 year old mother insisted that I date her and not the daughter, and cooked me a nice meal while giving the daughter $10 to go see a movie by herself. The daughter was embarrassed. It is like feminism had given older American women a sense of entitlement to date younger men which was completely and fatally at odds with reality.

Nobody, except the young women themselves, cared that the US Army had taught me 3 new languages and had made me the kind of world traveler that James Bond fans would have been jealous over. I was 30 and that was bad to the parents.

Ever see the film "Logan's Run" where men are hunted down and killed when they reach 30? Well, when the most gorgeous and intelligent woman in a small town happens to be your 20 year old daughter and a soldier comes home from his service at age 30 and wants to marry her...you are cutting him dead if you would disapprove because of his age. There was a reason for his being 30. It is called military service.

There are many American single males sacrificing their twenties in Iraq...and while FReepers will *say now* that they "support the troops"...when the Iraq War heroes finally come home at age 30 or 35...they are going to be persona non grata to those of you who now have teenage daughters who will be 18 when the 30 or 35 year old war hero comes home.

Shockingly, I've observed that American Democrats are more "tolerant" of older men dating their daughters. Sure, you could say "Of course, and they were fine with Bill Clinton fooling around with his interns"...but if the problem you had with Bill Clinton was the age difference and not the sham marriage, the adultery, the lying, the way he cut Monika off...then we see the world in an entirely different light.

I find socalled "conservative" American males who are ready to give other conservative males the keys to the kingdom job-wise and everything they want...but "not my daughter! because she needs to date the skateboarder with long hair down the street who is her own age"...a big problem.

The Iraq War veterans are going to want your daughters.

College coeds, in surveys, might say they want to find a guy 22-28 years old, but when you ask them to name specific males who turn them on, they say Bruce Willis (age 49), Steven Seagall (age 50), Kevin Kostner (age 48), John Travolta (age 55).

The "trend" and the "wave of the future" in America...may be more toward age NOT mattering so much. Older women are looking better and better because of the trends of modern life. I would bet that there are proportionately tons more sexy 40 year old women at this time, then at any other time in the history of the world. But, as with globalization, they are going to have to compete in a free market, where there are no artificial barriers to trade...such as feminist admonitions to young women to reject all men over 30 so the older women won't have the competition.

I can only imagine what it would have been like if I had gone to Afghanistan four years ago and later to Iraq...and not come back to the USA until after I was 40...and then attempted to marry the 25 year old daughter of a "troop supporter" who thinks older, experienced men are supposedly losers.

I was just thinking about the guy above who insulted 35 year old single males while claiming to be happily married to a woman his own age. I saw the way he seemed to want to earn "brownie points" for being "politically correct". Sometimes I wonder if such men doth protest too much, to use a line from MacBeth.

I can write a thick book on this subject, but here is a reasonably pertinent anecdote for that...a few year's ago I was in the sauna of the Marriot Copley Hotel in downtown Boston. A man my age was there and we were talking. I told him I was in Boston to meet someone I'd met on the Internet, a Harvard medical student. He got this lost look in his eye and then said "You know, if anything ever happened to my {same-age} wife, and God forbid I lost her to cancer or a car crash, I probably would want to search for my new wife among the students at Harvard myself."

In other words: If you were lucky enough as a man to marry at 20 to a 20 year old...and you are now happily married and things are going well...your wife can still die of cancer or a car accident. And if this happens, you don't want to be living in a society where "political correctness" makes you, the older white male, persona non grata with the younger women who would comprise the vast majority of what your unmarried replacement base could be.

You don't want to be a widower at 50 and have the Church Single Group's pastor tell you that you are not welcome in anything but the "Senior's Group"...if you have grey hair, you don't want to hear feminists cackle about how young women aren't going for the "greying set" these days. Or do you want that? Do you think, as a married man with a few life insurance policies, that you are really *insured* against becoming a single man again and experiencing the full wrath of the feminist fight against the patriarchy's entitlements?

Do you know the dating service "Harmony" (I forget the actual name because I won't live in the USA anymore)?

I investigated them. They are so incredibly politically correct...half of my matches were a different race, which was fine in theory but more related to the fact that I lived near Oakland and they had a stupid theory that living next door was a huge match trait...but the most insulting and laughable thing of all was that they match everyone in a tight 3 year age range, up and down, under the theory that this is best for "harmony". I'd sooner accept Michael Moore's theory of the Iraq War before I accepted that load of tomatoes. Harmony.com is just one big scam.

When I was 31 I walked into a Seattle dating agency once and the 20 year old receptionist flirted with me before I went into speak with the scam artist who wanted me to pay $1400 to get "matched." The scam artist, a woman, tried to butter me up with talk of my being a "busy professional", etc etc, and when I finally asked her to be specific about whom she had in mind to match me with...she shuffled papers and eventually revealed that nobody younger than I was ever joined. I said "what about the receptionist?" :-)

Now let's look at why anyone would still be single at 35:

High School: I was a nerd with a Beatles haircut and no body. I thus missed having a "highschool sweetheart" like in the movie "Grease." There was no prom for me as I graduated early at 17.

College: At age 17 I was a freshman at college. I was too young to know what I was doing there, so I just studied for four years. In my freshman year, I did start to look better and I dated a high school cheerleader, but I didn't get out of college knowing what I was doing in conversation with others or socially. I didn't have a "college sweetheart." I was a late bloomer I guess.

Army: I got an enormous amount of self-confidence in the military and learned languages quickly. In my experience, however, soldiers were not seen as eligible bachelors by anyone on the left or right. My first German girlfriend only went out with me because she thought I worked FOR the US Army and not IN it. The world has changed since 9-11 on that score, I hope. I got out of the army and took my MBA among a bunch of liberal elitists at the University of Toronto who were insufferable to socialize with. The undergrads at the U of Toronto DESPISED graduate students. I couldn't understand this, except that grad students were normally leftists with bad hair. I hadn't thought MBAs and law students would be thrown into the same pile. I still didn't understand "leftism" the way 9-11 was later to describe it to me.

One of the worst things about the University of Toronto was that a 28 year old MBA student was considered WAY TOO OLD for ANY undergrad. One undergrad coed shrugged and explained to me "Guys our own age are simply F-able." Canada scared me! I didn't understand that it was liberalism that encouraged so much hatred for "older white males", but I was only 28 and didn't CONSIDER myself to even be an "older white male."

This was my first exposure to the idea that leftists don't want younger women dating older men: "Stupid White Men" as Michael Moore calls us. Did you know that the Canadian and British version of that book has a chapter called "Don't Date Whitey?"

Michael Moore is well-known in Canada for encouraging white women to date Muslims.

The only time I have stuck my middle finger out at anyone or anything was when I caught a plane out of Canada and the plane dipped with the city of Toronto before me out my window. I thought "take this Canada. I didn't have to live her and keep taking abuse simply for being a white male over 25." I went back to New York where a now 30 year old man still had a chance.

But a chance only among the chain-smoking, black wearing "Sex in the City" types who revolted me, some of them only dating me because I had become an Internet paper millionaire. Then the paranoid Boston, Seattle and San Francisco environment...Paris and London can be bad, but the American cities were impossible. In Boston, it is standard practice for a woman to lie about what her job is because the man might FIGURE OUT where she works! God forbid!

Someday, after I write a book about liberalism the working title of which is "It's Not About Iraq", I am going to go a lecture tour, taking along a great European wife, in the cities of Boston, Toronto, Seattle and San Francisco. I will explain exactly why I left the places and how the liberal, anti-white-male social infrastructure needed to be completely rebuilt.

Now I am leaving out some girlfriends that I did have in some of the above harsh environments. They were wonderful and I could have married one...but they were all hard-core liberals and, although I didn't understand the difference between right and left until after 9-11, I knew enough not to marry a liberal.

Later, I was on the beach of Waikiki at sunset and met a young conservative woman from Idaho. She was 6'1" feet and 19 years old, she looked great in a summer dress on Waikiki...and she adored me. A guy her own age had married her and then divorced her after cheating on her in the first year of marriage (same-age guys will often do this).

When her "Christian" father found out about me, he hit the roof, telling her that he would completely disown her financially if she continued seeing me. The only factor was my age. Age, age, age. It is all some American parents think about. She still writes to me and says she is now unhappily married to a Mormon drunkard her own age. Her protestant family found the prospect of Mormonism and drunkenism and abuse more reassuring than a 12 year age difference.

Now in Europe, if I don't marry soon, you could honestly say it is because I have a commitment problem. But even here there are a lot of liberals...as FR wisely documents. At least you don't get the paranoia here. You don't get parents going insane because an employed, articulate, non-smoking, non-drinking male who knows a few things about life and spent much of his twenties in the military, might date their daughter.

gridlock->Men are just not ready to settle down at 25 (or 35!) anymore, but they don't want to settle down with a 40-year-old woman when they finally get round to it.

You->I hope they got to hell!

That's awfully harsh HOTD!. Why such animosity for people who are just trying to be happy?

The only thing allowing that is the willingness for everyone to have all the sex they want outside of marriage. And you freely admit men have the best of both worlds, and yet on this thread women are the problem.

I agree that sexual promiscuity is a huge problem that affects all of society. This is just one way, "Why buy the cow when the milk is free". Historically a woman's virtue was prized and protected by her until her marriage. Now she gives it away at a moment's notice.

I'm not absolving men of any responsibility here at all but the fact is that the man can't do anything without the woman's cooperation and biologically men and women are different. Men's drives are stronger, and for the most part when younger, men tend to let the wrong head do the thinking. It's always been this way but society's rules (which were strictly enforced) helped men keep better control of themselves back then. Now society's rules tell the young man "get laid all you want it's normal and expected"

Some men find good lives with ~shock~ women their own age :~D

This is true and is a great thing. But why blame a guy for marrying young especially if he wants kids. And if he wants kids then he should marry as young as he can so that his wife will have plenty of healthy child bearing years left. When the time comes for me to remarry I cannot marry someone my own age. They are out of their child bearing years.

Even if he doesn't want kids, why not get the best looking 'trophy' wife if you can (assuming that her character,morals etc are good also)

With rare exceptions it's all but insane for a guy to get married if he doesn't want kids. He's better off financially if he's single. Female companionship is easily available. He has total control of his free time to hang out with the guys, golf, hunt, fish, whatever. His money is his to spend and no one else's. And the big one, as long as he is careful (get's himself fixed if he's sure he doesn't want kids) there's no chance that he will lose his house and future earnings to some one who was just using him to make a living.

Is this cynical? You bet. Is it wise with regard to the state of the family law courts these days. Absolutely.

The sexual revolution (feminism etc) has destroyed the concept of marrying the girl of your dreams right out of school and making a life together. There are precious few of us left who want that (or admit that we do) enough to take the risks involved. Is this fixable? Yes, but it will take us conservatives raising our children to spurn liberals and everything associated with them. Then the next generation can back to living good lives.

(Sorry, I slipped into rant mode when I wasn't looking)

I'm enjoying your posts on this thread - you've told some politically incorrect truths with a much-needed dose of literacy and thoughtfulness that has kept the thread from degenerating into the usual Adam and Eve slugfest.

There is a common root cause for a lot of these problems:

This was my first exposure to the idea that leftists don't want younger women dating older men: "Stupid White Men" as Michael Moore calls us.

American television promotes the idea that "Stupid White Men", especially those who are over 30 and hold responsible positions in corporations, are the root of all evil. The people who frown at a representative of the Evil Empire dating one of their friends don't think, they just react to the images they have been programmed with.

In Boston, it is standard practice for a woman to lie about what her job is because the man might FIGURE OUT where she works! God forbid!

Amercian television taught her that a high percentage of men are violent rapists. She doesn't think - she reacts to the images she has been programmed with.

Age, age, age. It is all some American parents think about.

American television taught them that men more than a couple years older who interested in their daughters are predators...and probably pedophiles. The parents don't think - they react to the images they have been programmed with.

Television provides a form of social shorthand for people with limited experience with the world: they can watch and learn how to judge groups using the same biases that the producers of the programming have, then feel themselves to be as sophisticated as others who actually have that experience. I can only conclude that other parts of the world have medias with a less mendacious social agenda.

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