OMG it’s like if da GBFM(TM) wrote New Journalism or something (lolzolzlzolz he should do a musical verse interpretation of dis tho). Dalrock commenter Aquinas Dad tells this tale:
The Wife and I have a good friend, let’s call her Anna. Devout Catholic, in the choir and can sing like an angel, blue eyes, auburn hair, great figure, in good shape, chaste and a virgin waiting for marriage. The Wife and I met her when she was 24 and hopeful for a husband.
‘In the meantime’, she said, ‘I am working on my education while I look for a husband’. A PhD in Chemistry. We warned her that perhaps she needed to save money and work on domestic skills….
At 25 she started dating John. John is a great guy – CPA, doing well, owns a 4 bedroom home, a paid-off new Mercedes. Devout, in the men’s group, admittedly a virgin waiting for marriage. We set them up and he joins our parish shortly thereafter to be closer to Anna. After 8 dates he flies to Anna’s home state to ask her dad permission to court her. Great. after nine months he tells me he is going to propose and we are so excited!
She turned him down.
She refused to even date the next three guys we tried to set her up with and eventually dated a recovering alcoholic for 5 dates as her longest relationship post John.
She gets her PhD and a flashy job in Manhattan, so she moves. We talk often.
“There are no men” she says. “No one worthwhile to even date” she says.
I know guys in Manhattan. I set her up with a friend-of-a-friend. he is a widowed Catholic CEO. Devout, three lovely kids, daily communicant, wants a wife who is really, really Catholic; he is worth 8 figures.
–That’s $00,000,000.
My mutual friend tells me that after 7 months he proposed and she turned him down, cold.
About 3 weeks ago she called me, sobbing her eyes out. Her 32nd birthday was just a week away and she was no closer to having a husband.
I am about to tell her I give up when she says, really small, ”Did you hear?”
“What?”
“About John and Beth?”
Beth was who John dated after Anna refused him. 9 months later they were married. That’s about 4 years ago.
“Yeah! their 3rd child is a girl! they told us at Mass. We hope to be at the baptism. Why?”
“I told him no because he was balding.”
“What?”
“I told John no because he was balding. And now Beth has a bald husband and a home and 3 kids, and I have a cat.”
“Why did you say no to [the CEO]?”
“He already has kids. I am afraid they would hate me.”
Over the next 20 minutes she told me of the 8 proposals I had never heard of and why she had turned them all down. Two other widowers with kids; three were too short; one was too tall; one was ‘only’ a plumber (with his own company who owned 3 homes); and one had a silly laugh.
I asked her, ”What are you going to do now?”
“I keep praying for God to send me a husband….”
“Sweetie, he already sent you ten.”
–LOLZLOLZLZLOLZ! Oy. A sad story. But I do ask myself: whatever on earth compelled this mild-mannered Catholic choir girl to chase a PhD in Chemistry? Is there anything she can do with that she couldn’t already have done with a more modest course of study?– I mean, besides join the faculty or become Madame Curie. A hard science PhD sounds so . . . mannish. Or else–
And what sort of Girl-in-Rebecca issues did she have with the millionaire widower? Maybe she doesn’t want to be saddled with somebody else’s children. That’s understandable, I suppose; personally, I think I have a bit of a hypothetical horror of “mixed” Brady Bunches (though I suspect old school Catholics don’t get too strung out by that sort of thing). Anyway, hasn’t she seen The Sound of Music? Does she not trust herself to win over children? And, to circle back to the previous point: what makes her think she’s cut out for the life of a Chemistry PhD? Heck, what’s her conception of that life anyhow? Get thee out of the academic nunnery!
If she wanted to commit to a life of romantic ambivalence, all she needed to do was read a Stendhal novel. The PhD sounds like major, major overkill. And in any event, all this life of the mind (??) isn’t inoculating her against the free-flowing tears of regret.
Maybe she should go back for her Master’s in Philosophy?
–One final thought. The other day at heartiste, a commenter recapitulated a female complaint overheard, that went something to the effect of: “BUT NICE GUYS DON’T KNOW HOW TO F**K!!!” [NB: okay, so it wasn’t in all-caps] Lolozlzlzolz Well, surely that isn’t the substance of Anna’s complaints, but at the risk of sounding vulgar, there’s arguably something just as vulgar about these insubstantial little objections of hers. Perhaps these are the flimsy rationalizations of a woman who had other, less (self-)articulable objections. Maybe John was a dweeb; maybe it’s just the baby rabies that makes her envy Beth at all. Given a do-over, maybe she’d flee his bald embrace once more. Perhaps she’s been constantly besieged by the advances of less Catholic men, and all that secular attention has hardened her standards where it comes to officially sanctioned potential partners. I don’t know. Perhaps all will be well. But at 32, with a cat and no $00,000,000?
And people wonder why marriages between American men and foreign women are the only demographic that’s increased over the last 30 years…
lolzlozl That’s a great story. Sad, but . . .
Well, as GBFM likes to say, “Yes, I did very well on my GMATs/ They took away my soul, left me with cats”. I guess a PhD in Chemistry commands more respect than a GMAT score, and she may perhaps have no worse fault than her choosiness, but still . . .