"Really?" I stabbed my steak with my fork, hoping she'd see how little I felt like discussing this in front of my dad.
"Yes, really." she said, sitting back in her chair. "When I think about the great guys I dated in college, guys who would've married me in a heartbeat? Jesus…" She trailed off, looking over at my noncommittal, 50-year-old professor dad who was polishing off his halibut, hardly listening to her words.
I studied Alice across the table. What was wrong with her? She was reasonably attractive, smart, opinionated, and she seemed to like drinking. She was anything but boring. Maybe she was too demanding or too bossy and she went on and on about herself? Maybe she seemed confident on the outside, but once you got to know her she was insecure and needy and got teary at the drop of a hat? There had to be some reason she was dating a man 15 years her senior, a man who clearly wasn't about to marry her or give her the babies she wanted. Sure, my dad was good-looking and successful, but he also juggled much younger girlfriends far and wide, including one or two in Europe, to visit when he gave talks abroad. "One girlfriend, or three," he told me once. "But never two. If you have two, they'll find out about each other, and they'll be pissed."
This was the sort of pragmatic advice my father bestowed: advice that made no sense (three girlfriends wouldn't find out about one another somehow?), advice that had nothing to do with me.
My mother was even less helpful, limiting her counsel to some vague assertion of my appeal as a person, while inevitably managing to cast doubt on that appeal along the way. When I had a problem with a boyfriend and needed her input, her response was, "Who cares? If he's not interested, I'm sure someone better will come along as soon as he's gone."
"Who said he's not interested?"
"I'm not saying that, okay? I'm just saying it's irrelevant. You'll always have men eating out of your hands, no matter what you do. Why bother with someone who's lukewarm?"
"Who said he's lukewarm? Is that your impression?"
"Heather! Jesus! I'm just saying, there will always be lots of men who are interested in you, so why get hung up on someone who's on the fence?"
And so it went. Any practical discussion of whether this particular boyfriend was on the fence or not was out of the question. It didn't matter how much I said I liked him, or how much I wanted it to work. It was beneath my mother to mull whether this or that guy liked me or not, and it was beneath me, too. Why couldn't I see that? She preferred to look at the big picture—I was a catch, damn it!—and ignore the little day-to-day bumps in the road. She wished I would hurry up and do the same thing.
My dad preferred the big picture, too. "All men are assholes!" he'd announce, almost gleefully. "Never forget that."
"You're a man."
"Yep. That's how I know."
But instead of looking at the big picture, instead of casting a suspicious eye on the guys around me, instead of knowing that for every lukewarm asshole in my sights, there was another asshole waiting in the wings to take his place, I wondered suddenly if I shouldn't nail down one particular asshole as soon as humanly possible.
After all, to hear Alice tell it, while college was a fertile paradise, teeming with virile young men anxious to settle down and start earning money to support their beautiful wives and darling babies, post-college life was a barren wasteland, populated by lecherous middle-aged divorcés who wouldn't so much as lend you their bus pass after a night of hot sex.
So in keeping with Alice's very practical advice—the only practical advice I'd probably received about love in the first 19 years of my life—I spent the next 15 years hoping to marry every single guy I dated.
I wanted to marry the ambitious but slightly shallow yuppie who knew way too much about expensive wine for a 21 year old. I wanted to marry the stubbornly childlike aspiring filmmaker who thought marriage was a bourgeois trap designed to damn otherwise spontaneous people to lives of mediocrity and silent longing. I wanted to marry the older divorcé who lounged around the house in MC Hammer pants, quoting his favorite passages from Conversations with God. I wanted to marry the balding, perpetually unemployed stoner who had a life-size cutout of the Emperor from The Empire Strikes Back in his bedroom. Instead of assuming that there would always be attractive, interesting men around, I adopted Alice's scarcity mentality. I stretched out each relationship well past its natural shelf life. I remained committed despite big flaws and major incompatibilities.
Even so, like the school principal who's determined to stick with even the hardest cases, I had impossibly high standards of behavior. I tried each boyfriend's patience to no end. I was fault finding and relentless: This is not how the man I'm going to marry should act! I'd try to redirect his behavior, using polite but explicit terms. Hmm. How can I inform him, nicely, that my future husband should not talk about the wine at great length, or say things like "My mama didn't raise no dummies—except for me and my brother!" or wear MC Hammer pants? How can I make it clear that my future husband should mention how pretty I am much more often? How can I make it plain that my future husband should ask about my day, then listen like his life depends on it?
Every step of the way, no matter how frustrated I became, I never realistically evaluated our differences or made a rational assessment of our inability to move forward as a couple. I thought each guy constituted my one last chance to nab a husband before I lost my looks or resorted to dating middle-aged swingers. I just had to make this one work, there was no other option.
Photo: Taryn
