Dear Housewife
August 11, 2009
A reader writes:
Dear Thinking Housewife,
I have been perusing your website and enjoy it, with some serious reservations.
If I’m not mistaken I am younger than you (despite your obvious zest and vitality.) I am a single woman in my mid-twenties. Things are not going too well with me. I haven’t found the right man and am beginning to give up. The truth is I haven’t any idea how to go about this. Can you offer advice?
Laura writes:
Thank you for reading. I appreciate your interest.
Only one woman in history never faced your predicament. In her legendary garden, Eve opened her eyes – eyes too clear and deep for deception – and there he was. Her self transcended. A being familiar and yet strange. There he stood, delivered to specifications.
Eve’s experience – both mythical and real – has left its trace in us. It should be easy. Love should just happen. Why does finding a mate seem the romantic equivalent of building the Suez Canal?
My first recommendation is that you realize what you seek is not natural. You are not a frog in a pool. Human love is herbs and chemicals, a blend of the natural and the synthetic.
Let it sink in. You have a formidable task before you, something you probably face amid pressure to build a dazzling career. That’s a bum deal. The whole world may tell you to relax. Take your time and it will happen. Even your own mother may seem indifferent, unlike mothers of the past who gazed at unmarried daughters with undisclosed panic. This nonchalance is a lie. Don’t believe it for a second. I advise you to maintain a healthy state of panic until you have found a man worthy to be your husband.
Your mother may be oblivious in other ways too. She may be ignorant of the cultural disaster that awaits you. Men are in a state of potentially irreversible adolescence. Years in the great educational gulag, with its stultifying classrooms and cinder-block corridors, have killed the male spirit. In a serious world, they are surrounded by unseriousness. Men are bored to death. Men are in a trance. The constant non-reality of electronic games and TV and sexual images flickers on their internal screens. The screens grow larger. Their minds and souls correspondingly shrink.
They hang onto life by some invisible cord. How can something as subtle as love penetrate their psyches? You have a gift that is noble and rare. How can it compete with the glitter that sustains them?
This is bad news. Very bad news. There would be only one thing worse. And, that is if you did not possess the desire to love. Scrupulously maintain this capacity. What did Eve see when she opened her eyes and glimpsed Adam? She saw that all of nature was a master stroke of invention, the result of a love too profound for human comprehension. You cannot put yourself in Eve’s lucky shoes, except in one sense. You can possess her capacity for wonder and reverence. You can possess her soul.
Once you have this, you are halfway there. Spend as much time as possible out in the world. Any place but bars. Seek not and ye shall find not. All the conventional advice applies. Eve didn’t need nice clothes, but every woman after the Fall has needed conscious attempts at prettiness. Eve didn’t need to reserve herself until after the wedding, but you do. Through simple, age-old feminine inducements and the nobility of your love, you might awaken someone who barely lives. Together, you can create a new world. The Suez Canal wasn’t built in a day.
If this seems vague, it is because the object of your search is as yet unknown. Good luck!
