On Singleness, Part Three

In September, I’m writing about singleness. You can read Part One here, and Part Two here. I feel bold and empowered because this blog is anonymous! It’s nice, natch.

 

Sometimes I wonder if I am single because I am too content. I am incredibly happy, at home. I have overcome all of the angsty behavior of youth when I fretted about responsibility and independence, and these days I am perfectly comfortable as a professional woman who lives with her parents to honor their desire to protect her. I am obedient when I need to be, healthfully willing to respectfully disagree and come to mature compromises on everything else, good friends with all of my family members, and just generally very happy. I work with a group of more than sixty men and I am the only single girl under 40 in my company, I am routinely given attention that far exceeds a normal girl’s usual need for male affirmation. My coworkers are primarily in middle age and although they would’ve never chosen me in youth (and indeed selected one or more wives that are nothing like me) they find now that I seem to represent everything by which they are now enchanted. They adore me, compliment me, and (most importantly for my emotional equilibrium) consult me seriously and routinely about everything from finances to fashion. It ends up that I spend more time with them than any other human being in their world, in most cases including their wives and children and coworkers, and by perfecting techniques that I learned at The Lakes, I am the loveliest secretary I can be: I listen, and laugh with a certain wondering giggle that suggest that I have never heard anything quite so entertaining as what they just said. I love my job, and if you were to ask me on any given day, I have likely satisfied my possible quota of compliments needed in a 24-hour period. (I should note that I conscientiously honor their wives by my demeanor, speech, intentions, and appearances. I am utterly devoid of suggestiveness, create no awkwardness by behaving in a sexually aggressive way, dress carefully to be attractive without being irresistibly sexy, show no cleavage as a rule, and pursue friendships with their wives, who often tell me that they are so thankful to know that when their husbands go to work, they are safe with me.)

It is incredible and flattering, and they make me feel lovely and ladylike and even (when I walk into a room and they all abruptly stop discussing it) sexy. They make it easy to be caught up in the artificial comfort that comes from having all of the luxuries of affection without any of the responsibilities. When I get home this, added to my happiness at home, makes it easy to be apathetic about change.

 

And then, I am also the type of person who always thinks the worst. I am cheerful, happy, funny, and ladylike, but I am far from an optimist, and while everybody goes on becoming progressively more hopeful because they cannot help themselves, I grow more and more settled into the deep conviction that things will turn out however they are destined to (usually poorly) and that I must be joyful despite unavoidable disappointment. I don’t think that this is necessarily a bad thing: I have spent so much time expecting the worst that it feels like I am always genuinely surprised when nice things come along. This may be one of those times, because of course anything can happen, but I truly have both gone so long believing, and have had so great reason to do so, that no one will ever come along for me, that the matter feels settled entirely. I pray boldly – for the specific things that I want (YOU MUST! READ! THIS!), for a good man to come along, but I don’t feel I am entitled to one and I certainly do not feel, as though some girls do, that they are very likely one heartbeat away from the start of some sprawling, gorgeous story that will, in its far-reaching happiness, either explain entirely the past, or else completely eradicate it with overwhelming joy. I am not that sunny girl who believes that a Prince Charming will just come along, and luckily so: if I were that girl, I’d just be a 25-year-old with worn dreams and uninspired promises. I feel like I am the opposite: robust, willing, content, and happy. So very happy.

 

A few months ago, my parents realized that there were no boys left to be considered. The conversation went something like this:

Mom: Jane, what about that nice boy Jake you used to know?

Me: Oh, he’s married now.

Mom: Married? What?

Me: Yes, as married as a boy can possibly be. A ring, too. Titanium, I believe.

Mom: Well, what about Charles?

Me: Girlfriend, long term. Public Displays of Affection in city parks.

Mom: What about Joseph?

Me: Two kids. A mini-van. He knows how to make empenadas now, too.

Mom: And Matthew?

Me: Live-in girlfriend. Curly hair. Road trips.

 

And on this went, down what I realized was my mother’s Y2K-esque list of post-apocalyptic boy options, to be brought out when everybody else had excused themselves from the pool of possibilities for one reason or another. I heard her telling my father, afterwards, that, “Jane wasn’t just BEING JANE when she told us that there was no one left. THERE IS LITERALLY NO ONE LEFT, HONEY.” She was alarmed, and what resulted was an expected flurry of sudden and frantic strategization for getting me to meet somebody. Everyone (LITERALLY EVERYONE, HONEY) had already moved from the “maybe” column to the “no” column for me long ago, but I remembered the overwhelming confusion I had experienced when they did, in realizing that in order to  marry somebody, I have to first meet him. So I gave them time, as I once gave myself, time to grieve. But my parents are (unlike me) perpetual and unconquerable optimists, and their planning and alarm led them to asking me, very quickly, if they thought there was anything I should be doing to make myself more available. I was glad to listen because they were right to interrogate and question me me: my current style of living has no possibility for new introductions. I go to work early; I get off late; I work out; I come home; I go to bed; and I repeat it all. On weekends, I fix up my investment house; and I attend a darling little church with fewer than a hundred members and among them not one possibility for marriage.

 

It’s not that I am against possibilities, because Lord knows I am not, and let me say that in spite of my deep resignation to being unmarryable forever and ever, if I knew what to do I would be doing it. But I don’t want to do the usual things like take a college class or join a dating site, and what is left? The thing is, I’ve worked really hard during my single years. I’ve taken time to be thoughtful, lovely, responsible, diligent, forward-thinking, and I like to think that I can expect someone who has been at least similarly self-motivated. I am twenty five years old, and I have a good job, I own a home, and have $45k in the bank saved from my earnings. I don’t need a college student, however dreamy, who is figuring his life out experimentally. I’m already the possessor of an old and matured soul: I don’t want to marry somebody who needs a mentor or, worse, a benefactor. And the internet dating scene is equally suspicious, because I do not necessarily want someone to be so familiar with the computer real that he is likely to be profoundly comfortable spilling his soul on a screen. I work and live with a father and coworkers who are diligent and strong, and seem to rely on me for all of their primary electronic communications. I like that very much. (Besides, no one on any internet dating site is ever as tall as me, and I do not want to feel like an Amazonian Freak of Nature if I have to bend down to hold someone’s hand or, worse, make out with him. I’ve never heard of anyone on a dating site being taller than my height of 5’8”—have you? Thought so. Just keeping it real here, folks.)

But what else is there?

 

When my parents called a family counsel convened to discuss the issue indirectly, dad said that maybe when fishing we ought to go where the fish were, and dear momma said that perhaps we ought to consult the One who made the fish, and my brother said that maybe we should do that for our literal fish suppers too as long as we were just being resigned to everything, and so on, until the group was talking in allegorical circles without consulting me. I finally interrupted and said, “I am doing the best I know how! If I knew where to fish, I would be fishing, and since I do not, have asked the fish and the fisherman and the one who made the fish and all that, and that is certainly all anybody can ask.”

 

That shut them up, but I still feel as though I do not have the foggiest idea what I am doing.

 

On Singleness, Part Two

In September, I’m writing about singleness. You can read Part One here. The whole anonymity thing makes me bold and outgoing. Yay!

 

Maybe because I have the opportunity to know firsthand the way how easy it can be to feel helpless regarding meeting somebody, I tend to do my part whenever I can introducing friends. It seems like the thing to do. Even when I don’t understand somebody, and especially when I think that they are weird and unlovable, I try to think of anyone I know who would understand that person, and make introductions when I can. And maybe in some ways I am attentive and zealous because I am somewhat resentful against the Church for not doing the same for me. I never realized this about myself until recently, when some woman ran into me at the grocery store and, when recounting it to my mother later, I said, “She kept going on about me being, you know, sweet and lovely and that I was going to make somebody soooo lucky someday. People always use that line on me! Why doesn’t anyone ever consider that I don’t want to be placated with platitudes about my eligibility for marriage? They’re lying! If they really believed that I was a good candidate for marriage, they’d follow it up with, ‘And I have this really spectacular nephew that I think you should meet.’”

 

It was an uncharacteristic outburst for me, and my mom immediately asked, “Are you saying that the church has failed you? Have I failed you as a mother?” She immediately suspected that I was accusing her, which is exactly why I cannot really discuss these things with her: my mother is one of the most incredible women I know. She is the perfect mother, a lovely lady, the finest and most supportive and ultimately generous human beings that I have ever known.

While I am usually very content with my singleness and life (this blog post has been a long time in development and may be among the first of its kind in twenty five years…..even if it sounds fairly well-rehearsed here), my parents tend to feel like they have so much desire to allow the the luxury of a boyfriend (and husband) whom I love, and so little opportunity to do anything about getting me one. This is one thing that they can’t fix for me. They always imagined that their daughter, if raised properly, could afford to be choosy and could take her pick of interested men. My dad says that it literally never crossed his mind that I might have no one to choose from, let alone be single beyond the time when I chose to be. I try to make it easier by making sure that I am consistently optimistic and content in my comments, looks, and hopes, but they cannot help being anxious for me, and feeling that in some way they could provide for me the happiness they see me watch as my friends meet people and marry themselves off. I know their prayers for me, and their openness to consider any possibilities, and there are no two people in the world who have failed me less. As such, I have been under the impression that the church is maybe guilty only of false flattery and not irresponsibility. I think, I guess I am the problem, despite what people say in grocery stores. I know for a fact that I am not in the top 1% physically. I’m pretty: I have a smile I love, and I’m tall, and I take good care of myself, but I am not cheerleader-stunning or super-hot-secretary-sexy, and that is the simplest thing to suspect: “I’m sweet, but I am just not pretty enough to command the kind of attention I would need to get a decent boyfriend.” I have a lot of gorgeous friends who turn heads when they walk by, and as I watch them I think that it would be so much easier if I had a group of friends whose looks were average. I am not any of the stereotypical things, either short, cute and curvy; or tall and malnourished; or blonde-and-blue-eyed; or brunette-and-rosy-cheeked; or any of the other categories that people fit into when they immediately get noticed on Amtraks and in Super Targets. Every boy who has ever liked me has said that I am pretty, and I know that I am, but it’s just that…I am not airbrushed; I have pores; I have hair that can’t decide if it is brown or blonde; and I have to hit the gym for an hour after work (and eat 80% vegetables as a matter of course) to make sure that I stay thin. I have often tried to understand what God thinks about beauty and the jury is still out on that, but in the meantime I have tried to do whatever I can to work the best with what I have. I smile, dress nicely, walk as gracefully as I can, and make the rest up by being as attentive and joyful as I can to make up the difference. I cannot help thinking, though (as anybody would if they had as much time to consider these things as I do) if I simply do not belong in any category, which leads me to second-guess my own attractiveness: “Maybe if I were ten pounds skinnier people would notice me.” “Maybe people find my personality too calm—maybe I should be mean and witchy, and maybe I’d at least be noticed by people who would like a challenge.” Or, “Maybe I am too cold; maybe I should be more vulnerable.” And endlessly on, until I come up with hundreds or thousands of combinations of factors that would explain why people say nice things without producing a single spectacular nephew for my review. It is easy to feel as though I have nothing to be confident over, because if I was really the pretty, talented, refreshingly pleasant person that my Facebook comments, my friends, my parents, and especially  my church family says, there would be some evidence of it, right?

On Singleness, Part One

I want to write about singleness.

I know that is a cliché topic for a twenty-five-year-old lady, but I don’t think that my thoughts are necessarily as shallow as they could be, and they are long in coming because I don’t always have an outlet for clarifying them with an objective audience who will just let me talk, without feeling pity or, worse, guilt.

I guess I should start by saying that on paper I am ready for a relationship. I value the institution of marriage, but am incredibly happy at work and home so I am not (that I know of) needy or discontent without it. I’m diligent, good at domesticity, professionally successful, fiscally responsible, and personally pleasant. And yet, here I am suddenly and inexplicably teary-eyed as these things are on the screen in front of me, because if it is not any of those things that are against me, what is the problem? Boys have been in love with me before, and I have never heard anyone say, “Oh, Jane is too –” cold, or unpleasant, or unspectacular, or boring, or anything. I guess I should introduce Exhibit One in my current thoughts on singleness: please suspend reading this blog post and read “Singled Out For Good.” I read that article a few months ago, and since reading it, I have become rather superior and snobbish about any lesser treatments of the topic, but there were also several good points in a recent Boundless article, which I will concede to liking in spite of my lofty attachment to “Singled Out”. In the article, published a few weeks back and entitled, “Sexy Single Women,” the author summed up the problem perfectly several paragraphs apart:

 

How is a single woman, who is seeking to live out Christ’s call to purity and holy living, to deal with her sex drive?....Does Chastity require a denial of sexuality?...What about the Boundless reader who argued, “It is unnatural and arguably unhealthy for people with average sex drive to go without sex for a decade or more during their sexual prime”? So, if her 20s and 30s are clicking up on the odometer with no husband and no legitimate outlet for sex on the horizon, what’s a Christian girl to do?... “Wait a minute,” you might say, “Sexuality may be a great gift for people who are married, but what about me? I don’t get to have sex. My sex drive is something I have to manage, not something I get to enjoy.”

 

Anyway, this is incredibly relevant to me because lately I have been experiencing a lot of angst over this very topic. Specifically, I work with an office that is at present 100% sexually active. I observe how sex dictates their days. I can tell what is happening in their lives by watching the astonishing repercussions those private lives have upon their public ones. At the same time, the romantic attentions I get these days seem universally to be limited to coming from non-Christian boys; besides exhausting my resources of Christian guys (more on that in Part Three upcoming next week), the bad boys my age have seen the world, have spent their nights with easy girls, and are ready to settle down with a good lady whom they think they can win over if they just try a little bit harder. I cannot return one smidgen of their affection and still maintain my integrity. I must respond to every such overture with the stalwart behavior of an intractable virgin, because to return such attention is to unquestionably jeopardize my responsibility before God to be romantically involved only with believers. A few weeks ago my boss came into my area and asked, “Have you seen your company car?” Some vendor, persistent and dazzling, had sought out my car and put roses in the door handle, without any prelude of a note. They were just blooming, and they were my favorite – Double Delight, with white and pink – and he had stripped the thorns off, so that all that waited for me was sweetness and long stems. When my boss left, I threw the roses in my trash can. I felt indescribable unrest, a fit of agitation, because I adore long-stem de-thorned Double Delight roses, and because mostly I am a good, creative girl who would love nothing more than to be someone’s exciting, admiring, inventive, spontaneous girlfriend but how is forced to choose between honor to God by the suppression of my sexuality (in addition to most of my sensuality) and the indulging of my flesh, when the choice is obvious. I threw the roses away because roses are emotional forerunners to everything for which I was created and of which I dare not partake. Boundless began to address the problem simply, which may help or may not but at least did not pretend to ignore any of this:

 

Singles demonstrate that the things to which [sex points] are more important than the things themselves. Singles testify that the temporary will, in the end, give way to the eternal….The way you conduct yourself sexually is much bigger than your own personal life. It has meaning that connects to the cosmic, the unseen, the eternal. To manage your sex drive…you need to understand that….your sexuality contributes to the cosmic story. It testifies to the astonishing meaning of it all.

 

 

 

 

Luck and the Lakes

Once a year I volunteer at a community festival, in a booth sponsored by my work. It's down at The Lakes, and it amazes me that PEOPLE WILL CONSISTENTLY STAND IN LINE TWENTY MINUTES FOR THE CHANCE TO WIN TRINKETS.

 If we offered a table of the same items ("Floating Key Chain" and "Dish Sponge (With Company Logo)" and "Convenience Clip"), nobody would take them, but we humans find luck to be irresistible, and setting up a prize wheel with an adorable company secretary playing Vanna White (that's me, naturally), makes perfectly reasonable, otherwise content citizens stand in line in the hot sun by the thousands to win things they know that they will never use.

I love it, because I adore people-watching and because I like brightening people's days and getting hundreds, often thousands, of chances, to experiment what works. Do guys like smiles or laughs better? Do mothers like it when I pay better attention to them or to their children? Do teenage girls like to be complimented on their shirts or on their hair? Do little boys like to be called, "buddy," and do little girls like to be called, "sweetie" or do they prefer "little man" and "little lady"?
I am given a fresh slate every thirty seconds, to experiment with laughs and eye contact and body language. I grew up profoundly verbose and equally shy, which made me a bit of a social derelict, and in adulthood I have never stopped trying to grow better and use my strengths to my advantage. I am so glad that I was homeschooled, because it gave me so many chances to be better prepared intellectually and spiritually to be a good employee, person, and lady; but I am also grateful for my annual run at The Lakes, when I get to experiment with all that I think I have learned in the last year, to immediate results.

Is any of that cavalier?

Camp Jane

When I was sixteen years old, I had been pen-palling with a little big-cheeked twelve-year-old girl for nine months, and I ran into her parents at a Homeschooling Convention, which was about like meeting a potential romantic interest unexpectedly in Wal-Mart after they have been “dating” you exclusively through Skype. (Not that I would know anything about that, of course: I am staunchly opposed to webcams, given that they add approximately six million pounds, circles around the undersides of my eyes, and provide an extra-creepy view at the bedroom wall behind me.) Awkward. The dad in the family, whom we’ll call the Joneses here because I love being cliché like that, interrogated me about everything: how was I holding up in school? How did I find time to write letters? Did I play any instruments? I answered these questions, and then I spontaneously uttered the words that would change their lives forever: “How about if your family comes to our house for a few days?”

I was sixteen, remember, and a hermit, and I was trying very hard to reach out to my friend’s father, on the vague impression that my answers had not pleased him, and that he was about to restrict his little darling from ever wasting another postage stamp on me again. I was incorrect about all of this, since the man immediately agreed, and said that he had seen my father someplace, and said numerous other things that culminated in me having to go explain to my parents that I had just invited a family of eight to stay at our house for an extended weekend.

When they showed up, the Joneses all piled out of a car, and I presented them with carefully-made memorabilia I had created just for the occasion. I made the girls aprons with their names on the front, I made the boys hats with their names on the back, and I had a large booklet with our schedule for the next three days entirely planned out. It said, CAMP JANE. Actually, it didn’t say Camp Jane, since my real name isn’t Jane, but whatever. I had poured three weeks of love & affection into these books, and by golly I was going to make sure we did everything I planned. I had a game night in the works, a group birthday party one night (in case anyone’s birthday had generally been skipped over for any reason) and field trips every day. This poor family was never going to know what hit them.

Camp Jane didn’t turn out like I expected, but I was right that the family was never going to know what hit them: after we took them fishing, visited a museum, watched a movie, and stuffed them full of spaghetti and semi-tossed salad, they all came down with a violent stomach flu, one by one, until by 1:00 AM the next morning, everyone was laying all over our living room, while I held puke buckets for a house full of complete strangers. I have never really been able to find a way to describe how unfortunate that weekend was. This went on until their planned three-day visit turned into a four-and-a-half day languishing, and I found out more about those people than I ever wanted to know, while they had burst blood vessels and repeatedly heaved into little buckets I proffered tentatively in an outstretched hand.

I guess it was the oddest first meeting between families of all time, but by the end of that fiasco WE WERE BEST FRIENDS. We have taken summer vacation together for the better part of ten years, driven across the state to hang out together several more times a year, and have generally become inseparable besties. We always laugh about the week I planned to make friends and ended up making them in a totally different way, and now Camp Jane is a byword.