An iMessage Conversation Between Two Attractive, Attentive Twenty-Something Girls Who Have No Marriage Potentials

Her: The whole thing with [thinking Dan was interested in being more than friends when he wasn’t] made me realize that I’m ready to have a guy in my life…..more so than I allowed myself to acknowledge before. I don’t mean I’m hurt by it, not at all. But it just opened my eyes in a new way. And the hardest part of everything…..there is nothing I can do about it, or any of us.

Me: It’s all so foreign, so faraway, that I’m not sure we’d know what to do. Like if someone came along, I mean.

Her: Exactly. It’s hard for you watch your friends have a boy come into the picture, and the relationship develop, when….why are there no guy options for us?

Me: Yeah. I feel like I don’t understand it. What made him take it to the next level? I get friendship and I get marriage. But the evolution from one to the other just baffles me because it seems like it never happens for, you know, me.

Her: Yes, exactly. I look at you, my sister, myself, and I wonder, Why don’t the guys want to take it to the next level? No, we are not perfect, but we have so much to offer. I feel like we’d all make incredible girlfriends and God-glorifying wives.

Me: Yes. Yes. And then for every guy like Dan who doesn’t pursue a girl like you I lose a little faith in men maybe, or in the institution of marriage; like, I feel that maybe the problem is that nobody is interested in marriage anymore. Maybe we are the problem? Or maybe not. Maybe we haven’t met enough guys? But it seems so easy for everybody else: a guy meets all of those other girls and he said, “I like her enough to make this work”—and he does. HOW? What indistinguishable quality does she have that I don’t?

Her: I know! It makes me feel like I am missing something….or not worth pursuing, but WHY?

Me: Everybody says: YOU CAN’T RUSH IT! It just happens! But it IS happening for everybody else and I’m never even CLOSE to moving from one category to the other.