 |
Katie Hutchins Shaking the Tree |
|---|
My 36-year-old sister just got a new boyfriend. For the 45th time.
Think 36. What comes to mind? Over the hill? Wrinkles? Varicose veins? Not even. Not necessarily. Life isn't over after college.
My sister is Madonna's long-lost twin. Thin, blond, beautiful, brilliant. She has had many marriage proposals in her 20 years of dating, and she's turned them all down.
So she is not married, and she has no prospects. But all my sister ever wanted was to be a wife and mother. She thought college was a good way to meet men.
And it was. She met many men - even decent, cute ones. But she didn't meet one she thought she could spend the rest of her life with. And, unfortunately, she got a degree and now she's a career woman.
And it kind of made me wonder whether our generation will be much different. Particularly because we're not even looking. Now, unlike in my sister's generation, many of us feel that our career comes before family, that a Ph.D. comes before the two-car, two-kid, suburban life.
Among all my friends, I know of one - just one - long-term relationship. It's a rarity in this town. Because nobody's looking for long-term relationships anymore.
It takes so much effort to look, so I think many of us have given up trying. You'd think with all these young attractive smart people crammed together in one little town with not much to do, we'd be seeing couples everywhere.
But the overwhelming amount of good prospects is precisely the problem. As a friend of mine put it, it's all about supply and demand. There's too big of a supply, so we figure we'll kick back and they'll come to us.
So we don't actively pursue someone unless we really, really want them. And we don't really, really want anyone because we don't actively pursue anyone long enough to find out if they're our soul mate. And even if we do pursue someone long enough to find out that we want to pursue them, they surely don't want us back because there's too big of a supply.
Everyone's quite familiar with this ages-old problem of people not liking anyone who likes them back. I'm beginning to think it's in our nature.
But the current problem is much bigger than that. It's a huge effort to get a good catch to even call you for a second date.
We can afford to be very, very picky, and we are. So if you screw up just a little bit, all is lost. Oh, I don't want him because he smokes. I can't deal with anyone who doesn't love the Grateful Dead. I really liked her until I saw those hideous shoes she wore the other day.
As my 36-year-old sister once said, men are like buses. If you miss this one, that's OK because there's always another one coming along. So why chase the bus that's halfway down the street already?
I think the long-term relationship stage comes sometime after college, but sometime before we (women) turn 36. Because in the mid-20s, people we know start marrying off like crazy, and it makes us panic.
And we're no longer in a dorm room packed with boys at their sexual peak, and we're no longer meeting new young people every day. So a guy who you once would never look twice at suddenly becomes your best possible hope.
Supply and demand is what's killing my sister right now. There are tons of mid-30s women, who, if they want to have kids, need to get married soon.
And a guy, if he wants to, can wait to settle down until he's 60. And he always has the option of dating a much younger woman, because - according to sociobiologists - guys just want cute women and women want rich, powerful men.
But this whole situation makes college a little less fun.
I'd like to practice this long-term relationship thing once or twice before it really counts. Because I have no idea what it's like to be romantically involved with someone for more than two weeks.
But instead of jumping into a relationship - instead of pursuing every possibility - I see cute guys, admire the view, and keep walking. I figure it won't work because they have too many cute women at their fingertips. And so I don't even bother.
My sister was right. Men are like buses - they're everywhere, and they come along at regular intervals. They're good to look at, but they're somehow not worth the effort.
I'll catch the bus in a few years.
- Katie Hutchins will not waste her time standing at the bus stop.
She can, however, be reached over e-mail at katieh@umich.edu