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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Dear Cary,
I'm a 34-year-old never-married male, living and working in a Midwestern college town. I earn a decent living in IT administration and have settled into a comfortable routine, taking the occasional vacation to break the monotony. My problem: I can't seem to meet any single women my age.
There are literally thousands of gorgeous nubile undergraduates about, but in general I find them to be vacuous, naive, selfish, arrogant, or all of the above. Also, they tend to see me as a dirty old man. (I take exception to the "old" bit.) Women my own age are nearly universally married, engaged, or living-with.
Part of the problem is the transient nature of the town; people come here to go to school, they associate primarily with people they meet in class, and then leave when they've got their degree. At work, I've watched the most attractive women in the building marry their longtime sweethearts; these people seem to have the most perfect blissful relationships, there's not a single crappy one I can even try to bust up. (Ordinarily I wouldn't consider this an option, but hey, I'm getting pretty bored.)
I've tried the bar scene, but they come in two categories: massive sports bars crammed with binge-drinking undergraduates, or smaller, pub-style places where grad students huddle around a table and discuss their classes and professors and don't talk to anyone else except their waitperson. I'm not much of a joiner, but I took a yoga class last year hoping to meet some women. It worked: I met married ones.
Married women adore me; they generally think I'm good-looking, stable, smart and funny; and they frequently try to set me up with their single friends. This always goes disastrously; either I don't like them or they don't like me, right off the bat. Personal ads are just depressing. I think personal chemistry is paramount, so these blind situations have never ever worked for me.
"Sex and the City" seems like a dream world to me, where attractive 30-somethings are actually single and looking. But perhaps that's my answer: I need to hit the big city. Chicago is just a few hours away, but I've done the long-distance thing before, and it was only frustration and pain.
Spinning My Wheels
Dear Spinning,
When a man can't find any eligible women in his village, he leaves his village on a quest. He goes to Chicago, the windy city of broad shoulders and blues and graduate students in economics. You should move to Chicago. That's probably where all the women went after they graduated, anyway. They're waiting for you at the train station, all in a row, with their pretty hatboxes and their stockings with those seams that run up behind the knee and their espadrilles and lipstick and lifetime earnings expectations.
Stop being so damn comfortable. No wonder your married women friends like you. You're so settled, you probably remind them of a husband, safe and harmless. But no single woman wants a man who has already settled into a routine. Routines are for after you are captured. You must be a man on a quest. You must have a purpose in life. Make your purpose in life to move to Chicago and find a wife.
That should keep you entertained for years to come. And it will be a good story to tell. When you meet a woman in Chicago and she asks you, as she will, what brings you to Chicago, you can tell her, "I've come to Chicago in search of a wife."
That should make life very entertaining indeed.
