The Single Girls' Table
My girlfriends are some of the most amazing, talented and gorgeous girls you could ever hope to meet. I’m not just saying that because they’re my girls and I love them. My friend E is working at a major news network (like me), climbing her way to the top. My friend M was sent to Rome to work on a major studio production that is currently grossing bucket-loads of money. My friend D is a huge pr rep for one of the largest department stores in the country. My friend K is going to grad school at a top university, majoring in English literature. My friend A has a degree in physics from an Ivy-league school. You get my point. They are all accomplished women in their chosen fields. But they’re not nerds. These are also girls who you could sit and watch a game with, who could go out in jeans and a tee-shirt and sneakers and drink you under the table, girls who have been known, on occasion and when it is necessary, to dance on bars. These are girls you, male of female, would want as girlfriends.
But all of us are single. We don’t understand it. We are shocked by this when we look at each other (ourselves, we can understand, but these girls are single? How do they not have men knocking down their doors? If I was a guy, I’d be trying to put a ring on their collective fingers!)
My friends K and E and I went out to a bar one night to hear K’s ex-boyfriend play. He’s a musician, so one would think that he would be more sensitive, more in tune with his feelings. One would be wrong. K’s ex is so beyond stifled that the light from stifled won’t hit him for another hundred thousand years. So there we are, in a bar in the Village, listening to him sing love songs to K (and he is singing DIRECTLY AT HER. There’s no misunderstanding this one. He’s looking at her the whole time he’s performing. And although the audience is small, we are not the only ones there for him). He’s even singing a song to her about how he’d like to be able to write a song to sing to her. If it wasn’t so darned cute it would be damned pathetic.
It also made me want to shake him. Here he is, writing these beautiful lyrics, singing these amazing melodies and HE STILL CAN’T COMMITT. The answer is quite literally written write in front of him. And still he’s struggling for an answer. You just want to hit him on the back of the head and say, “Really?” How can he not get this? He’s got it all neatly written out in front of him in his own handwriting.
We move on quickly after his performance. K doesn’t need to torture herself anymore, and besides, the act that follows the ex is a woman who feels that she will be provocative as an artist if she makes her audience her gynecologist. Pictures of her last pap smear would have been less offensive. We travel to a bar down the street where K laments into her very strong drink. “Why?”
I’m asking myself the same question for all of us. Why are we unable to find men that commit? Why are men unable to step up and be men? When do men stop being little boys and become men?
When you look over the course of our society and the path it has taken in terms of education alone, it may be easier to understand this prolonged adolescence. Even as late as the 1980s, college was a choice, not a requirement. You could still get a decent job, work your way up, make a decent living on a high school diploma. Nowadays, that is just not the case. And whereas men would have to stop being little boys at 18 in days of old, that age is now pushed forward to 22. At the earliest. Grad school is almost a requirement these days. That’s at least 2 extra years of school, 2 extra years to be the immature asshole you’ve always wanted to be. You’re still in school. Might as well live it up while you’re still there. That’s K’s ex’s problem. He says he feels that he didn’t get to live out his twenties, so he’s living them out now, in his thirties.
Unfortunately, girls have always been more mature and this extension of foolhardy youth is getting in our way even more. For men, 35 is the new 25. But it’s kind of creepy when the 40-year-old at your parent’s cocktail party is your best bet. So we try to turn the pieces of coal we find at the kiddie table into diamonds. The problem with that is it takes a lot of pressure and a lot of years to turn a lump of coal into something you could wear on your finger and who has the time for the work and the pain and the heartache it would take? Especially when you’re on your own high-powered career path. So we wind up being the highly accomplished single-girl table at a cousin’s wedding.
Later on that night, at the third bar of the evening, we meet some guys our own age who seem fairly normal. They’re in the city for the night from Jersey. They’re all doing well, or so it seems. One has a house in Jersey that he bought himself. Then it comes out that he bought the house with the earnings he made by selling a whole lot of cocaine. Suddenly, the 40-year-old doesn’t look half as creepy as he did. Maybe it’s time your parents had another cocktail party.
But all of us are single. We don’t understand it. We are shocked by this when we look at each other (ourselves, we can understand, but these girls are single? How do they not have men knocking down their doors? If I was a guy, I’d be trying to put a ring on their collective fingers!)
My friends K and E and I went out to a bar one night to hear K’s ex-boyfriend play. He’s a musician, so one would think that he would be more sensitive, more in tune with his feelings. One would be wrong. K’s ex is so beyond stifled that the light from stifled won’t hit him for another hundred thousand years. So there we are, in a bar in the Village, listening to him sing love songs to K (and he is singing DIRECTLY AT HER. There’s no misunderstanding this one. He’s looking at her the whole time he’s performing. And although the audience is small, we are not the only ones there for him). He’s even singing a song to her about how he’d like to be able to write a song to sing to her. If it wasn’t so darned cute it would be damned pathetic.
It also made me want to shake him. Here he is, writing these beautiful lyrics, singing these amazing melodies and HE STILL CAN’T COMMITT. The answer is quite literally written write in front of him. And still he’s struggling for an answer. You just want to hit him on the back of the head and say, “Really?” How can he not get this? He’s got it all neatly written out in front of him in his own handwriting.
We move on quickly after his performance. K doesn’t need to torture herself anymore, and besides, the act that follows the ex is a woman who feels that she will be provocative as an artist if she makes her audience her gynecologist. Pictures of her last pap smear would have been less offensive. We travel to a bar down the street where K laments into her very strong drink. “Why?”
I’m asking myself the same question for all of us. Why are we unable to find men that commit? Why are men unable to step up and be men? When do men stop being little boys and become men?
When you look over the course of our society and the path it has taken in terms of education alone, it may be easier to understand this prolonged adolescence. Even as late as the 1980s, college was a choice, not a requirement. You could still get a decent job, work your way up, make a decent living on a high school diploma. Nowadays, that is just not the case. And whereas men would have to stop being little boys at 18 in days of old, that age is now pushed forward to 22. At the earliest. Grad school is almost a requirement these days. That’s at least 2 extra years of school, 2 extra years to be the immature asshole you’ve always wanted to be. You’re still in school. Might as well live it up while you’re still there. That’s K’s ex’s problem. He says he feels that he didn’t get to live out his twenties, so he’s living them out now, in his thirties.
Unfortunately, girls have always been more mature and this extension of foolhardy youth is getting in our way even more. For men, 35 is the new 25. But it’s kind of creepy when the 40-year-old at your parent’s cocktail party is your best bet. So we try to turn the pieces of coal we find at the kiddie table into diamonds. The problem with that is it takes a lot of pressure and a lot of years to turn a lump of coal into something you could wear on your finger and who has the time for the work and the pain and the heartache it would take? Especially when you’re on your own high-powered career path. So we wind up being the highly accomplished single-girl table at a cousin’s wedding.
Later on that night, at the third bar of the evening, we meet some guys our own age who seem fairly normal. They’re in the city for the night from Jersey. They’re all doing well, or so it seems. One has a house in Jersey that he bought himself. Then it comes out that he bought the house with the earnings he made by selling a whole lot of cocaine. Suddenly, the 40-year-old doesn’t look half as creepy as he did. Maybe it’s time your parents had another cocktail party.
posted by Still Hopeful @ 8:42 PM
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