Growing up, I always assumed I’d be married in what I imagined would be a timely fashion. I thought my romantic life would follow an established pattern. I would go to high school and have lots of boyfriends, go to college and do the same, have live-in boyfriends in my twenties and then get married somewhere in there. While I never pictured boyfriends and husbands as being very important parts of my life - I kind of pictured them as silent sidekick Kens to my center-of-attention Doctor-dressed Barbie - I always thought they’d be there, omnipresent, supporting me as I took on the world.
Funny how life has a habit of making hamburger meat of your best plans. Established pattern has been about the furthest thing from what my romantic life has been. The haphazard and indifferent nature of my dating history has been a constant source of curiosity for me. Why, I wondered, did my romantic life look so much different from everybody else’s? I often questioned whether there was something wrong with me personally, or with the lifestyle I led. It just didn’t make sense to me that the media seemed to promote a certain type of romantic lifestyle while my life differed so dramatically.
Eventually, as I grew older, I began to talk to other women and realize that my experience really wasn’t so different from so many others. The sporadic dates and occasionally dysfunctional relationships weren’t the idiosyncratic experiences of me alone; instead, they were quite common among many of the women I encountered. Eventually, I realized that the model I had grown up with, the model the media perpetuated, was actually only lived out by a minority of women. Eccentric dating histories were the rule, not the exception.
I think we single women can take heart from this fact when we think about the institution of marriage as well. As singles, we often think our romantic existences should follow a certain pattern or scheme. We may not be as rigid as I was, but, at some point, most of us believe that there’s something wrong with us because things in our romantic lives aren’t going the way we think they should. For most of us, we start getting marriage fever in our 20’s, and it just gets worse as we get older. We wonder why our dating lives are so crazy, why we haven’t found a boyfriend yet, why we’re still virgins, why we’ve never had a long-term relationship or a good long-term relationship, or - yes - why we’re still not married (or married again).
Honestly, girls, in reality, this is just the way it goes. Romance is a b****. There’s no two ways about it. I could be looking at the beautiful woman walking down the street with her hot husband and be absolutely insane with jealousy, never imagining that they fight every night over his workaholic tendencies and that she’s on the verge of leaving him, developing bipolar disorder and being single for the next 15 years. This unfolds in a million different ways. On the outside looking in, it seems like so many people are married, and that those married people are happy, and that most people have normal romantic histories. Not true, sisters. For every woman, there’s a different story, and those stories can include - among other things - sociopathic boyfriends, chemical dependency, mental illness, abortions, domestic violence, eating disorders, inability to commit, psycho in-laws, and so forth.
Being a virgin, never having had a boyfriend or a husband or a good one, are just pieces of a much larger romantic picture. Everyone’s romantic tapestry is different, and striking in its own way. Composed of patches and scraps of varying colors and textures - souvenirs of where we’ve been, who we’ve seen, what we’ve learned - it is what makes us unique. Very few people are Michelangelos when it comes to romance. Most of us are more like Picasso. Or Jackson Pollock. You can’t try to analyze it, or process it. In the end, you just have to sit back, let it all sink in, and enjoy the ride.
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