I'm eating and watching trash when I should be dissertation reading. There's something about my husband being gone that turns me into a sad bum.
But I watched this video of this girl who makes a list of all of the qualities she wants in a man, the producers or whoever finds a man who meets all of these qualifications, and she goes out on a date with him:
Even after having every single qualification that she wrote down met, they still didn't click.
I don't know, there's just something equally hilarious and sad about that. Like, he had literally everything she professed to want, but when it was presented to her, there were still reasons why she didn't feel they were compatible.
I found a list that I wrote when I was 16 and realized that my husband does line up with pretty much all of them:
1. "He has to be tall." He is, I guess, around 5'10, which isn't basketball-player tall, but a good 4 inches taller than me. And I can wear heels and still not be taller than him, which is all good.
2. "For some reason, I don't know why, but he absolutely must have long eyelashes. It would also be nice if he wore glasses." He has very long lashes and he does wear glasses.
3. "He would have this absolutely charming smile that would make you melt every time he flashed his pearly whites. Dimples would be nice, too." He does have a nice smile, and he does have dimples.
4. "He has to like to read." Check.
5. "He has to have a passion for music, and an appreciation for all types. It would be cool if he could play the guitar (I love guitar!)--then he could make up guitar ballads about his undying love for me (just kidding)." I really wasn't kidding, though. He definitely has a passion for music, he definitely plays the guitar and he has definitely written ballads about his love for me. He proposed to me with one. When I wrote this 17 years ago, little did I know that I would one day also play the guitar and that playing the guitar would be what initially brought my husband and me together.
6. "He has to be understanding--he has to be sensitive to my feelings and realize that sometimes I say or do things that I really don't mean, and sometimes I myself may not understand why I feel a certain way, but he'll understand that, too." This is so true. I am emotional and sensitive and cry all the time and he is the sweetest, most understanding man ever about this side of me.
But here's what's crazy: If there were some other person out there who had all the same qualities that I claimed to want and maybe even need, there's absolutely no guarantee that he would have "clicked" with me. I mean, my little teenage list aside, even if my "mature," 30+, single self had written a list like the girl in the video did and that man materialized right in front of my face, there would be no guarantee. Everything you wanted is really not everything you wanted until you actually have a chance to want it in a flesh-and-blood person who also has a chance to want everything they wanted in you. I know that's a little convoluted, but it's true.
There are things you think you want/need, but then there are things you never knew you wanted/needed that only come alive within a living, breathing bond between two living, breathing people.
The guy the girl in the video described up on the whiteboard was not a real person. He was a conglomeration of ideas and characteristics. Even if all of those ideas and characteristics could somehow become concrete (imperfectly, because the abstract can never be made perfectly concrete), there is, as the video showed, no guarantee that this concrete abstraction would or even could meet our needs, or as we like to call it, "click" with us.
This is another idea that makes me see a marriage as a sacred metaphor. Great is the mystery of godliness. Great is the mystery of what it is that makes what we think we want and need somehow secondary to something as ungraspable as another human being's bond with us.
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