She’d Rather Wait for Mr. Right Than Settle for Less in Mr. Wrong
Steven, the 38-year-old man who told Single Life that he has remained unmarried because he wants to be sure he has grown to be as ideal a marriage prospect as his potential bride, has a female counterpart in Laura, a 37-year-old Corona del Mar woman.
After reading what Steven had to say about his advanced status as a single man (“I’m looking for the perfect woman, but I want to present the perfect guy. . . . I want to hook up with someone who can do the same sort of thing for me that I can do for them. . . . I don’t ask anything of a woman that I can’t deliver myself”), Laura said she felt she had found a kindred spirit in him.
“It’s refreshing,” she wrote, “to find that there is a man in Orange County who considers being single a positive status and (is) one who can be open and honest about it. I feel very lucky that I’ve never been desperate enough to settle for Mr. Wrong and have determined that my Mr. Right is a rare individual. I consider myself somewhat of a late bloomer anyway and feel in the end it will be well worth the wait.”
She said she was “glad I’m not a divorcee at this stage in my life, and (I) know I am much better prepared for the challenge of commitment than I ever was in years past. . . . Like (Steven), I’ve spent a lot of time working on my own self-portrait. . . . I’ve learned that I don’t have to be a ‘10’ to be happy or to make a man happy.”
Although Laura acknowledged the possibility that she might never marry, she wrote that she felt she needed “the right man to complete my life and feel whole. I can stand on my own, I can be strong, I can take care of everything, but sometimes I need support, sometimes I need to be weak, sometimes I need help. It’s taken me a long time to be able to admit that I’m not Superwoman. I’ve spent so long carrying the load, pursuing a career, handling the responsibilities . . . that I almost lost sight of my own human needs.
“I’ve had the support of family and friends, but I’m all too aware that sometimes they just aren’t enough. It’s not the same as the closeness shared between a man and a woman who really care about each other.”
We wanted to know more. For instance, does she feel that her longstanding independence and her desire for a man in her life constitute a contradiction?
“I’m not saying that now that I’ve established a career that I’m through doing that and now my main goal is finding a man,” said Laura, who works as a commercial real estate broker. “What it is in a way is a response to being involved in my career. My work consumed me and absorbed me and I probably didn’t put as much time and emphasis and focus into relationships as I might have. I never said, ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to find a man.’ I’ve always been very independent and strong-willed, and that’s great, but I found myself sort of getting into the role of doing it all myself and being in control and not giving myself time to be a little more human, a little more needy.
But, said Laura, she wasn’t always so independent. For her, being a “late bloomer” meant, in some ways, growing up at a more advanced age.
“I was raised in a somewhat old-fashioned type of home,” she said. “And there’s no question that when you come from that type of upbringing, you grow up with old-fashioned expectations. I remember looking at my sister’s wedding pictures and there was a picture of me with my boyfriend at the time and a family friend said, ‘Why’d you let him get away?’ Well, when (a breakup) happens, it’s not necessarily a loss. It can make you think, but you answer the question yourself: The right person hasn’t been there.”
Like Steven, Laura said that during her adult life, she’s been involved in “long-term, very satisfying relationships that for one reason or another didn’t evolve into marriage. Sometimes you find someone with whom you think you have a lot of compatibility and later on you find that’s not true. But at some point you’re bound to meet somebody more right than wrong.”
Laura’s first priority as a young adult, like Steven’s, was putting her own house in order.
“Because I was brought up in a sheltered environment, I was expecting to grow up and go to college and have kids and everything,” she said. “(But) I watched my mom do that, not having any skills to fall back on, and she found herself middle-aged and divorced, and it was a very difficult transition for her. I decided I wasn’t going to give in to the pressures” to marry and have a family. “I enjoyed finding out there was a world out there. I felt I could always have those other things when I wanted to.”
Throughout her 20s, Laura said, she was “building herself up as a person,” progressing in her career and, in the process, earning more money. That, she said, could be a bone of contention with men.
“Men in my age bracket, if they were raised in a traditional environment, weren’t necessarily taught how to deal with women who are professionally successful,” Laura said. “I felt I had these great accomplishments, but I had boyfriends who were intimidated by the fact that I made more money than they did. It creates a dilemma. You don’t want to be less successful or work less hard. You don’t want to take something away from yourself. Obviously, if a person can’t handle something that I’m doing that I think is rewarding for me, I can’t spend the rest of my life with him.”
She recalled a boyfriend, a stockbroker who, when their relationship began, made more money than she did. However, she later was promoted to a position that increased her salary to the point at which it eclipsed his.
“He said he couldn’t handle it and I was devastated,” she said. “I said, ‘Don’t you realize how much this (the job) means to me?’ It didn’t change me as a human being, but he couldn’t cope with that. There was a strong possibility of that relationship leading to marriage, but I said I couldn’t deal with that” insecurity he had.
Although never-married men her age are few, Laura said, they’re much appreciated. She said if she met such a man, “that would be great. It would be really enjoyable. Both the man and the woman in that situation understand that they’ve both gone past their 20s and waited and watched for the right person. And they’re going to have the same uncertainties and insecurities, but that would actually be a mutual ground. But you have to be realistic. More often than not if you’re in your 30s, most single people have already been married.”
And, as a consequence, sometimes they are quite direct.
“I met somebody recently,” said Laura, “who was so open with me that it blew me away. He said at our age it’s sort of silly to mess around (with more conventional dating behavior), and I said, ‘You’re right.’ When someone calls you an hour after you meet him and says, ‘Are you ready for romance?’ Well, it’s just . . . wow!”
In the rarefied atmosphere of late-30s singlehood, Laura said that keeping her balance is still her highest priority.
“I’m not going to say, ‘Oh, I’ve worked for 15 years now, so now I’m ready to be a Newport Beach housewife.’ I like the idea of having a career. But now I know there’s more to life than a job.”
Get Me to the Church
Several of our correspondents have suggested that, in the world of interesting single people, the bars, the clubs, the dating services, the singles’ associations and other traditional meeting grounds are vast wastelands. If you want to meet Mr. or Ms. Right, they say, head for the altar--specifically, to church singles organizations. Have you exchanged margaritas and chips at the Red Onion for bread and wine at your local parish? And have the results turned out to be heaven or purgatory or worse?
And So to Bed-- Maybe
How has the era of AIDS affected your dating relationships? How can you be sure you’re ready to take the step into sex--and how much of a risk, both emotional and physical, is involved? If you’ve chosen an extreme course--either celibacy or promiscuity--we’d like to hear from you, too.
Abortion Aftermath
If you’ve had an abortion, how did you arrive at this intensely personal, yet very controversial decision? Has time affected your feeling on whether it was the right or the wrong thing to do?
Send your responses to Single Life, Orange County Life, The Times, 1375 Sunflower Ave, Costa Mesa, Calif. 92626. Please include a phone number so that a reporter may contact you. To protect your privacy, Single Life does not publish correspondents’ last names.