Hot Pants and Cold Facts on Male-Female Connections

Just wondering. . . .

An item in the paper recently referred to a “singles convention” in Costa Mesa that didn’t attract many men. Lamenting the sparse turnout, the single women who attended wondered where all the quality guys have gone.

Three days later, another story appeared in the paper. This one told of a Laguna Beach woman sentenced to probation for hiring two men to wave a lighted road flare near her ex-husband’s groin. The gambit was designed to scare him into signing a lucrative property settlement.

As gambits go, the old glowing-road-flare-in-the-groin proved effective, and the ex-husband signed the agreement--thankfully not burned but plenty scared. Then he called police.

I don’t know if there’s a connection or not between a lousy turnout at a singles convention and the prospect of having your Dockers set ablaze 3 1/2 years into your marriage, but let’s not rule it out.

Like I said, just wondering. . . .

Not everyone sees things so negatively, of course.

Bridget Wright of Huntington Beach is convinced that there’s a market here for guys and gals looking for stable relationships--loosely defined in this day and age as the kind that don’t involve highway safety equipment.

She and co-partner Donna Mee have set up a matchmaking service out of Wright’s home, geared to serious singles.

“I put together the club because of my own situation,” said Wright, a divorced single parent of 33. “I don’t like the idea of casual dating. I wanted to get away from that and focus more on meaningful relationships. In talking with many people, they feel the same way. They’re tired of the singles scene, especially in Orange County, where they’ve been very successful in business. People are really caught up in business, and they don’t have time to invest in meeting quality people. They’re very lonely, but they hate to admit it. Most wouldn’t be caught dead at a function like that (the singles convention), because they don’t want to admit they’re lonely. Because what they’re saying then is that they’re not successful.”

As a budding entrepreneur who set up shop 3 1/2 months ago, Wright has numbers on her side. The county’s statistics people say that there are more than 560,000 never-married men and women in Orange County. That figure includes anyone 15 and over, so it’s somewhat misleading, but you get the idea. When you add the divorced and widowed population, the number of eligibles soars to about 850,000.

That total breaks down almost evenly between men and women, the county says, although there are about 100,000 more never-married men than never-married women. A higher number of widowed and divorced women is the equalizer.

I hate to bring it up again, but I hesitantly mentioned to Wright the ugly road flare incident, likened by some to that “War of the Roses” movie, and asked her if that wasn’t an apt symbol for people’s hopelessness in finding marital happiness.

No way, she said. “When you stop having hope, that’s when people start dying,” she said. Alluding to the desire of associating with the opposite sex, she said, “You can bury that as deep as you want, but it will always resurface from time to time. You can have a problem for years and years, but the natural thing is to want to be with another person. I can’t imagine someone giving up and saying, ‘I’ll never do that again.’ ”

I was getting pretty buoyed talking to Wright, but then she had to go and acknowledge knowing of at least one woman who wants to kill her husband and a couple others who get physically ill whenever their husbands are in the same house with them.

But even in those cases, she said, the women are having a hard time breaking the bonds. “They want that closeness with somebody, and when you’ve been with someone for so long, you think you’ll never attract someone else again.”

Wright was so upbeat that she almost convinced me that marriage will survive into the 21st Century.

Assuming that it will, I would humbly suggest that they make an addition to the traditional vows, to be worked in where appropriate, something along the lines of:

. . .I (bride’s name) take thee (groom)

To have and to hold from this day forward

To love and to cherish

And to never threaten with any incendiary devices

Especially in the vicinity of the trousers

Till death do us part.

Amen.