Why I am not married

I'm not married.  I have nothing against marriage, and I would like to get married some day, if a marriageable suitor who suits me should cross my path and want to eat hot dogs with me forever.  As part of the maturing process I feel must be necessary to get to a place where I can treat relationships seriously, I have compiled a list of reasons why I am single, and I will endeavor to work on these things in the future:

(1)  The only man I could ever love and feel safe with is Westley from The Princess Bride, and that's too bad for me, because a man like Westley is no more likely to exist than an R.O.U.S.  If you don't know who Westley is, or if you don't agree with me, stop reading my blog, because you're stupid. 

[D.B. Sweeney]

(2)  I say things like, "If you don't agree with me, you're stupid."  To wit: while being driven home from a first date that had gone really well, my date mispronounced the word "nuclear" and I demanded that he stop the car.  I yelled: "Stop the car.  STOP THE CAR!  I have to get out of the car!"  He said, "You're gonna walk home because I mispronounced a word?  That's kind of extreme."  I said, "I agree, but what you just said made my skin crawl.  I can't help it.  I liked you better when I didn't know you were one of those people who mispronounces the word 'nuclear.'"  He said, "How are you supposed  to pronounce it?"  So I told him.  And he said, "OK.  I didn't know.  But now I do."  I liked the way he diffused the situation.  I really thought that he'd let me roll out of the car and I'd never hear from him again, but it was masterful.  He was like a lion tamer.  He made me see that I was being ridiculous and that the problem could be solved with less drama and less jumping out of cars.  He did that a lot (I try to jump out of things a lot).  So we dated for a couple of years.  But he never could marry me.  How could he?  I would always be the girl who tried to jump out of his car.  You don't want people like that raising your kids.

(3)  Music is really important to me, and men are always wanting to listen to Jimmy Buffett and Jimi Hendrix and KISS.  I'm not going to say anything bad about Jimmy Buffett or Jimi Hendrix or KISS, but I don't want to listen to them.  I had a very healthy, 3-year relationship with a guy who willingly went to more than one Tori Amos concert with me.   And liked it.  And he wasn't even one of the gay ones.  That kind of lightening doesn't strike twice, so I kind of know I have it coming.  The next guy I date is going to be a total parrot head and there's nothing I can do about it.  I'm gonna have to iron palm tree shirts and eat at Margaritaville every single time I go on vacation for the rest of my life.  How can I get keyed up about marriage knowing that?

(4)  I just made it sound like I want a heterosexual man to go to Tori Amos concerts with me.

(5)  I don't cook.  It's not even that I can't cook.  I don't cook because I have no interest in it.  But I like to eat.  My last few boyfriends have enjoyed cooking, so it worked out nice for me, but my luck has to have run out there too.  Someone is going to expect more than a Pop Tart out of me one of these days, and I'm not going to go there willingly.  And certainly not before I threaten to jump off the roof.

(6)  I'm a divorce lawyer.  The "So, what to do you do?" portion of first dates is BRUTAL. I recently went on a date with a very nice guy who said something innocuous but nonetheless derogatory about lawyers within the first 5 minutes of our date.  He then told me that he was talking to a friend of his before the date, that he told her he was going out with a lawyer, and she told him not to say anything rude to me about lawyers.  But he still did it.  Guys ask me outright if I'm bitter or don't believe in marriage.  Actually, it's the opposite.  I take marriage very seriously.  I don't want to get married just so I can register for Corning-ware   I know that no one wants to get divorced.  But knowing what it entails, I really don't want to get divorced, and the only fool-proof method of avoiding divorce is to not get married in the first place.

(7)  I want to adopt.  I have a loose plan in my head of waiting until I'm in a position to adopt a child, and then I'll take the mean age of all my friends' kids and adopt a kid that age from the local foster pool. So you can imagine how strange people are going to think it is when all of a sudden I'm living with a 15-year-old black boy.

(8)  It's often quite scary to be a passenger in my car.  But the larger problem is, I don't care. I'm taking the bend by the Drake on Lake Shore Drive at 85 mph, and you're grasping at the dashboard thinking, "Why does she have to drive an aluminum Japanese coffin?  Why can't she at least have a Volvo?"

(9)  I have a tendency to start off as one person, and then partway through the year, I change into someone completely different.  I had two boyfriends in 2002.  The first one opined that I was too much of a party girl.  The other one said I didn't want to go out enough.  They were both right.  But, to be fair, the first guy gave me an eight ball of coke for my birthday, and the other guy moved his DVD player and his huge TV into my condo and signed up for Netflix  so it wasn't all my fault.

(10)  I blurt out things like "I got an eight ball of coke for my birthday!" I sort of know you're not supposed to say things like that out loud, but I do it anyway.  You weed out a large portion of the respectable/marriageable population when you have no governor between your brain and your mouth.

(11)  My wardrobe contains no tube tops. Guys only want to date girls who wear tube tops.

(12)  I have a problem where I think it's natural to write things in a blog that may or may not be true... and I don't care whether people know what things are true and what things aren't. Someone recently asked me if I really have a lot of STDs and do a lot of blow. "Why, yes! Yes I do! I was hoping you would notice that I wrote that in that blog of mine! And by the way, do you know any great guys you can set me up with?!"

(13)  I twirl a baton when I talk on the phone, and I am always hitting myself in the face with it, which causes me to swear and scream and abruptly hang up the phone, and people never know what's going on with me because I never call back. I once split my left nipple in half with my baton, and nothing looks more unsightly in a tube top than when your left boob is being held together with an ace bandage.

(14)  There is now, as you may have surmised, something wrong with my left nipple.

Oh, and that may or may not be true.