There have been some hard times, as revealed in another post. In May, our match will have lasted 20 years. I didn’t care about all the men I hadn’t met. “But what about all the ones you haven’t met yet?” Hadn’t met yet? I was 25, my biological clock was ticking, there were babies to be made, meatloafs to be cooked, a perfect Catholic family to be orchestrated. “Of all the men I’ve ever met, he’s the most suitable,” I told her. When our homework was done, Chris proposed and I accepted. My sexier, less repressed, more optimistic friend and eventual bridesmaid, Mary, whose updo outshown mine at the wedding-not that I hold grudges-suggested I not marry him. “In the secular world, a lot of the times a couple will fall in love with each other and then at that point they lose objectivity,” said Rabbi Steven Weil, the executive vice president at the Orthodox Union in New York in this New York Times article. In arranged marriages, “there is a lot of homework, a lot of energy spent, before a young man and woman fall in love with each other.” Chris and I examined our compatability with surgical precision. My parents had 5 divorces between them, despite my dad being tall, dark and handsome and all his wives being lovely-at least at the beginning-and my mother’s first husband being a dreamboat of a Pakistani man with cocoa skin and ice blue eyes. I wasn’t about to bet the farm on sexual attraction. He was trying to figure out where all those kids would sit. “What do you think of picnic tables?” he asked. Chris thought I meant I wanted procreate to the limits of my fertility, and when my ovaries went kaput, start adopting. “I’d like to have some and then adopt from China,” I told him. In what circumstances do you believe divorce is justified? I want to stay home with the kids. Over the next few months, we talked about everything. We were both mid-twenties, both Catholic and both wanted to be married. His name was Chris, and during the retreat he started wearing his contacts. A little dose of being on the rebound helped me get past the denim ensemble. Years later he would reveal that he had almost failed the class, and that Ms. Dove had asked him incredulously-he being a Supply Chain and Materials Management major-”Why in the world did you take this class?” During an icebreaker we discovered a mutual interest in poetry, and that he had taken a poetry class with Rita Dove. A young man wearing way too much faded denim for one outfit and coke-bottle glasses started sitting next to me at meals. Two weeks later I was in Jerome, Arizona in a defunct Catholic Church called Holy Family at a retreat for young adults. I honestly didn’t know how else to tell if food was hot. (She was.) At Thanksgiving dinner with his mother, he was scandalized when I checked the temperature of the mashed potatoes with my finger. There had been signs it might not work out, like when we played Catholic Trivial Pursuit and he mocked me for saying Mother Teresa was Albanian. His name was Thomas and he walked with a sort of swagger, having broken his femur playing soccer for his Catholic alma mater (which shall remain nameless lest I reveal too much), and it didn’t heal quite right. He yodeled and looked like Clark Kent. It was February 1994 and I had just been dumped- on the phone, no less.
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