Type Versus Reality

I had a hilarious conversation with a married friend the other day. For some reason we were talking about boys. You would think that married ladies over thirty would get tired of talking about boys, but we haven't. At least, I haven't, and maybe the other married ladies over thirty are just humouring me.

But anyway we were having this hilarious conversation in which the subject of Our Type came up. If you have lived more than twenty years, you know what I am talking about. Perhaps you have even said (for example) to a friend, "You know, My Type is six-feet-tall-or-over, dark-haired, blue-eyed, athletic but also intellectual." And your friend may have said, "Oh, well, I don't really care about height, but My Type is dark-eyed and muscular."

These do not, by the way, approximate Our specific Types. I can't tell you what Our Types are because of the next part of the conversation, which was when we fell about laughing because in the end we married men who didn't look at all like Our Types.

I wonder if this is a sweeping phenomenon, this being attracted to One Type and then happily falling in love with another. And I wonder if it is related! (A sudden look of existential horror has passed over Auntie Seraphic's face.) What if the very fact that we are attracted to Type A gives us the exact right amount of indifference towards Type B that makes Type B go to vast lengths to impress us?

And since the more attractive examples of Type B doing the human version of the blue-footed booby dance are demonstrably more lovable than dumb ol' hot-but-haven't-noticed-we're-alive Type As, could it be that our psyche gives up on Type A and just falls in love with this highly attractive example of Type B? Or is it that our psyche knows that Type A is fun for dreaming about, but that this particular Type B guy is the real eligible deal?

I don't know. I haven't done any social-scientific research on this. I almost never do any social-scientific research on anything I write here, poppets, which I hope you remember. I work from instinct, curiosity and memory, like Miss Marple.

By the way, when I talk about forgetting about Type A long enough to fall in love with Type B, I am not talking about settling. I am never talking about settling; I hate the whole concept of settling. This is the 21st century, and you shouldn't have to settle. In Western cultures, you either marry in an exuberant spirit of friendship-on-fire or you don't marry.

I once spoke to a deserted husband who said "I've known for some time that I wasn't the kind of man she wanted" and I felt so awful for him. No woman should marry a man with whom she is not madly in love. It is not fair on him, no matter what he says beforehand. He can't love enough for two, and I wonder who came up with that particular bit of nonsense.

No, all I am saying is that we women may have certain Types that we recognize when we see them, but that they have little to do with the flourishing female life as it is actually lived. And thank goodness that's true, or English-speaking men under 5'10" would never get married. I have never in my life heard a Canadian, American, Australian or British woman describe her Type as "of small or medium height." Yet men of small or medium height can make great husbands, as I happen to know first-hand.

And don't write in saying "But what about men?" because men aren't women. I believe, and this is based not on science but on hearsay, circumstantial evidence and personal experience, that men are much less likely to fall in love "out of Type." Nope. When Type B starts doing his blue-footed booby dance, it is because his psyche has perceived his Type A before him.