A 40-Something Bride

Interesting news for long-term readers of this blog! Kim P, who wrote this wonderful guest post, is getting married tonight. An evening wedding sounds so romantic... Best wishes, Kim P!

I always think a bit before mentioning weddings because although some Singles are happy to read about weddings, others fall helplessly into a bog of "What About MEEE?" I don't want to push people into this bog first thing in the morning.

However, I think there is less chance of this with Kim P because she is, if I have the math right, 47, and the majority of my readers are well under 47. If you are a Searching Single, you probably don't want to wait until you are 47 to get married, but guess what? Truth is what it is, and not what you want it to be. And, anyway, if you do get married to the Love of Your Life at 47, you'll be so excited and happy, you won't be thinking about how long you waited. You'll just be delighted you waited for the right man.

Now, Canadian columnist Margaret Wente also married in her forties--also at 47 if I have the math right--and she wrote a hilarious article in Canada's Globe and Mail this week. I don't know if she meant to be funny, but she was delightfully funny:

Am I the only person who thinks Valentine’s Day is a crock? Not that I mind the hearts and flowers. (In fact, I insist on them.) But society’s obsession with romantic love – the notion that one day you will find The Perfect One and live happily ever after – is responsible for more mischief and misery than any other myth of modern life.

I think I find her so funny because she is so dry about what you look like in your thirties. Actually, I don't think women look that bad in our thirties. Okay, we have lost the dewy softness of youth. But sometimes that means losing some puppy fat and a dopey expression. Meanwhile, men did not exactly flock around me when I was 21, so I never had that to miss. I don't sit here sighing for my twenties when men fell all over themselves to talk to me because it never happened.

(I never in my life depended on my looks, except the time I had a teaching job and capitalized on my resemblance to Anne of Green Gables to make my students like me. It worked. Oh, and then there was the day I realized that I looked an awful lot like that funny British blogger Benedict Ambrose's principal crush object, Dame Emma Kirkby, only younger.)

Anyway, another funny thing about Wente's article is that she seems to say SETTLE, but she didn't settle. She married the perfect man for her, and she was willing to wait until she was 47 or so to do so.

Thanks to Andrea, who sent me the article wondering what I would think of it. I think the heart of it is this line:

He liked me just the way I was.

Yep. When I was running around town with two twenty-somethings the other night--very good-looking twenty-somethings, incidentally--I couldn't help thinking about B.A.

B.A. is 39, so he never makes me feel old. He never makes me feel stupid, either. He is very intelligent, so he never misunderstands me. He is very kindly, so he always interprets what I--and others--say in the most charitable way. He does not, on the other hand, like running around town at night. If I want to do it, that's fine, but he's going to have a glass of wine at home and do the crossword puzzle in the back of the London Review of Books. And I loved thinking about B.A. at home, tranquil with his wine and his puzzle, and that fact that when I was tired, I could just come home to him and be comfortable.

That's what it's all about. So Wente is right in a way. Marriage should not look like a scene in Wuthering Heights or, for that matter, Heathers or Bonnie and Clyde or Romeo and Juliet. It should look like a hug and a pile of clean laundry and a well-cooked meal and a sigh of contentment.

Anyway, everyone please offer up a prayer for the wedded happiness of Kim P and Jamie!