A growing number of people today are making their love matches through online dating. I guess this makes sense in a world where people chat through their computers rather than face to face. I cannot imagine choosing to date someone based on a photo and an online list of turn-ons and turn-offs. My own Facebook picture dates back to 1987! The idea of cyber-dating violates one of my cardinal rules for life: don’t look for love. I do not believe you can make a love match when you are shopping, as the act itself heightens one’s most discriminating filters. Falling in love, I believe, happens by accident. It is only when you least expect it that someone sneaks into your life and steals your heart. Nonetheless, the last half dozen or so people I have met who are recently married—both young and slightly more “seasoned”—claim to have found their loves on match.com. What do I know?
I met my husband the old fashioned way: I picked him up on a bus. Granted, it wasn’t your ordinary bus; it was a Harvard shuttle bus. My mind was as far from love as it could be. I was spending the year after college graduation living and working in Boston trying to decide my next move. I had deferred my admission to a couple of graduate schools in order to apply to the Harvard School of Public Health—their health policy and management program would not admit anyone without at least a year of work experience after college.
Then one day, out of the blue, I received a very disturbing letter from my beloved grandmother. She had been biting her tongue, she said, and could bear it no longer. In her perfect schoolteacher hand—which served only to accentuate the sting of her words—she admonished me for the disappointment that I was to my family. After all, she explained, I completed four years of college and graduated “with no visible prospects.” In my mind I was trying to figure out how it was that my family could not understand. I had been admitted to all the graduate schools to which I applied, but I was holding out for the Harvard program, for which I needed to fulfill the work requirement. As I read on, I realized that she was not talking about education or careers at all.
Apparently, my family had rationalized my Harvard education as a means to find a suitable husband. If a misfit “smart girl” like me could be considered attractive anywhere, certainly it would be in a place where everyone else was so smart I wouldn’t stick out. During college I dated one guy—albeit from that other school in New Haven—almost exclusively. As we became more serious, I discovered he had rather unpalatable views about marriage and family. I cut my losses, considering myself well rid of him. But here in this letter, I found my grandmother telling me “so what if you don’t love him—you’ll learn.” In her words, I “could not afford to be so particular as to turn down what was likely to be my only opportunity” at marriage. How could I be “so ungrateful to all that my family had done for me?” Suddenly, I was Elizabeth Bennett being scolded for refusing the likes of Mr. Collins. It was better to be locked in a loveless marriage then to be a burden on my family.
I was shocked and hurt. My grandmother herself had fought with her own father for the right to attend college. As he was an immigrant, she had to convince him to file citizenship papers in order for her to apply to school. He was reluctant, as he did not think it appropriate for a girl to be educated. Yet she prevailed and attended teacher’s college—even though she already had a boyfriend, my grandfather, locked in. Here was this woman, someone I held as a symbol of self-betterment, suggesting that college was nothing more than a marital shopping expedition! I could barely reconcile this attitude with the woman I revered.
That year after graduation became an important turning point in my life. Realizing once and for all that I had only myself to satisfy, I deferred my acceptances, got an apartment in the city with my dear friend Jane, found some meager employment, and worked on my Harvard application. Late in January, I took the morning off from work in order to have my Harvard interview. Having missed the last of the morning’s shuttle buses back to Cambridge, I was stuck for the better part of an hour in the Medical School dorm’s common room waiting for the afternoon bus service to resume. Finally, the 1:15 bus pulled up and I jumped on, a bit anxious that I would be reprimanded at work for arriving later than expected.
I hardly noticed the tall red-head who climbed into the seat in front of me. Nor did I realize how he had squeezed all six-foot-four of himself into the one row of seats choked by the indentations of the wheel wells. To this day, neither of us remembers who spoke first. Somehow, he managed to get from me the most important piece of information—that I was NOT a medical student—a fact that would have ruled me ineligible in his book. I managed to discover that he was a dental student, something that endeared him to me; the best guy I ever knew—my grandfather—was also a dentist. What I remember most were his eyes—deep blue pools of light that held me like tractor beams.
By the time we arrived at our destination, it was as if there was no one else on that packed bus. He walked me to my office, managing to drop his name into the conversation and to ascertain mine. When he called an hour later—having tracked me down through a maze of campus directories—I had difficulty maintaining the calm of practiced indifference.
Ours was a love match, made of equal parts chemistry and serendipity. It reinforces what I still believe in my heart—that the best things come to you when you aren’t looking for them. Had I shopped for this man I never would have found him. He would have been labeled incorrectly and hanging somewhere else in the store.
Tomorrow's blog: Sometimes the Truth Hurts
No comments:
Post a Comment