Guys, Dolls and Gardening Gloves

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I wasted my twenties and early thirties looking for a husband. Every day. All day. I prowled the bars, the gyms, the office parks, the subways, and the supermarkets— always on maximum flirtation alert in case Mr. Right wandered onto my personal dating movie set. I had to be ready to flag him down, to snare him, to get his hand in marriage. Mine was an existence of profound misery, a dead zone—a mating hell that almost cost me my sanity.  

And none of it was my idea.

When I graduated from college, the endless pressures, questions and comments about my coupling status began. Usually originating with other women, older women, ordinary women.

“Do you have a serious boyfriend yet?”  

“When are you going to get married?”

“Do you know how hard it is to meet a man after 35?”

They convinced me that my inability to snag a husband meant I was somehow defective, somehow unlovable. I morphed into a pathetic creature that cried for weeks on end and bored friends to death overanalyzing situations where a guy I’d dated for as little as two weeks never called again. My desperation hit rock bottom the night I talked to an obscene phone caller for thirty minutes believing him to be Mark, the handsome law student I’d dated three weeks earlier finally calling me back. He immediately sensed the sadness in my voice and realized he could get more bang for his obscene buck by pretending to be the object of my desire. Even though the caller’s voice sounded completely different, I so needed him to be Mark that I rationalized away our bizarre conversation.

By 35, I’d had it.

The obscene phone call was not only my lowest dating point, but also my breaking point. The mental energy required to find a mate drained out of my body. I had to fill my evenings with something more life sustaining than dates with guys I had no real connection with.

A small ad in the local paper piqued my long dormant interest in music. The director of a community theater production for Guys & Dolls put out a call for singers, dancers and set crew. Not a singer or a dancer, I landed the important role of curtain puller. Night after night, scene after scene, I donned my nubbed gardening gloves and opened and closed the heavy red velvet curtain, mesmerized by Guys and Dolls my age dancing and singing before me. I looked forward to being in the company of men without the burden of a husband search weighing me down.