American Lament

One thing that helps romance keep afloat is that of hope. As long as there is a chance out there to find their one true love, most people are content. Sure, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that that blonde down at the coffee shop who bends over a lot to work the milk steaming machine or whatever it’s called will say “yes” when you ask her out, but as long as you can sit in the comfortable confines of your isolated emotional box and ponder the fact that there might be a chance…that’s worth all the actual balls-requiring activity you would need to actually take some risk. Hope does a lot to gloss over a lot of lonely Valentines’ Day evenings and watching The Notebook after 10pm.

Of course, hope can do a lot of scapegoating, as well. While it’s nice to extrapolate theoretical romances in your mind, the practical results are often left a lot to be desired. Hoping that it won’t be the case may make you feel better, but, just like comfort food, caffeine, and the alternative minimum tax, once reality sits in of what you’re really going to have to put up with you’re often left with disappointment. For example:

Hope: I hope that that guy finds me attractive.
Reality: I hope she puts out on the first date.

Hope: I hope I find my true love.
Reality: I’m going to set my standards as to what true love is so high that when I realize that what I’m looking for is impossible to achieve I will be dead.

Hope: I hope I didn’t forget her birthday again.
Reality: Will they be listed as “lawyers” or “attorneys” in the yellow pages?

Hope: I hope I didn’t scare her off.
Reality: I hope he realizes I’m Catholic.

Hope: I hope my significant other doesn’t find out how much I’ve been flirting with the help.
Reality: This could really hurt her chances to secure the presidential nomination.

Another reason that hope is so strong is the mere existence of online relationship web sites. Now, granted, classifieds have been around for quite a long time ever since Og carved “Single Cro-Magnon Male Looking for Single Female, likes long walks on the beach, being drug by hair to cave. Must love mammoths, imminent starvation” in the town rock. And, of course, there is a lot of money to be made in hope, as individuals looking to find their match online are usually willing to pay a premium for such services. (Though one has to pause when a discount is offered for six months of service, a time frame most would assume is more along the lines of the discouraging.) It’s so lucrative that niche markets are about to produce reasonably massive profits, and sites such as JDate and Adult Friend Finder can specialize in (hopefully vastly different) demographics. Simply adding the old .com to any particular concept seems to be a recipe for success, and so Finnishscrapbookers.com and Seventhdayadventistaccountants.com won’t have very long to wait until they are presented with a catalog of love.

Of course, with the introduction of massive amounts of opportunities also frightens many people away. By expanding our choices, we also dilute the attention given to each one. Typing in our height, lying about our weight, and checking off hobbies such as “hiking,” “watching TV,” or “illegally downloading music” and crossing our fingers is a far cry from the personal touch of having the file clerk down in inventory try to hook you up with his roommate’s sister who, by all journalistic standards of accuracy, enjoys having a good time.

Having faith in the new technology of romance is almost essential in today’s world. Not having such faith will unnecessarily restrict you in your choices, and with a few adaptations of behavior, mostly those that will keep you away from confronting Chris Hansen, it can be used to terrifyingly great effect. And while those who help sort through personality matrixes and conquering the elusive likes/dislikes algorithm may have a financial bias to get you laid and/or finding true love, in the end both parties gain. Faith is important for this particular commercial transaction, of course, since it seems destined to replace the more traditional, if more time-consuming and potentially embarrassing, personal recommendation. While your friends and family have a vested interest in not pulling a bait and switch scam on you, lest you skimp on the Christmas present next year or buy generic potato chips for the family picnic, Match.com only wonders whether you’re paying by check or credit card. Having faith that the system works is, therefore, required to keep the whole house of cards from tumbling into a giant heap of unfilled promises, shattered expectations, and Kleenex.

And, of course, it requires a bit of faith for the relationship itself. The person you meet for the first time is only as good as he or she says she is. Most dates don’t come with a background check or a credit report, so you have to take it on faith what they’ve done with their lives. They could be polygamists or cat ladies or libertarians and you’d never know it from their endlessly fascinating stories about what color his car was in high school or the first time she wore makeup to church. Starting out the relationship assuming everything that the other person is telling you is a ridiculous lie is probably the practical and better idea, but having faith in the opposite of that will help you sleep better at night.

Of course, when it comes right down to it, love will answer its own questions. You’ll know when it’s time to relent and cast hope into the wind, safe in the knowledge that your relationship can deal with true reality—and it has to, in order to survive the ups and downs that is the universal nature of love. Faith is unnecessary when you can accept your partner’s unconditional trust, evolving it into obsolescence, and no longer question the important conversations, or even the more pleasurable trivial ones. Indeed, as has been posited, out of faith, hope and love, the greatest of these is, and has to be, love. Dot com.

Joe Hardy, founder and CEO of the 84 Lumber Company and owner of the Nemacolin Woodlands Resort, recently exchanged rings and probate court servers with a 22 year old salonist employed at the complex he owns. Or, rather, previously employed, though I suppose that goes without saying. Hardy recently reached his 84th birthday, so the age difference and standard deviation of wealth have raised more than just a few eyebrows. I’m sure it would take more than a few numerologists to divine that someone who named their lumber company “84” after the town it was started in would find a particularly creative way to celebrate their landmark 84th birthday, but I doubt even the most expert of psychiatrists would predict it would involve creating a future Anna Nicole Smith replacement. Nature, as it seems, perpetually abhors a vacuum.

May-December romances always seem to cause a bit of a stir when they happen, even though, historically, they’ve been rather common. Back in the day, gentlemen with, shall we say, a significant amount of life experience routinely courted mere teenagers as their wives, partly because in a day and age of rampant consumption, violent, drug-free childbirth that was the medically necessary equivalent of seamlessly passing a watermelon though a screen door, and the socially acceptable requirement of breeding enough children to field both teams, and the fans thereof, of a standard baseball game, it was encouraged that middle-aged men find fertile, study young women as their lifemates. Plus, they were pretty much old horndogs.

With gender equality came progress, though, and young maidens no longer had to be held as prizes for established merchants or reputable gentry to procure as a fruitful and subservient means of production. As the sexual revolution entered the mainstream, women were now free to be held as prizes for freshly minted middle managers and young appliance salesmen to procure as a fruitful and subservient means of production.

As society settled down to equilibrium during the sleepover Eisenhower years, marriage tended to be among equals—most courtships were between high school sweethearts, so unless the groom skillfully avoided getting assaulted with the smart stick for long enough and skipped about every other grade until he passed remedial study hall, the age among both parties involved reached near parity. So much so that couples often graduated together, started getting cancer screenings together, got sick of each other and cheated on each other together, and got that letter from the AARP and then discussed exactly how old they are and how they wasted their lives buying Frankie Avalon albums and voting Republican when all they really wanted to do is drink highballs and smoke duty-free cigarettes playing blackjack at the Indian reservation together.

Because of this, the incidence of the golddigger/trophy hunter match-up always gets people’s attention. It’s unusual enough as it is, though it’s perfectly explainable. Women tend to find constancy, maturity, and success as desirable traits in a man, while men tend to gravitate towards nubile innocent young things with a rather cavalier grasp towards socially accepted sexual mores. Pairing these two things up will often lead towards marriages of unequal ages. (Please note that this paragraph contains some atrociously sweeping generalizations, most of which women will find incredibly insensitive and men painfully indifferent. Such ham-fisted oversimplications will no doubt cast aspersions on my analysis, but it will certainly be enough to pass muster on, say, The CBS Evening News.)

The extreme forms of this occur in cases like Joe Hardy. It’s not terribly common, but hardly unheard of, as many old men realize that their sell-by date is fast approaching and they might as well get all they can while the getting is good, lest their shrew ex-wife get a portion of his money when he dies. It’s not too much to think that he might as well split the pot three instead of two ways while getting his rocks off in the process. Depending on their theological inclinations, of course, such transgressions will no doubt be either erased by the vanguards of history or, at least for Lutherans, eliminated with a healthy dose of God’s good grace.

It’s strange how, often, the females end up with the shadier reputation in these partnerships. Many of them are portrayed as stiletto-heeled vixens perfecting the art of extracting his wallet while staring at the ceiling. Yet nary an aspersion is cast at the man, who could just as easily be painted as a predatory pervert throwing greenbacks around in what is generally considered to be borderline prostitution. Perhaps it’s latent jealousy, perhaps it’s society’s expectations, but most likely it’s the fact that most old men with money have gotten to the point where eHarmony isn’t exactly going to be sending out boatloads of responses on a regular basis so they might as well go to the strip club for prospective wives.

To be honest, I’m surprised things like this don’t happen more often. I mean, every man wants some eye candy to wake up next to every morning, and every woman laments for financial stability. And if love isn’t defined as the appropriate arbitraging of sex and money, well, then, I don’t know what it is.