relationship

There’s a Birmingham man who’s so desperate for a girlfriend that he’s willing to pay $10,000 to whoever introduces him to a woman he dates at least six months.

But it’s not me. Honest. But it does make me think about how my ad would read if I did the same thing.

Ren You moved to Birmingham last year when he took a job here at a private equity firm just after he finished grad school in Boston. He’s from the Washington, D.C., area, so he has no social connections in Birmingham, and he says he works long hours which leave him little time to search for a girlfriend.

So he’s put up a website outlining who he is and what he’s looking for. He’s accepting applications — and he promises to pay $10,000 to whoever finds the right woman for him.

I’ve playfully kicked this idea around before, but more as satire than as something serious. Years ago, my friend, Whitney, used to threaten to post up posters on her college campus to find a wife for me. She was going to set up www.MarryDavid.com and plaster the campus of Washington University in St. Louis until she found the right weird young woman for me. It was a running joke that she threatened to turn serious.

Whitney never did the flyer or the website. She got married and moved to California instead. But the idea of satirizing an online search for love never left me. As recently as a few months ago, I kicked around the idea with a friend of setting up such a site for April Fool’s Day.

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When I was in high school, my desires for a girlfriend were simple. I just wanted a girl who was attractive and was interested in me. Yes, I wanted someone who was smart, but when I look back on those I fell for, I realize I was willing to sacrifice that requirement as long as a pretty girl showed me any attention.

I certainly wouldn’t have considered myself shallow — and I still don’t see my young self as having been shallow. I confined my interests to girls who shared my own values, at least as far as I could tell, in a broad societal way. (At the time, that would have meant “a church girl who shares my moral views and is consistent with what she believes.”) So I wasn’t completely focused on just finding a pretty girl.

I was simply ignorant of what really mattered in the long run.

As I think about this tonight, I’m thinking of a couple of situations among people I know.

One woman wanted a husband who was very “impressive” and she got what she was looking for, but she’s miserable. He makes a lot of money. They live in an impressive house. He moves among “important” people. From the outside, he looks like a great catch. But she’s miserable, because except for the times when he wants something, she doesn’t exist to him except as someone to serve him. Her needs are non-existent to him. Everything in their world revolves around taking care of the needs and ego of this narcissistic man.

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