There is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast

I've always been disparaging of a certain type of stagnant female. It seems to me that those women who remain single over the age of thirty-five or so lose something. They seem to me demanding, opinionated, nosy, pushy, and generally intolerable. They constantly battle bitterness for what must be imagined a general rejection from the human race (and men specifically) against the need for human contact. Their generosity and flexibility abandon them, leaving them in the clutches of an unpleasant realism. They will often become passive-agressive or openly vindictive, or they will settle into a mediocrity prescribed by their own wilting self-opinions. Perhaps they were already that way.
Perhaps they travel widely, or educate themselves beyond their intelligence. They take to wearing colorful glasses with thick, plastic rims. This does not seem to be the cure.

I'm halfway there. I'm not long for my twenties, and already I see things I wish were too stupid to notice. My glass is no longer simply half empty. It is dwindling in dregs. I am the stinky cheese. People turn up their noses at me until I return to the sock drawer. I don't think it's because I'm single. They are good people, and mean no harm. I think it's because of what being single has made me, or what I allow myself to become.

Consider: women who marry have a wonderful opportunity to turn their eyes outside of themselves (that isn't to say that they all decide to do so). If they marry well, they have constant reminders that they are loved and constant opportunities to serve someone else, or if they are so blessed, several others. Life gets a shot of Perry Como. Someone loves them.

What of my sisters who are not loved? Should I make a list of all the virtues mankind cannot tolerate? Or are my lonely sisters single because they really are inferior? Does the female psyche require the distractions of home and family at a certain age to remain healthy?

Please, let me not become a harpy. There must be a way to be Sheri instead of Rhonda. I cannot help being single, but I MUST make of myself a lady, not some kind of predator. There must be some (affordable) way to keep the selfishness at bay, when my niece and nephews live fourteen hours away. There must be a way to feel love, and loved. We need it too, we who pretend we are independent, we who must take the long road.

I am frightened that so many of us stay unmarried. My instinct is to look for the cause, but I think it is this; when we are young and beautiful we spend our love like credit. Instead of working to make a life of comfortable loves around us, loves in all forms, we spend our affections on the undeserving, or on movie stars and sparkly vampires, or books and cars. We think there will be time later for the careful budgeting of love between husband and wife, but we look up from our debt of affections and see that we are old, and no one will share their fortune with us; we would cost them too much.

Alternately, we have invested ourselves in so much fandom that we cannot be found beneath all of the things grown into our skin. We are a Trekkie; we are a Mustang; we are a Winchester; we are U2; wii are fit.

Have I sinned? It has been four years since my last date. Maybe a few "Our Father"s will get me out of this one.