Marry Smart: Advice for Finding the One

Life in the Boomer Lane has been stalked lately by a bra (specifically a Bali, underwire full coverage). She is also being stalked by shoes, linen cardigans, comforters, tiny photo frames, and a stretch canvas buffalo. These are all items that LBL has, at one time or another, placed in her shopping cart on various sites, but never consummated the relationship. Or they are items she has searched for online on several occasions but never purchased.

The items refuse to be discarded. They keep following LBL around, sneaking in places they are least suspected. Every time LBL goes onto any site now, a sidebar appears in which various decided-against items appear. If she looks closely, LBL can swear that these items either have a pitiful look about them or a contrived hopeful one. Either way, she is reminded of old films in which cherubic, newly-scrubbed tots line up in dismal reception areas of orphan asylums, with hopeful, expectant looks on their faces, while well-heeled future parents (the wife is always wearing a jaunty hat with a feather) go down the line looking for “the one” to save from a life of gruel and diminished expectations.

Because of the ever lengthening trail of merchandise following her, LBL almost missed a New York Post commentary sent to her by an alert reader, regarding the recent engagement of George Clooney to Amal Alamuddin. Apparently, Clooney has taken a break from choosing his women by how efficiently they serve him two eggs soft-scrambled, hash browns and wheat toast at his favorite dining establishments. He has now actually chosen one who has some pretty darn hefty credentials. Alamuddin is a human rights attorney, advisor to Kofi Annan and a scholar who has co-edited a book, “The Special Tribunal for Lebanon: Law and Practice.” She is fluent in French, Arabic and English. When she isn’t having a serious impact on humanity in three languages simultaneously, she poses in tiny bikinis in order to showcase her stellar 36-year-old super model body.

But, while LBL wishes George and Amal the best of luck and hopes they produce a long line of genetically gifted offspring who will populate the pages of US Magazine, this is not the item that caught her attention. The point of the article was that Alamuddin has managed to snag a guy while still having spent many years on her profession, in direct defiance of a book titled “Marry Smart: Advice for Finding The One” by Susan Patton.

Patton is a graduate of Princeton. In case you forget this, she will tell you that her favorite color is orange and that her house is decorated with Princeton paraphernalia. If she ever married again, she would like the wedding to take place in the Princeton Chapel. The first time around, Patton made the mistake of not marrying a Princeton grad. Because it would be mighty difficult for the unwashed masses to understand how a Princeton grad could possibly make the mistake of marrying anyone other than another Princeton grad, Patton explains:

“After I graduated I spent years dating men who were not nearly as good as the men in my class. Ultimately I married the man I was dating when I was 31, because I was running out of time to have children.”

Patton’s husband “went to a school of almost no name recognition,” she said, “a school that nobody has respect for, including him, really.”

Representatives of the Des Moines Night School for Bicycle Messengers refused comment on this statement.

Thankfully, Patton’s sons have not made the same mistakes she has:

“I am the mother of two sons who are both Princetonians. My older son had the good judgment and great fortune to marry a classmate of his, but he could have married anyone. My younger son is a junior and the universe of women he can marry is limitless.”

A random sampling of over 100,000 college coeds aged 18-56, here, abroad, and on most planets in the solar system aged agreed that Baby Patton is #1 on their To-Marry list.

Because Patton is neither the government of Dubai nor a multi-billionaire philanthropist, she is unfortunately unable to pay for all US high schoolers to attend Princeton in order to have a shot at anything other than a meaningless, tawdry life. But she does want to make sure that young women today don’t make the same mistake she did. She tells career-oriented women:

“Girls should get major bodywork in high school.” And “College age women (of Ivy League schools)…have to start putting in place plans for their personal happiness because they will never again have this kind of concentration of extraordinary men to choose from.”

In her 18 years as a human resources specialist and life coach, as well as the sex puppet for the Princeton football team, Patton heard agonizing stories from “women who were editors-in-chief, heads of marketing, publishers, making 400,000 or 500,000 a year. They had wardrobe budgets, salon budgets, T&E budgets. Endless budgets! They’re on every A-list in town. And they are profoundly unhappy…They go home to an empty apartment.” Patton told them,”You have “been so invested in your professional super-stardom that you took your eye off the ball (sic). You have no husband and no children, but the ship has already sailed! It’s too late. You don’t get to have everything.”

LBL, herself, has been a life coach. She doesn’t recall ever having told anyone (even neurotic multiple-married and divorced agoraphobics with extremely bad breath, that their “ship has already sailed.”

In addition to beginning both their cosmetic surgery and their stalking at about the same age that their adolescent acne makes its appearance, Patton advises young women to stay sober. “If you are too drunk to speak, then you may be incapable of saying no or warding off unwanted advances. And then it’s all on you.”

Patton refers to “date rape” as “mistake sex,” to characterize intercourse with a woman too drunk to consent. “I’m troubled by the term ‘date rape’ because it diminishes the true horror of rape,” she added. In other words, what we used to refer to date rape is actually an oops.

Male (pulling his limp rod out of his date’s snatch): Oops, I neglected to notice that you were too inebriated to participate in our most delightful bout of  fornication. My bad.

Female (in the process of achieving consciousness): No problem. May I please have a bucket, if it wouldn’t be too much of a bother for you?

Patton’s bestselling book (generating two out of five stars on Amazon, making it comparable to “The Advantages and Disadvantages of Castration” in the area of reader reviews) is best described by one reviewer: “I got this as a free pdf copy from a friend as a gag gift.”