Last Saturday evening, I found myself sandwiched in between two middle-aged women at a dinner table that was weighed down by a vexing assembly of different-sized forks and dinner rolls. I touched nothing. Moments after I sat, the slightly younger women to my right began what would be an unending arsenal of interrogation and unsolicited advice. She welcomed me with the following endearing remark: "And who are you?"
Well, there's a simple answer to this question, I thought to myself, 'I'm Anna.' However, as part of my human experience on this earth, I've learned that when people say things like that, they are really asking something else. What she really should have said to me was: "And what makes you worthy to be here, young lady?"
Why people don't say what they mean remains one of the most mystifying aspects of human language to date, but that is a topic for another time. After her moderately polite gateway comment, this woman certainly did get on to saying what she meant.
In between telling me that she was a vegetarian, the only one of her friends to "make it in New York," a self-proclaimed highly intelligent and motivated college dropout, and that she still lived at home with her parents, she implored me to never waste my time looking for a husband. As she cackled and told me she had never married, I couldn't help but feel like I had better do everything in my power not to become her. After beginning the evening by asking me to prove myself to her, she had spent the rest of the night proving herself to me, despite the fact that I had never once asked. I had sat down curious and stood up critical. I'm not typically judgmental, and I certainly don't think I know all there is to know about the lady who sat on my right that evening, but in those fleeting moments she was the pinnacle of things I don't want to be or become: self-centered, over-confident, a terrible listener and wildly insecure.
I have to get married, I thought to myself.
Soon afterwards, I turned to the slightly older, quieter woman on my left. Before I had finished talking to her about where she was from, the woman on my right had interjected: "Your nails look fabulous." I nodded my approval. "Oh, why thank you," the older woman on my left said, "I just got them done for the first time at the nail salon in town—wonderful people." She then proceeded to tell us how she and her husband had just moved to the town of Princeton for his new job. Apparently her hands had been so ungodly after the moving process that she just absolutely had to have a manicure. I slowly curled my fingers against my palms to avoid exposing my unkempt nail beds that I was now certain she would find unacceptable. I sat caught in the crossfire of the leftward spouse and the rightward independent woman.
As I listened to the two women discuss the town of Princeton, the prospect of socializing together at some country club, and the best grocery stores in town, I became aware of the friction between their two lifestyles. In all honesty, I couldn't fathom either life ever becoming mine. The woman to my right was entirely independent and the woman to my left completely dependent. The rough edges of each way of being a woman scraped up against each other, exposing themselves to me and making me nervous.
"Marry a Princetonian, Anna," the woman to my left told me after I asked how long she and her husband had been married. "And find him while you're here,"she suggested to me, as if I have nothing else to do or look for during these four years.
Maybe this is an inaccurate or overdramatized representation of the two options most girls are presented with when considering how to become a woman, but these two polar opposites certainly exist and when you're sitting in the middle, both appear rather flawed. I don't really think there's a perfect way to do it and I'd like to believe there's somewhere in the middle.
