Girls! Girls! Girls!
Monday, November 1, 1965 Nashville, Graduate School
I am so sick of having girls turn me down on dates. Literally for years I have wandered around waiting for the right girl and now that I search she still doesn’t appear. I have not the heart for a great battle merely for the privilege to drink coffee with some radiant soul, feeling the whole time the pressure of the fact that my minutes are precious – that I might not be able to get another date for three weeks. Well, you say, things are unnatural at Vanderbilt. Where have I been that there wasn’t this unnaturalness? I would crave to know a beautiful and sympathetic girl with whom I could become great friends. I go for weeks without even a date and it’s not because I don’t expend the dimes in the phone. And then this is not my main concern. My studies occupy me 24 hours a day. I am a student and that comes first. Always something else comes first. Duty! If I reach 30 and still am not dating anyone, I shall go off with backpack on my back and shall never be heard of again!
By sharing in this blog what I wrote at age 24, I’m opening myself up to folks understandably saying, “You were really sick!” Please give me some latitude that “I shall go off with backpack on my back and shall never be heard of again” is far short of saying that if I don’t find the perfect soulmate “I’ll end it all.” Being a happy wanderer with backpack on my back is not a bad fallback – sad maybe, but not bad.
If JoElyn, my wife of now 50+ years, had come into my life around the time that I wrote this journal entry, she would have been a few days from her 20th birthday and not yet out of college; she is almost exactly five-years my junior. She is more mature than I am; even so, neither one of us would have been prepared to put as much into having a happy marriage as we later did. Having gone without a soulmate of the opposite sex for still five more years, we took marriage seriously from the start and knew that it would require attention and priority. That’s why for us we have had an utterly satisfying marriage that has gotten better from one year to the next all along the way.
Waiting until age 30 or beyond to marry is not something that I’m prescribing for all of my 20-something male friends. There are too many successful marriages that have begun in the early post-high-school years. In some of those cases it has taken these couples formed in younger years to realize the effort and priority that must go into growing a robust marriage.
Oh, was I lonely! The “unnaturalness” that seemed to hang over all of my attempted friendships with girls plagued me; but I’m so glad I didn’t “settle.” The modicum of patience that I was able to muster was enough to see me through to my marriage to JoElyn on June 12, 1971. JoElyn has been that “beautiful and sympathetic girl with whom I could become great friends.” And being friends, enjoying each other’s company, has been the backbone of our time-tested relationship.
