I see friends shaking hands, saying, "How do you do?"
They're really sayin', "I love you"
In the made for TV movie adaptation of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, Eddie goes back to the Philippines to meet one of his significant people. He knew the Philippines from his time there as a prisoner of war in a forced labor camp.
The person he meets there was The Captain of his military unit. At the end of this part of the plot, he asks the captain why he chose to stay in this wartorn hellscape.
In other words, he's asking "How is THIS your idea of heaven?" His captain says "That's what YOU see. THIS is what I see." and with a gesture of his hand the wartorn hellscape disappears to reveal the lush tropical greenery of the land he apparently fell in love with while there as a soldier.
I cannot access the paywalled article. My recollection is the author took photos and personal statements documenting the pain and suffering of not only the surgery and immediate recovery but the fact that some people have scar tissue that leaves them impaired and in pain for life.
Over the years, I've seen countless articles and online conversations citing how much cars maim and kill people as a reason to object to our car dependent culture. They generally don't ask if cars can also be calculated as saving lives, extending lives, etc. so I know for certain that's a one-sided, politically motivated point of view.
I never hear similar arguments about the price of beauty in heteronormative culture where women make less money than men and marrying well is the only really good means women have for accessing The Good Life, so there is tremendous financial and social pressure on women to look good so they make tolerable sex objects and can thus attract a man.
And it doesn't buy women financial security.
About 42%-45% of all first marriages in the U.S. end in divorce. and even if you remain together until death do you part, odds are high the woman will outlive her husband and be plunged into poverty after his death no matter how comfortable they were while he lived.
If you divorce, you are not competing for men with women roughly your age. You are competing for them with every woman over the age of 18 and up to your age but probably not older than you.
Men tend to marry women younger than them. The age difference typically gets bigger in second marriages.
I have no expectation I will ever remarry. I'm unwilling to pay the price of beauty in terms of pain and suffering and I'm certain trying to adhere to societal expectations for beauty would make me horrifically ugly and cost me my life because of my genetic disorder.
I'm fine with how I look. I look fantastic for someone who should be a long dead rotting corpse.
People with my condition typically have clubbed fingertips and 90 percent of them are so thin they basically look like concentration camp survivors. The other ten percent are obese.
I look vastly better than that though, no, I no longer look like I could be a super model, as people have suggested to me I once did in my youth.
Too bad so very fucking sad. Awwwww.
Over the years, I've met quite a few people online who found me wildly attractive and swore they wanted to marry me. No amount of trying to tell them to "Keep it real. Let's aim for a coffee date and see how it goes in person." ever gets through their thick skulls.
They are in lurv. They are smitten. I'm the one they want for LIFE.
And they never show up.
I've previously ranted about this elsewhere. I'm pretty sure it boils down to no matter how much they LIKE me and enjoy my company, I'm just too old and ugly for them to want me in the flesh.
There's an episode of Just Shoot Me where some guy is pursuing Maya Gallo and keeps trying to feed her donuts and cake and she finally realizes all his exes are quite heavy and he's basically trying to fatten her up while constantly talking smack about men being too focused on women's looks.
There's a great line where he says something like "I'm attracted to you. Just not SEXUALLY." And she tells him that it's actually the EXACT same thing as men who want you to be skinny enough to sleep with and rejects him.
I feel like I have told people until I'm blue in the face that I feel fine about myself and how I look, all things considered, and it just doesn't ever seem to sink in, perhaps because there are currently no photos of me online.
That's not because I feel I'm ugly. It's because I'm unwilling to play this game where the world judges my value primarily based on my looks and will be happy to drag me for failing to look like a 25 year old super model.
I don't want to marry well. I want to earn a living some other way.
See also: A Pearl Necklace.
I got to be beautiful. I got to be a full-time wife and mom. I've had love affairs that made me feel sexy as hell. I've gotten all that stuff and it never adequately paid my bills or made my life work.
Ever since getting divorced, I've basically been dirt poor. And I've never once thought "I should have stayed married!"
There's no turning back the clock and I don't care. My body tortures me less than it did in my youth. My quality of life is higher as a poor single woman than it was as a theoretically "pampered" homemaker.
My mother used to say to my father "If I worked for a COMPANY for 40 years, I would HAVE a retirement fund." Men expect women to give up careers and marry for love but the reality is this means that for women, marriage is frequently how they keep a roof over their heads.
And it comes with no retirement fund and you can't put it on your resume to help you get a job if he dies or you get divorced.
If you married young, like I did, you may have more or less been equal partners. You both had nothing. You supported his career and had a voice in things.
If you marry well a second time, now you're "a gold digging whore" and if you don't want to dress like he likes, etc, you can be replaced by someone younger, prettier and more compliant.
That is IF you can get a man AT ALL at your age because men YOUR age are marrying women younger than you and women live longer than men, so at some point older women are de facto competing for an ever smaller pool of old geezers.