Open Mind, Open Heart

Started the day with a good cup of coffee, and I was thinking about how, like many single women I once had my laundry list of criteria for Mr. Right: honesty and humor, good looks and brains. I was a busy professional girl and wouldn’t meet a first blind date for more than coffee, lest too much of my precious time be wasted, and I rarely gave men without immediate chemistry a second shot.

But women? I’m sexually straight as an arrow, but I’d jump into new friendships with both feet and boundless optimism. I met one woman at a pottery studio and, barely knowing her, we spent a week driving halfway across the country to drop off her car in Texas before she headed to South America for the summer. Would I have done that with a man I barely knew? No chance in hell. But she and I? We became close friends. Take Beth Jones, one of my co-authors, whom I met on a walking tour of a Boston area cemetery. Two single girls, out for a quirky afternoon of intellectual enlightenment, we clicked immediately. Next thing I knew, I was inviting her to drive five hours to northern Maine to spend the weekend snowmobiling for an article I was writing for The Washington Post. Would I have invited a man to do the same? Again, noooooo way. Would she have gone with a man? Perhaps. But barely knowing each other, off we went. Years later, she is one of my best friends, and she is the woman who gave me her unused donor sperm so that I, too, could be a mother if I never found love. That’s friendship.

Not all of my gambles have been so lucky. I recently got a fast “friend crush” on a woman whose child is the same age as mine. Excited to have met someone I liked after moving to a new city, I instantly mentioned the things we could do together, from camping to homeschooling our kids. Would I have had that conversation about the future with a man on our first date? Hardly. I was hopeful. But when our husbands failed to click, that was the end of Us. Though I am thrilled and grateful to have Mark, my fiance, I realize now that perhaps I would have been luckier in romantic love earlier in my life if I had been more open in mind and heart to the men who came along. Just as I had been open to women.