filed in Single Women's Hall of Fame
Too Smart For Your Own Good
A straight guy I know, who has become a close (platonic) friend, really doesn’t get me. For one thing, he thinks my hair is too short, and he hates when I use more than three syllable words, because I sound too in-tel-luc-tu-al. When I was updating my online dating profile, he advised against listing War and Peace as my favorite book. “It’s a turn off,” he said. I don’t take his advice, but it gets under my skin, into that cold, dark place where I’m sure I would have found true love, if only I was….different.
Which brings me to the late, great Wendy Wasserstein. She died a few years ago at the tender age of 55, and the theater world mourned. Her birthday is Sunday. Through her many plays and essays, Wasserstein was so adept at capturing smart, ambitious women who found their romantic lives coming up short. After years of trying, she became a mother when she was 48 (and wrote a beautiful piece about it in The New Yorker).
Here’s a fragment from her 1988 Pulitzer-prize winning play The Heidi Chronicles, in which Scoop explains to Heidi (a girlfriend he could never commit to) why he’s marrying Lisa:
SCOOP
Do I love her…? She’s the best that I can do.
Is she an A+ like you? No. But I don’t want to
come home to an A+. A- maybe, but not A+.
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Thanks for this post on smarts and on Wendy. She wrote the screenplay for my book and we spent time together. She loved her little girl who she birthed at big risks to her own health. Sadly, her brother, Bruce Wasserstein (a Wall Street legend),passed away this week of sudden heart failure. He was 61 and the guardian of Wendy’s child. So tomorrow I’ll say a birthday prayer for Wendy and her little girl.
[…] me and likes my best friend is it okay to give dating advice?Make Money Online Share and Enjoy: Too Smart For Your Own Good – firstpersonsingular.org 10/17/2009 A straight guy I know, who has become a close (platonic) […]
I’m a little surprised someone who would criticize integral parts of you has become a close friend. I don’t think I could be friends with someone like that.
I love that quote, as sad as it is. For a long time, I’ve observed what I thought were people intentionally “settling” for less than the best because they didn’t want to have to live up to a standard they felt was too high for them. Of course, the person who always suffers most from this decision is the fabulous girl or guy who is left behind with a broken heart, self-esteem in shreds because they were “too good” for the person they loved. The irony is that most of these people probably would never have made a single demand on their insecure partners and loved them just the way they were.