Super large, super beautiful SWF, 40, witty, charming, intelligent, Protestant minister, seeks smart, funny man with flair for romance.
”I didn`t put the ad in to find a few more good buddies to go to baseball games,” intones Rev. Ruth Fowler, the pastor of a small Southern Baptist church on Staten Island who, like many single women in New York, is looking for one good man through the classifieds.
Then again, she wasn`t exactly advertising for a little afternoon delight.
”I`m not anti-sex, but sex outside marriage is not a possibility for me,” explains Fowler, who was ordained in 1986, and who considers her 14-member congregation a precious gift from God.
Premarital sex ”would be risking a lot: the respect of my congregation, the risk of disease and the risk of pregnancy,” she says. ”What would a single woman minister with an illegitimate child do?” While male ministers may make headlines with sexual shenanigans, Fowler just can`t envision liaisons in her church-owned home or sneaking into a No-Tell Motel.
Every unmarried person with a demanding job has a litany of reasons for not meeting suitable mates. Fowler has a canon of complications. Saturday nights, she`s putting the finishing touches on her sermon. Going to bars is out of the question: Being on call constantly amid celebrating marriages, baptizing babies and ministering to those who have lost loved ones, you`re just not in the mood to go to a bar where a guy`s first question, inevitably, is ”What do you do?” and whose next question is ”No-really-what do you do?”
Despite the intercongregational romances depicted on TV shows like
”Amen,” it`s a betrayal of one`s position to date a parishioner, Fowler says. ”In some ways, you`re more powerful than a lawyer or doctor. We deal with people`s thoughts, desires, problems and their eternal soul. You`re dealing with very personal, intense feelings (in a love affair). You have to be willing to lose that parishioner . . . if things don`t go right.” Dates, she adds drolly, ”are much easier to come by than church members.”
Fowler, who weighs 312 pounds, concedes that ”it`s asking a lot in a culture that worships Christie Brinkley to find someone who accepts me just as I am.” Yet, she insists, her girth is less of a problem than her profession. ”There are lots of men out there who love large women,” she affirms, but not too many who can relate romantically to a woman of the cloth.
”There`s a double standard: Women have to be either good or bad. It`s almost like kissing a nun goodnight for some of these guys,” Fowler says.
Her parishioners, she reports, are excited by her romantic reconnaissance missions and help with the responses she receives, some through a special phone line.
”By phone, you don`t have to sort through all the pictures of naked men, which is kind of a relief,” Fowler says. ”One guy wanted a bisexual. . . . I presume there are churches somewhere with bisexual female ministers, but I didn`t call him back.”
More troubling was the call ”from a guy who sounded absolutely great, but didn`t leave his number. Richard in SoHo: Leave your number!”
