Jill, Janice, Gail, Cindy and Lynn have been friends for 20 years. They range in age from 39 to 43. They meet one Friday night a month for dinner, drinks and gossip. They’ve been best friends, in various combinations, since college. They’ve been there for each other through four first marriages, two divorces, one second marriage, many job changes and countless bad dates, failed relationships and almost-engagements.
Here is the latest update: Janice, Gail and Cindy are married, Lynn is divorced and okay with it. Jill, 42, has never been married.
“Jill wants to be married,” Janice says. “Every bone in her body wants to know that life. She asks us questions like, `What’s it like to have someone to tell about your day every evening?’ She talks and talks and then apologizes and says she needs to talk so much because she doesn’t have anyone at home. She loves the idea of kids, and in fact, she’s great with kids. She would stay home to sew curtains and raise kids at the drop of a button.”
Trouble is, Jill hasn’t had a relationship with a man that’s lasted more than a month in more than 10 years. Her last boyfriend was one of your really handsome sociopaths. They dated in grad school and he pulled various stunts. His way of dumping her was to give her the long goodbye. He kept canceling more and more dates until he finally disappeared.
Since then, Jill has met a lot of men through work and friends. But they were never good enough for one reason or another.
She joined a dating service and met several men who sounded pretty interesting to the rest of her friends, but she always found fault with them. She hit the roof when the service tried to fix her up with a 51-year-old guy with a limp.
“How could they think I’d be interested in him?” she asked her friends. She considered asking for her money back.
When Jill wasn’t around, various combinations of her friends would discuss her “problem.” Basically, they thought she was stuck in a time warp. She was still picturing herself as a twentysomething, dating a hunky, if somewhat sociopathic, stud. She hadn’t adjusted her bottom line to something a little more realistic. Like a middle-aged man with a limp.
“A few of us wondered if we should do an intervention with her,” says Janice. “Like when the family of an alcoholic or a drug addict gather around him and tell him the hard reality. We wondered if we should say, `Wake up, sister, adjust your thinking, open yourself up to someone older, someone imperfect, because you’re not so young or so perfect yourself.’ We didn’t want to be mean, we just wanted her to find someone, and we knew that a 40-year-old hunk might not want her.”
So far, the intervention is in the talking stage. The friends know that Jill is going through a hard time and might not be able to handle a confrontation very well. For now, they’ve decided their job is to be supportive , not judgmental.
“We continue to be tempted, though,” says Janice. “The other day she was criticizing someone from work who had mentioned the possibility of fixing her up with a 49-year-old man. Jill was talking about how bald he was, how out of shape, how dorky he dressed.
Janice says, “All of us married women were thinking, `He sounds just like my husband, thank you very much.’ “
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Is marriage what thought it would be? Send your tales and relationship questions to Cheryl Lavin, Tales from the Front, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL. 60611 or e-mail CLavin@tribune.com. Please include day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be used in whole or in part for any purpose.
