Mom always said...hey, whatever happened to Murphy Brown?

a friend asked recently what to tell her daughters, who are tormented (or at least torment their mother) with their worry that they will never find true love.

I later thought about what my Mom used to say, which was, "stop obsessing about it and get on with your life, and it'll work out when you least expect it." (Isn't that in the "Mom" script that they hand out to all of you in the delivery room? ;-) )

But really, I think it's true you find it when you're not looking--that's definitely how it worked for me ("I'm only in town for a year and I'm just getting over a bad breakup; I don't really want to be involved with anyone right now" I told Rebekah at some early stage of our interaction. Yeah, right.).

Maybe this is because people want what they can't have, but according to Mom (and my own life tends to provide supporting evidence), it could also be because seeking "true love," in itself, tends to be a whiny, self-absorbed activity that leaves one without anything interesting to say to "true love" when s/he does show up. (I mean, who would want to spend five minutes with any of those "sex in the city" chicks, anyway? or Grace from "Will and Grace," or the entire cast of "Waiting to Exhale"--or any number of the other tedious pop culture female role models whose entire inner life revolves around the "search for true love").

I know it's such trite, boring advice, but maybe the daughters need a hobby, or better yet an all-consuming passion, for something, anything outside themselves? (I don't know them at all, so maybe they're already all hobbied up, but I'll just follow this train of thought anyway....) To paraphrase my Mom, it's not only an opportunity to meet someone interesting but an opportunity to BE someone interesting. When I think about it, Rebekah and I met while volunteering; my one cousin met his wife while doing telemark skiing (some special kind of sporty skiing that I never heard of until their wedding); my other cousin met his wife while doing church activities; several friends I know met their spouses while doing political work; another friend met her husband when they were both volunteer EMTs; etc etc etc.

Come to think of it, why doesn't this ever happen on TV? I'm not the biggest TV watcher, but Sybil on "Moonlighting" is the last female character I can remember who met someone she loved while doing something she loved. Hey, what happened to Sybil and Murphy Brown and all those cool feminist heroines, anyway? If this is a real change, I'm sure I'm not the first person to notice this (maybe the gender theory folks can fill me in), but this is the first time I've thought about it. I can't think of any female TV characters who do anything seriously--what they do do, they seem to do as a sort of side show to their main focal point, which is their man or lack thereof. Well, I don't watch all the shows about cops and lawyers, so maybe there are some women on there who do things they really love, other than obsess about men?

Well, my one and only feminist heroine has just threatened to make me sleep in the other room if I don't come to bed, so that's all for now.