dormamcgruder.com

The following appeared in the newsletter of a 1400 member church, and was supposedly a letter written from one member to another:

Dear Friend:

Our church membership                                            1400

Non-resident members                                                 75

Balance left to do work                                               1325

Elderly folk who have done their share                           25

Balance left doing work                                              1300

Sick and shut ins                                                            25

Balance left to do work                                               1275

Members who do not pledge                                        350

Balance left to do work                                                 925

Christmas and Easter members                                    300

Balance left to do work                                                 625

Members tired and overworked                                    300

Balance left to do work                                                 325

Those with alibis                                                          200

Those who said yes but meant no                                123

Balance left to do the work                                               2

That’s just you and me – And we’d better get busy.  Especially you – It’s too much for me!

Many A Man who is in love with a dimple, makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl, said Stephen Leacock.

I quoted this aphorism last week to a young man who confided to me that he had almost decided to marry a certain girl because she has such “fine qualities.”

One of the grand errors we tend to make when we are young is supposing that a person is a bundle of qualities.  And we add up the individual’s good and had qualities, like a bookkeeper working on debits and credits. 

If the balance is favorable, we may decide to take the jump.  But human arithmetic has an X factor that never shows up on the books.  It is this X factor, and not the qualities themselves, that determines the success or failure of an emotional relationship.

The world is full of unhappy men and women who married their mates because of a preponderance of “good” qualities – honesty, gentleness, stability, generosity.  It seemed to be a sound investment.

Love, however, is not an investment: it is an adventure.  And when the marriage turns out to be as dull and comfortable as a sound investment, the disgruntled party soon turns elsewhere for adventure.

We have lost sight of the fact that a personality is much more than a collection of traits, and that love is a celebration of a mystery, not an inventory of assets.

No one knows why two personalities do or do not get along well together; but we do know that is has little to do with the traits you can weigh and measure and tabulate.

Ignorant people are always saying, “I wonder what he sees in her,” not realizing that what he sees iin her (and what no one else can see in her) is the secret essence of love.  Love is always an overevaluation – a distortion, if you will – of the other person.

Entering a marriage calmly and rationally is like dancing a bacchanal calmly and rationally; it is a contradiction in terms.  It takes into account everything except what is important: the spirit.

This is why living with a “good” person we do not love is infinitely more of a hell than loving a “bad” person we have to learn to live with.  Take a look around and see if it isn’t so.

Mathematically speaking, only 17 good men are left.

Valentine’s Day seems as appropriate a time as any to ask, “Where have all the men gone?”

“It’s been a while since I’ve shopped, but every woman I’ve encountered doing the singles scene has confirmed that eligible men have become as extinct as the whooping crane.  The dating famine seems to have hit the 25-30 age group the hardest.  No one knows why.  Logistically speaking, this is the way the figures add up. 

In 1955, 2,073,719 boy babies were born.  Out of that number, 872,638 died in war, accident, or natural causes, leaving 1,201,081.

Now it gets sticky.  since 10 percent of every thousand get married and five percent of every thousand get divorced, you can assume 15 percent of this total are marrying and divorcing one another, leaving 1,020,919.

A survey recently estimated that homosexuals represented possibly 10 oercent of the males, which brings the eligibles down to 1,010,710.

Of the little over a million eligibles roaming around, five percent don’t know their sign and don’t even care.  Another five percent are tied to their mothers by a food fixation and would never give that relationship up for a girl.  They prefer to hang out with their handball buddies.

A whopping 20 percent are searching for a girl in the traditional role who will pick up his clothes, run his bath, burn her fingers shelling his three-minute egg, run his errands, bear him a child every year, look like a fashion model, tend his needs when he is sick, and hold down a full-time job outside the home to make payments on his boat.

Twelve percent are perennial schoolboys who take two classes a semester, have changed their major 13 times and feel they cannot risk a commitment until they are out of school.

Fifty-five percent of today’s eligible men have gone underground for lack of money.  “Hello” is a luxury.  “I’m buying” is a line they only remember from an old Bogart movie.

Let’s see, what’s left?  A conservative three percent.  Hey, that means there are 17 men out there who are your basic healthy, traditional males who still believe in conversation, time to know one another and are not threatened by new attitudes.

This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody.

There was an important job to be done and everybody was asked to do it.

Everybody was sure that Somebody would do it. 

Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. 

Somebody got angry about that, because it was everybody’s job.

Everybody thought Anybody realized that Everybody wouldn’t do it. 

It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what Anybody could have done.