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A Farewell To Bachelorhood

The unthinkable has happened: after leading a singularly single life for half a century, I'm planning to get coupled. My friend Anne D., who softly tiptoed into my heart over the past seventeen months, persuaded me to renounce my solitary ways and join the great matrimonial majority. Actually, 'persuaded' might be the wrong word; it implies a surrender of will accompanied by a sigh of resignation, like so many demoralized Aztecs renouncing their feathered gods and converting to Catholicism. (Those helmeted Conquistadors knew how to be persuasive.) No such thing happened here. What startled both of us, in the end, is that the proposal slipped happily and voluntarily from my lips -- no cajoling, no arm-twisting, no threats of bodily dismemberment. In a sudden flash of insight I beheld delightful visions of wedlock in the company of my Anne, and those visions seemed to glow brighter and more steadily than the open-air circus of bachelorhood. I promptly knelt on a pile of unopened mail in my living room and popped the question.

Ah, bachelorhood. I feel as if I'm taking leave of an old friend -- a quirky and occasionally morose friend, but a friend all the same. What will I miss about it? The traditional bachelor mode of dining, for one. Single people enjoy the inalienable right to eat anything, at any time, in any room of the house, with or without Tabasco sauce. I grab handfuls of granola when the spirit moves me, or I tuck a few slabs of canned mackerel into a pita with a hefty pinch of Cajun seasoning sprinkled over the top for added gusto. I eat my vegetables mostly raw, straight from the refrigerator -- carrots, celery, peppers, spinach, broccoli, even cabbage. I'm probably the first man in history to enjoy raw brussel sprouts as a snack food. I add corn-nuts to my salads, salsa to my baked potatoes and bits of beef jerky to my omelets -- all prime examples of scrappy yet resourceful bachelor cuisine. Ice cream is ALWAYS eaten directly from the carton, without guilt or ice cream dishes. In fact, I've dispensed with dishes of any kind; I long ago discovered that paper plates fit neatly into wicker plates -- no need to waste valuable bachelor minutes washing either of them over a grubby kitchen sink. About five years ago I took the ultimate step toward bachelor-friendly accommodations: I exiled the kitchen table from the kitchen and installed my new computer in its place. When I'm hungry, I simply swivel around in my computer chair and take what provisions I need: my refrigerator, cabinets, stove and microwave all lurk within arm's reach. How many married men can boast of such a gloriously unfettered and efficient arrangement? It pains me to give it up.

As a single guy, I've also enjoyed the freedom to seek my recreations spontaneously and without consideration for the emotional needs of a resident life-mate. I can watch old Popeye cartoons or werewolf movies with impunity; I can listen to Jimmy Durante on my stereo without causing a minor riot; I can linger at my computer until 2 a.m., pouncing at the last minute to nab an 18th-century map of Newfoundland on eBay; I know the heady exhilaration of pointing my car south and ending up on a makeshift tour of Delaware. I can clutter my abode with all manner of artifacts culled from my long and fruitful bachelor years: a stuffed pheasant here, a giant medieval brass rubbing there, ship models and souvenirs, framed autographs of Teddy Roosevelt and Rudyard Kipling, a hefty wooden Indonesian rooster on the floor and a bare-breasted Balinese goddess dangling from the ceiling. And of course, books everywhere. Shelves of books... desks and file cabinets topped with books... books next to the bed... Books ON the bed... books piled on top of books. No married man can arrange such exuberantly unfeminine interior space and live to tell about it. I know full well that my bare-breasted-goddess and books-on-the-bed days are numbered.

What about the bachelor's freedom to fall in love, you might ask. Surely I'll miss the prospect of fresh romance lurking inside the nearest Starbucks, bewitching eyes enticing me from an adjoining restaurant table, a lone kindred soul encountered on a darkened train across northern Italy. But as a wise friend once advised me, that sort of life always reads better than it plays. I'd bet that most bachelors spend their prime years, as I did, longing for quixotic apparitions that never materialize. My own romantic karma was famously bad; whenever I'd enter a cafe or bar with a reputation for attracting uncommon women, those fine-boned females instinctively knew enough to scatter just before I arrived on the scene. It didn't help, either, that I spent my prime bachelor years marooned in the borough of Queens, amid middle-aged couples with tidy little lawns. Seven years later, in an apparent attempt to engineer a social setback from which my bachelor life would never recover, I took a job in Allentown, Pennsylvania, where I live today. 

Still I attempted to extract some classic bachelor pleasures from my provincialized life. I ventured on solitary vacations with the hope of discovering romance at my hotel, on the hiking trail, along windswept beaches after families with tots had already gone packing back to civilization. No luck. I took a Caribbean cruise on a ship the size of the Titanic and marveled at the scarcity of unattached pre-menopausal women; I ended up hanging out with a genial contingent of Nebraskans. When I was growing up I'd envy the charmed lives of single men as envisioned by Hollywood: Fred Astaire courting leggy Ginger Rogers in Art Deco splendor... newspaperman Gregory Peck squiring princess Audrey Hepburn around Rome... Cary Grant getting mixed up with the incomparable Grace Kelly at Monte Carlo. What impossible, treacherous and misleading fantasies the screenwriters had concocted! What a thumping letdown when my own single life played out more like the annals of the Wichita Stamp Collector's Club!

I don't mean to imply that my bachelorhood was the social equivalent of Kazakhstan. I enjoyed a modest but rewarding share of romance and adventure -- at least one year out of four. Those intervening three years of relative torpor gave me valuable time to read Chinese philosophy, add new birds to my life-list and explore places like Millville, New Jersey. And when I did find romance, it was never while sailing on a yacht, or strolling through a snowy city park, or dancing on a rooftop in Manhattan. It was generally through friends who had the grace and good sense to introduce me to one of THEIR friends -- a woman who had the happy misfortune to be unattached at the same time I was. I'm going to marry one of those women, the most endearing and eloquent of the lot -- my own Anne D. I'm sacrificing the splendors of bachelorhood for her, and I'm hoping she'll be kind enough to let me watch an occasional werewolf movie.

© 2001 by Bridget Petrella Media Relations. "Some Cynical Guy" appears here by permission of the publisher.

Profile of a Cynic...

Bayan, who claims to be a "kinder, gentler cynic," currently lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania. His weekly column, "Some Cynical Guy," is published and syndicated by Upbeat Online. 

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