Fight Club 9 years later
“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”
I was a bit of a wallflower in high school. Not for lack of trying, of course. I was the ubiquitous dateless wonder, the consummate sexless virgin, the omnipresent guy you feel sorry for yet hang out with anyway. Okay, it wasn’t that bad, but being “that guy” in high school, made it seem that bad. I started college with a rather spotty record, you know, with the ladies. And by spotty, I only mean one spot, and that spot was zero. A generation of teen sex romps had informed me that going to college a virgin invariably meant leaving college a virgin. Ignoring the homosexual overtones of the conversation, Tyler’s talk with Jack about settling down and getting married being the last option either of them would choose seemed like the only thing that made sense to me.
It was the equivalent of a drunken friend letting me know that I was too good for my recent ex, and that I should swear off women altogether because they’re nothing but trouble and heartache, minus the drunken friend and recent ex. Such a philosophy didn’t seem like a bad idea for a guy that had problems with women anyway, and besides, Tyler didn’t seem like he had any troubles with meaningless sex with floozies. I could only benefit from adopting such an ideal. Luckily I had even less luck with this approach than I had before. This ended up working out to my extreme benefit, as I managed to meet my wife a few years into college. She wasn’t my wife at the time, of course, but once we met one thing led to another until we were blissfully wed.2 It’d be silly to say that Fight Club influenced my decision one way or the other to get married, but I discovered, like the narrator, that love can give you strength. Through my marriage I’ve discovered things about myself that I wouldn’t have been able to find any other way, and that includes an imaginary hetero life-mate.
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