Free The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum Page B

along not during high school or college or during that summer lifeguarding job but during your thirties or even your forties or fifties.”
    And, finally, my pièce de résistance:
    â€œAs fun as it is to look at graphs and pie charts and Venn diagrams showing why we make the decisions we do,” I said, “the fact is that the human heart is pretty pie chart resistant.”
    It was such a good line I was almost embarrassed. I was embarrassed for the Marriage Project guys, with their PowerPoint and the weird way, despite sounding like therapists on a Christian call-in radio show, they stepped around any mention of their religious orientation. Mostly, though, I was embarrassed for the bestselling author. Skilled speaker though she was, there was no way in hell her remarks were going to compete with mine. She was droll and appealing, but she was canned. She purported to be a truth teller but she was really a provocateur, a saleswoman, a brand. She may have sold more books than I ever had or would but the real truth teller here was me. If even just one member of the audience, perhaps a leopard-print-blouse-wearing member of the singles’ group, walked out of that synagogue thinking, Hey, my heart is not a pie chart , I’d consider it a job well done. Lip quivering in anticipation of my own profundity, I brought it on home.
    â€œChoosing a partner wisely involves logic and rationality, of course, but it also involves that woefully unscientific method called ‘just knowing,’” I said. “And some people just know in their twenties and others don’t know until much later. And that is why ultimately this discussion, fascinating as it is in many ways, is, to me, only as useful as our ability to accept the randomness of life. To think not in terms of ‘I must marry by twenty or thirty or forty’ but ‘I must respect the life and the timeline I was given and live with authenticity as well as compassion and commitment.’”
    The crowd sat there, jaws as slack as they’d been at the beginning. They applauded respectfully.
    The bestselling author stepped up to the podium. “I feel like I’m going to cry,” she said. “That was so romantic.”
    She then proceeded to bring the house down by reading from the introduction to her book. It was centered on an analogy for female pickiness she’d called the Husband Store. There were six floors in the Husband Store and you could only visit the place one time. The first floor offered men who had good jobs. If that wasn’t enough, women could proceed to the second floor, which carried men who had good jobs and loved kids. The goods grew increasingly fine (men who have good jobs, love kids, help equally with housework, give back rubs, et cetera) until the sixth floor, where women were told that there were no men on that floor and that the showroom existed only to show that women were impossible to please. “Thank you for shopping the Husband Store,” they were told.
    The audience roared with laughter. They slapped their knees and leaned forward so as not to miss a word. They rocked back and forth in their seats, as though davening to the ghost of Henny Youngman. The single women smiled big, toothy, happy smiles. The extremely pale guy in the yarmulke nodded in recognition. Next to me, the “Knot Yet” authors chuckled in appreciation, seemingly unperturbed that the speaker was making no reference whatsoever to their report.
    We had all taken so long with our remarks that there were only about five minutes left for the “debate” and questions from the audience. Most of the questions were for the bestselling author. What did she think of online dating? Did she recommend using a private matchmaker? An elderly man with a cane stood up and thanked her for her humor and perspective.
    â€œObviously, you’re the practical one and Meghan is the romantic one,” he said.
    I had never