So there’s this woman who wants to get married, because she’s 35 and ready. Whatever is she to do?
If her name is Lisa Linehan, she kicks off ProjectHusband, complete with web site and Facebook page. She plans a wedding, with the help of a company called Peapod Productions. She sets a date, gets a dress, Skypes into the freaking Today Show to tell my archnemesis Kathie Lee Gifford about it, and blogs about her “journey” for the Dallas CW affiliate, because clearly her motives are entirely pure here. She just wants to find L-U-V, seriously.
Because what is she missing? Oh, only a husband-type person. Small detail.
“Help me find my soulmate and groom for my wedding – Feb 15, 2011 Piazza in the Village near Dallas, TX,” she pleads.
That just happens to be her grandparents’ anniversary, she says. She is partnering with nonprofit organizations to do good things for the community all year while she goes out with a bunch of guys and records them to post on the web. This will be an adventure in dating, she says, that just happens to come with an online countdown clock.
I really did just sigh audibly. As an unmarried female a few years older than Lisa, I have two c0nflicting points of view about this whole Project Husband business. Picture these opinions as the little angel and devil Fred Flintstone, if you will, and watch them duke it out.
Angel Fred: Good for you. Go ahead. Publicly date and eventually marry it up, especially if you’re willing to slog through Facebook messages like this one:
“heyy im from dominican republic.. i just saw ur story on al rojo vivo… i´d like 2be close of u honey.. but gud luck n congrats for ur wedding!!”
“My brother is looking for a American Wife .. He is a good man, single, without children…. Do you want to know him? I like you as a sister in law…”
Well, be my (wedding) guest. Take the matrimonial bull by the horns. Never mind getting to know someone or letting a relationship evolve without the pressure of a wedding date that’s, hmmm, seven months away. Never mind taking this, or anything, off-camera. Even do really weird and awkward things, like take some hapless dude — pretty much a stranger, I’m guessing — on a cake-tasting date.
DO IT. FIND A MAN. Time waits for no single woman!
Oh my God, I think I killed Angel Fred. Let’s move on.
Devil Fred: Gag. Stop. Go away.
Way to focus on the trappings of a wedding day and the need to legally tie yourself to another person, ostensibly forever, on DEADLINE. Present a pure-and-simple PR ploy and stab at using that University of Virginia marketing degree (yes, I read her bio) as a real deal life choice. Blog the hell out of this, baby. Skype in to morning television programs. Use this as a convenient excuse to bludgeon the world with your treacly pop music recordings.
Why must there so frequently be accompanying treacly pop music recordings?
Do all of this, while worst of all? You intentionally or not perpetuate the notion that not only beyond a certain age is a woman nothing without a man, but, worse than that, the person you’re getting married TO is the final interchangeable detail of a successfully sponsored and overly-documented wedding that may or may not happen in the first place.
Devil Fred is verbose and he is a downer, I know. He wants to be laid back about this, wants to say that hey, in a world dominated by the Bachelorette that love and marriage has already been commodified, thank you very much, and that you’re just as likely to meet Mr./Ms. Right on a series of made-for-the-internet dates as you may be in any other random people-meeting way. And at this point in Reality TV Nation we should be used to the supremely blurred edges of fake and real — of life and truth as purely editable entities.
Lighten. Up. Devil. Fred.
But I don’t think he — that we — can. Project Husband may be, as Lisa Linehan says, a social dating experiment, and for her that’s fine. Maybe it will score her more local fame and a minor league recording contract. Maybe she will meet the man of her dreams. Maybe February 15 will be a beauteous, meant-t0-be sort of day. But I would just like it if she were more upfront about the mercenary backstory — that this is just as much about commerce as it is about love.
Because it is, right? Or am I reading it wrong?
Or do I just not want any more projects, especially not of the human variety?
Eh, maybe I’m just an idealist — because I think that even Devil Fred might be a fan of singing some songs for real.
. . . . .
Laurie honestly has her mind blown by stuff like Project Husband.
