Wednesday, May 08, 2013
Wrong ending
Listening to a discussion of marriage on local EWTN station. Mostly good points: the pre-1968 approach to marriage worked, while the modern approach doesn't. Good hints on selecting a partner, but one illustration was glaringly wrong.
The marriage expert told this story, which he admitted was more of a parable than a strictly true account:
A soldier had been corresponding with a beautiful girl while he was serving in WW2. When he was demobilized, he took a bus to the town where the girl lived, and arranged to meet her for the first time. He was supposed to go into a certain restaurant and look for a girl carrying a red rose in her left hand. He got off the bus and found the restaurant. Went in and looked around. He saw one girl with a rose, but she was a dumpy overweight type, one of those girls who looks 50 when she's 20. Nevertheless, he approached her and introduced himself. She said that she wasn't quite sure what was happening, but another girl had asked her to carry a red rose and watch the entrance. She pointed to the back of the room where the beautiful girl was waiting without any roses. The soldier went to the beautiful girl; she said that she had misplaced the rose to see if he would respond primarily to surface beauty. Soldier and pretty girl married, and everyone lived happily forever after.
NO! Dead wrong! Precisely wrong! If the soldier had any sense, he would have returned immediately to Dumpy Girl after discovering the deception. Pretty Girl had just proved herself to be a faithless trickster, a deceiving devil. Dumpy Girl had shown herself to be honest and amenable.
¶ 2:34 AM 
