A new essay by alumni Tatjana Soli (fiction ’06) is featured in the New York Times column Modern Love:
One of my first boyfriends announced after our fourth date that he would never consider marrying or even living with a woman who smoked. I was devastated (although I didn’t smoke).
Still in college, I was looking for a soul mate, and my boyfriend’s inflexibility seemed unromantic in the extreme. One of my glamorous ideals back then was a black-and-white picture of Camus looking rumpled, intellectual and French with a cigarette tucked between his fingers. This guy would ask him to take it outside.
“What if she were the most beautiful, smart, sexy woman in the world?” I asked. “What if she said you were the love of her life? You’d give all that up because of a nicotine habit?”
I mention this only to establish that I never would have thought it necessary to establish criteria for boyfriends or husbands, especially one as seemingly unimportant as: Must love dogs.
