Six years, and nobody was ever asked to decide.
She had the degree, the job, the apartment, the friends. In six years, no man ever had to answer anything.
All of this comes out of one book, Castles Want Queens, Not Princesses. Near the front of it, Blair Rowe writes down the six years before she stopped.
Six years. I want you to hear the number, because you probably have one too. Mine ran from twenty-four to thirty. I had the master’s, the job, my own apartment. I had friends. I went out.
And nobody chose me. Not once, in six years, did a man look at me the way you look at something you’ve decided to keep. And I did what you do: I decided something was wrong with them, and then that something was wrong with the market, and then, quietly, at eleven at night with the phone in my hand, that something was wrong with me.
from Castles Want Queens, Not Princesses by Blair Rowe
Three explanations, and the third one sticks
Every woman I know has run that same list, in that same order. Them, then the market, then herself. She stops at herself, because that's the one that hands her something to do. If you're the problem, there's nothing left to look into and plenty left to fix. So you fix. You get better at the job. You get better company at dinner. You get easier to be around.
The book has a fourth answer, and it stings. It stings less than the third one. Nothing was wrong with her. She was auditioning.
An audition, and nobody was judging
For six years she walked into every evening as a candidate. Excellent, easy, interested in his work, free on Saturday. Never once the woman who'd said out loud what she wanted. The book puts it in one clause: a good conversation becomes an audition under those conditions, and auditions make everybody perform.
So the man across the table isn't holding out on her. Nobody asked him anything. He's having a nice evening, then a nice month, and the arrangement suits him, because nothing in it calls for a decision. She goes home and reads the silence for a verdict nobody ever wrote.
She has a better name for those six years than I do. A telepathy exam nobody had been told they were taking.
One sentence, and it's on page two
Rowe doesn't save the method for the last chapter. She puts it on page two. One sentence, said out loud, and then you stop talking.
A sentence isn't what six years are made of, though. Six years are made of a hundred small moves that put you back in the audition an hour after you swore you were done with it. You don't catch yourself making them. Nobody does, from the inside.
So the woman who invented the method turned it on herself, years later, in month seven of her own marriage. Three weeks. She wrote down what she caught.
The one who says I’m fine because it’s easier to keep up. The one who filters every opinion before letting it out. The one who puts herself together a little more than she needs to for dinner at home.
from Castles Want Queens, Not Princesses by Blair Rowe
She got it wrong first in a climbing gym. Then in a catering business. Then in her own kitchen. That's most of the book, and it's the half you can't work out alone on a Saturday.
She was never a candidate for anything
The title does real work. The castle is a man with a life already built: the job, the apartment, the friends, the Tuesday nights. The princess waits outside it to be chosen, and performs while she waits. The queen already runs one of her own, says what she wants once, and watches. Queen here just means the woman in charge of herself.
She already ran her own. Nobody doubted that for one of those six years. She was standing outside a room she was qualified to walk into, waiting for somebody to call her name. And nobody calls your name at a party you were already invited to.
CASTLES WANT QUEENS NOT PRINCESSES | The Difference Between the Woman He Dates and the Woman He Keeps | BLAIR ROWE. About two hundred pages, on the phone that already sits in the room at eleven at night.
Why it would be worth doing this week
The reason is in the book, in a parking lot, with a bar’s reservation card in her hand and a number written in the corner of it. Her hands were shaking. She sent the text before she could talk herself out of it, because she already knew what talking herself out of things had cost her. She put a number on it.
I came within one talked-myself-out-of-it of losing six more months of my life. To a text.
from Castles Want Queens, Not Princesses by Blair Rowe
If you’ve closed a book like this before
Plenty have, right around page twelve. Either it turned out to be written for somebody ten years younger, or it turned out to be a set of moves for keeping a man interested. Both are fair reasons to be careful with this one. So here are the author’s own terms:
Apply the method for 90 days. If it doesn’t work for you, you get your money back.
Six years of waiting to be picked, and the method starts on page two.