But for me, and my three best friends, the key word is “want” rather than need.

We all have fulfilling careers, lots of good friends and interesting lives.

.” No matter what I said, or what nice things I did for Karen, she was out of my league since I was younger.

Karen was a 17 year old junior, and I was an incredibly good looking and intelligent 16 year old. This is exactly what my mom told me every time I brought her cupcakes.

This kind of culling is even easier now that dating sites let us whittle our options down to the year.

I contend that as long as nobody is being willfully creepy (I see you, guys in Ferrari hats), this kind of limitation is mega lame.

I know many brilliant, mature people who aren’t old enough to rent a car.You have to work hard to find someone you really want and really like – or, as one married male friend put it, “someone normal” (apparently normal men are in short supply).The search is a kind of journey, and along the way you tend to learn a few things about yourself, and about the society we live in. Everyone knows lots of fabulous single women in their 40s …but can’t think of any equally fabulous single men the same age.When I was a junior in college, a woman called “The Princeton Mom” wrote into our school newspaper telling undergraduate women to “Find a husband on campus before you graduate.”“Forget about having it all, or not having it all, leaning in or leaning out,” she said.We had more important things to worry about, like the alarming decay rate of our attractiveness.