Is Love Available for Poor Men?

A while back, I had coffee with a friend of mine named Fred Sprinkle. As we sat out in front of the Starbucks on Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, Washington, he said, with regard to my desire to meet a woman I might marry: "You don't have a 'right' to have a wife." I replied that it was not a matter of rights, it was simply a matter of an intense desire on my part.

I said that to placate Fred, because I did not want to end our meeting on a hostile note. But truthfully, I was really, really offended. What if he had substituted the phrase "home in which to live" for the word "wife"? What if he'd substituted the phrase "food to fill your stomach"? Does not the right to life include such basic things? Just because there are idiots who cannot grasp the importance of the right to life, with respect to unborn children and abortion, does not make that right go away, nor does it mean that the right only applies to some categories of human beings and not to other categories.

When it comes to love and romance, the odds are heavily weighted against men who are poor economically, whether or not they are homeless or recently homeless. It was not any flaw in my character that forced me to live at the Lighthouse Mission. The economy stunk in general, as anyone who watched the news could tell you. The fact that I'd suffered several disabling "ministrokes" did not help.

Women often talk about the "glass ceiling", and about how they are disadvantaged in the workforce. All they want, they often say, is "economic equality".

Well, I am here to say that that is pure unadulterated bovine excrement. To a lot of women, men are nothing but wallets with legs. There are quite a few "sugar daddy" web sites where women go to seek men who will support them in the lives of luxury they desire for themselves. One such site is SeekingArrangement. Another is MutualArrangements. A third is Sugardaddie.
The Sugardaddie site ("Dating for the Attractive and Successful") says it's "millionaire dating for attractive and successful people". One might naively think that men who wanted to be supported by women could hope to find such women there. After all, there are plenty of women with substantial amounts of money of their own. Women like the ones at http://money.cnn.com/gallery/magazines/fortune/2012/09/27/25-highest-paid-women.fortune/ certainly do NOT need "sugar daddies" in order to avoid living in the poor house. Safra Catz, according to the article, rakes in roughly 51 million dollars a year in her job working for Oracle Corporation (responsible for all those annoying ads pertaining to updates of your JavaScript). Sheryl Sandberg, at Facebook, "only" makes 31 million or so per year. Oh, boo, hoo, hoo, "cry me a river". And here I am, expected to feel that I am fortunate to actually have half of one apartment, after spending 9 months of my life living in a homeless shelter known as the Lighthouse Mission. I still can't afford a car of my own, so I have to get rides on the WTA paratransit vans ("buses", as they call them).

Regarding the Seeking Arrangement web site, one oneline article says, "SeekingArrangement.com reports that the average registered public school teacher on the site is between the ages of 28 and 33 years old, and asks for $3000 a month in financial assistance." $3,000 a month?!? Wow, there goes my entire budget, and then some. I'm only getting about $700 a month altogether, most of which comes from my SSI benefits.

Not long ago, Fred told me that he thought I was "obsessed" with getting a woman of my own. Yeah, kind of like I was obsessed with getting the bleep out of the Lighthouse Mission, so that going to church would be a matter of my own free will decisions, not a matter of rules and regulations forced on me as a condition for getting any kind of housing at all! Fred has a car. Fred has a wife. Fred has a paying job. How dare he, or anyone else who has been blessed with such things, imply that they are entitled to experience such things but I am not? I worked for the bulk of my life, when I could find work, and I often stayed after work and put in extra hours, to make sure that the job was done right. That was the case when I managed the database at YMCA Child Welfare in Chicago, where we handled the care of 950 foster children in need of loving homes.

Fred's pastor, Matt Atkins, recently sent me an email that implied that I was some kind of rapist or wannabe rapist, saying, "I truly hope you find a spouse, Mark. I pray that that happens. As for your accusation that you are being falsely accused, why don't we sit down with a police officer and one of the young women you gave a note too, and ask the police officer if your actions could be deemed "predatorial"?    I think the answer would be very clear.  Your actions cause me to think you are predatorial, whether you are or not doesn't matter. I am a mandatory reporter if I am concerned that someone might "offend" with a minor or non-consenting adult, I am concerned enough with you that if something else happens I'll report it to the police."

So, in other words, it doesn't matter much to Matt whether there is any substance to his accusations or not. (There isn't. I have NEVER EVEN KISSED A WOMAN WHO DID NOT WANT TO BE KISSED. As for his comment about "a minor", he needs to check his laws. 19 years old is NOT A MINOR. If a 19-year-old female wants to star in a porn film (or work as a legal prostitute in the state of Nevada), she is legally free to do so.  I freely admit that when I asked a woman of that age out for a cup of coffee with me, I did not know that she was 19 years old. I could be wrong, but I think I spotted that young woman in the company of the Bellingham High School Show Stoppers, which provided musical entertainment for Heather Ludwig's Stroke Support Group at our annual Christmas party on December 12. Interestingly, the woman who directed to that music group called the members "kids", but she then corrected herself and said YOUNG ADULTS.

Oh, by the way, I followed Matt's advice regarding presenting my case to a police officer, when I sent an e-mail to another pastor named Mitch Senti, and when I sent a copy of that email to Detective Allan Jensen of the Bellingham Police. The letter included my current address and my current cell phone at the end. If Allan Jensen honestly thought that I posed any kind of threat involving "non-consenting adults" or minors, don't you think that he would have showed up on my doorstep before now? Yeah, I think so. But after being sent after me one time already, by Brad Howell from Hillcrest Chapel, and after having seen for himself that the only "threat" I posed to anyone was the threat that I might actually speak my mind, I think that Allan is probably tired of being jerked around by power-hungry pastors who are too loose with their accusatory words.