In the past couple of years, several of my single girlfriends have fallen for the same man. I can understand why. He's chiselled and magnetic in a Heathcliff-meets-Mr. Rochester sort of way - one of those brooding types who, despite his actual age, behaves like a perennially wounded teenage boy. But it distresses me, not only because he's an inappropriate match, but because he is also someone they will never, ever get to meet.
That's because he's fictional.
Yep, my girlfriends are crushing on Edward Cullen, the vampire heartthrob from the Twilight movie series.
"I love him and I want to marry him," a pal recently confided to me over drinks. She is not a cat-obsessed shut-in, but a beautiful and well-educated 30-year-old schoolteacher who has plenty of single men hurling themselves her way. Just not in the way she'd like.
"You mean you want someone just like him," I suggested. "Someone dark and romantic with old-fashioned manners. A successful creative type. Like maybe an architect or a composer in his mid-to-late 30s, with a dog and a child from a previous -"
She cut me off with a shake of her head. "I want Edward."
Well, that is a difficult one, I had to admit. Impossible both to arrange and to fathom - until, that is, I saw the movie. The third in the series is just out and proving to be a summer hit. Suddenly, I understand why even grown women are swooning for this fictional blood-sucker. Allow me to explain.
It has often been noted by critics that the author of the Twilight novels is a practising Mormon. This is important because the series' storyline revolves around the battle for one girl's virginity, both in the metaphorical and literal sense.
Bella, a morose child of divorce, moves to Forks, Wash. to live with her single dad. There she finds herself attracted to Edward, a gloomy outsider who runs with a crowd of similarly melancholic foster kids with amber eyes and ghostly pale skin - think emo as undead. At first Edward spurns her advances, keeping her confused and off-balance, until finally he admits the truth: He loves her - so much so that if they hooked up he might just lose control and sink his fangs into Bella's neck, causing her to spend the rest of eternity thirsting for blood like him. Basically, this is vampire code for "let's take it slow."
But like any teen girl confronted with a cute older guy (Edward is over 100 years old) with a deep dark secret and means to spirit her away forever, Bella's reaction is: "Bite me, baby."
As the Atlantic Monthly writer Caitlin Flanagan puts it more eloquently in her review of the series, " Twilight centres on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known."
No wonder that my single twenty- and thirtysomething girlfriends are hot for a vampire - Edward is the anti-Mr. Big and Twilight is the anti- Sex and the City.
Think about it: Where Mr. Big for years wanted sex without commitment, Edward wants commitment without sex - an old-world ideal that seems all but lost in the modern orgy of designer shoe shopping and no-strings hook-ups that, many fashion magazines and films will have you believe, is day-to-day life for most single urban women today.
And indeed that's true for some. But the fact is, most single women today want far more than that. They want to be prized, not discarded after use. They want substance over style and decency over decadence. With few exceptions, they want, deep down, a good relationship.
But like Bella, their desires are also somewhat paradoxical. Single women want freedom yet they also want to be protected. They want a man who is passionate but is also willing to respect their dignity and (dare I say it?) virtue, too. In short, they want to be courted like young ladies from the 19th Century and respected as the grown-up modern feminists they are.
At this point a lot of single men will be rolling their eyes and saying, "Therein lies the problem!" (Okay, maybe that's just the old-timey way Edward would say it, but you get what I mean). But why shouldn't single women be able to have their beefcake and eat it, too?
In a more recent essay for the same magazine, Flanagan, who is at work on a book about the emotional lives of teenage girls, writes about how the Twilight series (and other books and movies like it) are evidence of girls rejecting the notion of hook-up culture in favour of "the boyfriend story" - basically the notion that emotional sensitivity and sexual desire need not be mutually exclusive.
"There might seem something wan, even pitiable, about all these young girls pining for boyfriends instead of hook-ups," she writes. "But the wishes of girls, you have to remember, have always been among the most powerful motivators in the lives of young men. They still are."
The same goes for my single adult girlfriends' desires. Inundated as they are with a mindless stream of beauty tips, celebrity gossip and invitations for empty casual sex, they will manage, I predict, to find their Edwards. And by that I mean a successful thirtysomething creative type with a dog and a child from a previous marriage. After all, even girls who believe in fairy tales need to be realistic.