What Women Worry About

I watched a documentary on HBO the other night. It was about online dating. Statistically, the number one thing that women fear most when they engage in this activity is meeting a serial killer. The thing men fear most is meeting someone fat.

For the last 9 days my daughter has been in Nicaragua---a third world country. She is there as part of a study program through the Nicaraguan government co-sponsored with her university. She and her fellow classmates are developing a business plan for the Nicaraguan coffee growers—poor farmers. It is a noble adventure. It is a wonderful opportunity for her to experience hands-on knowledge of international economics and to see the world through the eyes of the indigent.

Yet despite all this wonderful-ness all I can think about is what could go wrong. I think about some group of revolutionaries initiating a political coup while she is there. I think about even more realistic things like her rickety bus overturning off a cliff with no way to medevac her to some subclass third world hospital. I think about malaria, typhus, yellow fever, dengue fever and leprosy—just to name a few diseases she may contract. I ignore the thought that her host family on the coffee commune will make inappropriate advances towards her or sell her into white slavery.

I think about her meeting a Nicaraguan serial killer.

And I can say with near certainty that absolutely none of these thoughts has popped into my husband’s brain every 7 minutes or so for the past 9 days like it has with me.

He sleeps well at night. Male brains are not wired to ponder the catastrophic. Their brains are more practical—which is why my husband’s only inquiry was whether I thought Kara might be hungry when she got off of the plane.

Because the truth of the matter is meeting a serial killer through online dating is statistically negligible while meeting a fat woman through online dating is a million times more likely. Numbers do not lie.

And when Kara’s plane touches the Atlanta runway I will realize that her trip was the adventure of a lifetime---fret with unnecessary worry---just as her father (and every other man) would have predicted.

The odds after all are in her favor.