[Tirned Tinnu]

Thank you Lush, for quoting me.
You seem confused about the problem of "nice men" versus "egotistical men".
Perhaps I can offer an example.
I was once courted by a man who was 4 years older than me. Certainly too old for a 16 year old girl. I did not find him attractive. In a year when I was in full spring of my youth, a blushing virgin, ripe as a strawberry on the verge of picking, he was balding, skinny, sweaty, zit ridden, full of uncontrolled jittery movements and the tendency to chew his fingernails off. He asked me to marry him. (Of course, not that year, he'd wait for me through college.) I was horrified. If this was how he looked now, well, it was all downhill from there! He promised me that he would treat me as Pygmalion's statue, placing me on a pedestal, ever revearing me as if I were Varda, queen of the world.
I laughed haughtily, and shugged him off.

Instead I found a fighter, who was handsome and quick tongued, a swordsman and a ruffian, and pledged to him my troth though he kept me waiting for years. He betrayed me by bedding a 16 year old. Is that irony, or what?!

So I learned the hard way, that perhaps it's better to take the nice over the handsome, and the legend of The Frog Prince or Gawaine kissing the ugly woman to discover the true princess might have been correct. I think that this is what Tolkien is trying to do, to teach us about marriage and balanced pairings, about life and our choices in love.

[ September 21, 2002: Message edited by: Tirned Tinnu ]