From the New York Times:
The information in these files was so abstract, so sterile, so tinged with the depressing reality of paternal grandmothers with diabetes and fathers with heart disease.
What about personality, love, intellect, passion? All I had to go on was the hieroglyphics of handwriting. I couldn’t visualize any of them. From what I understood they were mostly kids, college students in need of tuition money, with mothers who were probably younger than I. I’d probably be better off grading their college English papers and picking a father for my child on that basis. What was I doing here?
UNFORTUNATELY I was looking for love, still trying to make an intuitive selection, not a rational one. I tried to fall for something on each page, some soaring words in their short essays, but there was barely the flair of a crossed T to swoon over.
Um, lady, you’re in a sperm bank. Your chance at romance and Daddy taking the kids to their soccer game has passed. Following your intuition instead of reason is precisely what got you here in the first place. No doubt her intuition told her that those men who were willing to marry her in years past were not exciting and passionate enough for her.
The thing is, excitement and passion are the very last things you want in a marriage. Infidelity is exciting. Divorce is passionate. Safe, friendly and mutually comfortable is what men and women should pursue in an ideal marriage, but of course, such pedestrian wisdom is wasted on young hearts steeped in Hollywood romance.