New Book Review for 1.14.24: Just Maybe

Title: Just Maybe 

Author: Hannah Jo Abbott 

Date: 2019 

Publisher: Grace & Peace 

Quote: "I can't be in a relationship right now." 

Brakes. This is a sweet Christian romance but I find myself reading it as Act One of a tragedy. 

One romance trope I've never liked is the one where the conceited hormone-ridden male pushes the female to "choose between your career and ME!" In a romance she's required to choose him by the rules of the genre. I tend to feel that that's always the wrong decision. 

I may be excessively biased about this. There may be women who put a man ahead of a job and were better off for it. But what I was told as a girl has proved to be true in every case I've observed: Job skills last longer than men do. Between a man and a job skill, always choose the job skill. No contest. Always remember that, in couples that stay married, most wives outlive their husbands--some by fifty years.

Here we have a sweet college romance about a student who likes being at the head of every class, who wants to be a pediatrician, dealing with peer pressure to start "dating" a boy who says icky creepy things like "And being a pediatrician is the only way to [help children]? What about having kids?" In the novel it may work for the characters, but in real life, if any high school or college girls consider reading this book...ICKY. CREEPY. 

If you don't feel that you should do something that carries risks for other people, whether it's driving a car or having a baby, you should not do it, and anyone who pressures you to do it is not a friend. 

If the taxpayers and your parents are paying to have you prepared to be a pediatrician, you should already have come to terms with the fact that that career choice writes off your prime childbearing years, and the probability that as a pediatrician you can probably get paid to adopt children, and the truth that there are enough baby humans in this world already. 

If your DNA is all that special, you should not plan on being any kind of doctor. Why expose those perfect babes to the stress and germs? Pick a nice clean job you can teach the kids to do with you!

But as a pre-medical student you should, most of all, be able to replace friends who apply pressure on you to "date" that icky creepy would-be baby-daddy. 

Yes, "falling in love" feels good when you're in college...but there are good reasons to wait. 

For one thing, people who seemed very nice in college have not been road-tested yet. When Mr. Straight Arrow faces real-world temptation, he might end up marrying one of his students--the gender-confused one, at that, like the boy people at my church college thought was so perfect for me. Or embezzling money, or taking drugs. You don't know. Some nice, cute, well-behaved college boys are going to become the sort of men you want to marry, and some are not. One of the fellows who sat through an ethics course with me grew up to be a scuzzy lawyer who sues old people for payments they have already made, figuring that they're too worried about their health and/or too senile to fight back. He wasn't an especially attractive student, but then again he had as much potential to be attractive when he finished growing up as everyone else had.

For another thing, although enjoying a strong physical attraction is unlikely to hurt your grades, giving in to it and making a baby most certainly will. 

For another thing, most college romances go very sour very fast, and the ugliest emotional messes of all occur when you knew the person was not your beshert, but you let other people push you into per arms...When you wait and watch and limit "dating" to walking into a campus cultural event with one person or another, and some of those people make it clear that they're not your beshert, you can still be friends. You can feel good about the person, and yourself, because you spotted incompatibilities in time. "Tracy is a nice person, but Tracy and I are taking different roads in life." But when you gave in, not even to your own hormones, but to a lot of unpleasant people whom you, in your inexperience, mistook for friends, and made Commitments of Time and Investments of Emotion and All That in someone you you didn't even want to kiss...oh, the misery! Not only have you lost Tracy as a friend; you've lost all the people who pushed you toward Tracy, as friends. You failed to stand up to them, and now you wonder if you have any friends at all. Hormones are not our friends. People who want to let the hormones run wild are not our friends. 

Friends say to college students, "Wait--if you can!--and keep your hormones to yourself. See which of the people you find attractive wants to live in the same place you do, after college. See whose life plans and dreams fit together with yours. See how Miss Pretty and Nice holds up when she's paying her own bills. See whether Mr. Straight Arrow can start a new trend for the coffee, tea, and water lunch, or lets his Irish genes make him a disgusting sodden drunk in a business where his colleagues take three-martini lunches. Then it's time to try being a couple."

Are there no people who marry young and stay married until they're very old? There are. Some people's life plans do revolve around having babies early in life. But when a sweet, pretty, nice, lovable, sincere college girl like Carrie says she's not sure she wants to have children because she didn't think her own parents showed her how to show love to children, a man worth marrying listens. Carrie may not have a big bad emotional problem; Carrie definitely has communication problems. You want to see how well she's learned the communication skills her parents lacked before you allow her to baby-sit with children.

This is a sweet college romance, wholesome in the sense that the characters spend more time talking than kissing, but I can't say I recommend it to college students. Married women who want to remember feeling like college students, maybe, but for their sakes I hope this is not a story they'll find easy to relate to. But if you want to recall days when the world was new and you were full of doubts and fears, and also hormones, this book may help recapture that mood.