Column: Making your own mistakes

By Gwen Daniels
June 4, 2008

Even before I came to MU, I could envision my column. Once a week, “Single File” would appear in The Maneater. My photograph would be at the top of the page: me with my hair teased, winking, puckering my lips, playfully seductive. I’d describe my latest dating dilemma and invite my readers to share their advice on an online poll. “A cutie in my psych class asked me to dinner!” I’d write. “Problem is, he smokes — yuck! Should I a) take him up on it; b) make him promise to leave his cigarettes at home; or c) say no to secondhand smoke?” Every week, I would follow the advice of my readers and report back seven days later.

“Single File” is inherently flawed. I don’t want to embarrass the unsuspecting men I know and I don’t want to tell 27,000 students I Google Earth my crush’s house. I refuse to take the advice of random voters. With the click of a mouse, the girl down the hall who doesn’t wear flip-flops in the community shower could slaughter my chance of getting married.

Plus, my daddy reads The Maneater online. Daddy wouldn’t just vote once, twice, three times a week, controlling my love life from his office 400 miles away. No, I bet my daddy would e-mail my editor with advice for me.

“Erica,” he would write. “Please tell Gwen she should under absolutely no circumstances date any man who even knows what a cigarette is.”

Most importantly, my romantic life doesn’t merit 600 words a week and an online poll. As a columnist for The Maneater, I am so not writing an interactive dating column.

The ultimate problem with “Single File” is not potential mortification, too much advice or even my loveless love life. By following the whims of readers, I wouldn’t make my own mistakes. I would make theirs.

I want to make my own mistakes. I need to grow from them.

When I graduated from high school, I only had one regret: I wish I had gotten to really, deeply know the people I thought I wasn’t supposed to get to know, the people who weren’t National Honor Society officers, who weren’t capital-letter Conservative Christians, who weren’t slightly-varied versions of me.

(Okay, second regret: I wish I had taken an Advanced Placement lab science in high school. Now I have to take a geology lab online over the summer. Yes, online lab science. I’ll have my own personal set of rocks.)

I know phenomenal people at MU. In my freshman year of college, I got coffee with some people from high school I wanted to talk to, some of the people I secretly admired, some people I wondered about, some people I never got to know. These people aren’t actually my acquaintances from high school. I’m the only student from my high school here at MU, and I might’ve lost the opportunity to make some great friends at home. But they are people I wouldn’t have befriended in high school. They are people, interesting, different and new, who I am excited to know.

I’ve had eye-opening, entertaining discussions: about hot-button topics such as abortion and stem-cell research, about the significance of the Old Testament, about community college and human suffering and liberal arts and what it truly means to be “pro-life.” I’m becoming more open-minded. I’m growing!

I’m growing from my own decisions, from choices I made without interactive polling.

Also, I dated a smoker. Secondhand smoke may be gross, but I like him. Should I date a smoker? I’m making that decision myself.

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Column: Making your own mistakes

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