Everybody Needs a Plan B (although I could use a Plan G!)

I've got some good ideas for a few new posts so keep checking back in the next week or so. But first in response to my nunnery post, my friend sent me a great story about the ideas she and her friends had come up with about their own spinster commune. They have some great ideas, I especially like the one about having a patron to fund the whole thing. So without further ado here is Plan B.

"Ok, so Plan B.
First you have to realize that this was cooked up in the mind of me and my high-school friends who really had nothing better to do with our time.

I think you'll appreciate it though, since it relates to your whole nun topic.

So, to explain. To every one of us, in some form or other, about the same thing had happened: we had gotten the "talk" from a guy that we liked but apparently didn't like us back in that way. You know, the talk that goes something like this:
Guy: You are so great.
Girl: I think you're great too.
Guy: I feel so close to you. You're like a sister to me.
Read: There is no chance ever that we will get together in a romantic way.

So one of my friends had recently gotten that talk from a guy and he actually told her that he thought of her as sort of a secular nun. Meaning, I guess, that he envisioned her as celibate, but not Catholic. Which of course meant that he couldn't see getting together with her.

So all of this spawned an "order" of sorts where we called ourselves the Secular Nuns. And in planning for our future, Plan B was born. Basically it was something that we liked to fantasize about because, again, we had nothing better to do with our time. But I guess it's a way of talking about our fears without really going off the deep end. The secular nuns always planned on wearing fabulous prom dresses as their habits, of course. No blah habits for us.

So the plan is this: our friend T always wanted to be a doctor (which she is now, by the way) and doctors make a lot of money, right? So we figured that if none of us got married, we would just live together in a big house and that was Plan B. It's not unlike your idea of getting together and sharing a place. Here are some of the details:
-- Our mansion is located on the Oregon coast.
-- It's large enough for each person to have her own wing of the house.
-- However, there are some shared facilities that we all enjoy, such as a library.
-- Oh, and did I mention the bowling alley?
-- And the waterslide. The waterslide is actually an enclosed one and it goes through the library. So when you are sitting quietly in the library and reading a book, every once in a while someone comes down the waterslide...
-- I think there was something about each of us having our own servant boy or cabana boy or something, but you can fill in your own ideas about that.
-- Although our rich doctor patroness basically provides for our every need, for pocket change we make little souvenirs to sell on the beach. You know, the ones that are like rocks and shells with googley eyes? Cheap souvenirs like that.

So that is Plan B. Every once in a while we would just sit around and talk about what was going to be in our house and that was our way of having fun. Or commiserating. Or both. :)"

Thank you, dear reader friend for the story. I also love the waterslide idea. Who says spinsters can't have fun!

Get Thee to a Nunnery...

Sometimes I wish we as Mormons had our own counterpart of the Catholic nun. I mean since I have wound up taking a vow of celibacy and unfortunately a vow of poverty I might as well get some kind of credit for it, right? I mean not every Mormon girl is going to marry, so why not give her a post where she doesn't have to feel guilty or sad about not finding her EC (Eternal Companion). My friend has even come up with a name for us Mormon nuns- Mormonja! I guess a word for 'nun' in Spanish is 'monja', so she just combined mormon and monja. Perfect! See my friend's post: http://mormonja.blogspot.com/2008/05/where-did-term-mormonja-come-from.html.

Ok, so I know that that's never going to happen, but that doesn't mean I can't come up with my own kind of nunnery! Wouldn't it be great to have some sort of spinster community where we could support and befriend one another. Technically my nunnery wouldn't be like a Catholic nunnery, nor would it be like living like as a sister missionary. Spinsters would have regular jobs and could even date and evenually get married if they wanted to leave the flock. The great thing about my nunnery would be the friendship AND the combination of resources.

That is the kicker. Just imagine how much we could have if we combined our resources. The sad truth of the matter is that statistically, women make less money throughout their lives than men. I don't know why that is, is it the glass ceiling effect, do women start their careers later or do they just choose careers that don't pay as much? It's hard to say, but what I do know is that it is hard to buy a nice home on a spinster's budget or have nice things. But just imagine if 4 spinsters living together combined their 35,000/a year salaries-that's 140,000/year, enough to afford a nice house and stop blowing our money on rent! I'm not really talking about everyone sharing their money equally like the law of consecration, but I am talking about buying a house together and other things together that you couldn't afford alone!

Now I know there are skeptics out there, because I've talked to them about my plan, but it could work. If someone did decide to leave they could sell their share of the house to another spinster(including the equity they had accrued) or rent it out to another spinster (or maybe do a rent to own plan). There would definitely be some kind of contract that would outline all of the particulars. I know spinsters like to be independent and are often transient, but after awhile you just want to settle down and have a house like all your married friends have. Why can't we have the same things? We can, we just have to be more creative about it.