Paradigm Schefft

By Margaret Hicks in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 12, 2007 4:30PM

Hey! Are you single? Really? Are you sad about Valentine’s Day coming up? Do you feel like you need a man to make you happy? You do? Well, guess what? Everything is going to be OK! Know why? Jen Schefft is here to tell you about her new book, Better Single than Sorry: A No-Regrets Guide to Loving Yourself and Never Settling. Golly, Molly, just even reading the name of the book makes us feel better! Right, ladies? Am I right?

Ack, even Chicagoist can’t keep up that level of satire.

So Jen Schefft, star of "The Bachelor" and "The Bachelorette," has written a book letting women know that it’s OK to be single. Great — thanks, Jen. On "The Bachelor," Schefft got engaged to Andrew Firestone, then rejected two guys on "The Bachelorette." She’s also been linked to Bill Rancic and Chicago’s own Billy Dec. You can see what a hard time she has finding a man, poor thing.

We know we’re supposed to fawn over Jen because she did the right thing on "The Bachelorette," releasing two men she wasn’t interested in. But there’s just something about her that makes us want to trip her in her high-heeled shoes. First of all, having a beautiful, rich, successful woman tell you that its OK to be alone is great and all, but we pretty much know we’re not in the same boat as Schefft, much less the same body of water. Even the cover of the book makes us feel a little inferior with our own hairy legs and white-washed snow boots. Ending sentences with exclamation points (“I'm all alone ... and I love it!”) does nothing to address the true fear and loneliness that single women feel, especially as we start to get older. Sure it’d be great fun to be single if we had a ton of money, a ton of hot guys waiting to date us, and a sweet job that had us mingling all over the city.

We appreciate Jen’s effort to let us know that it’s OK to be single; we here at Chicagoist think most single people know that already. Hearing it from Schefft somehow makes us feel worse about being single, not better. And even though she should have been our feminist hero for not settling, we can't help but think that Jen Schefft just doesn’t get us at all.

You can see Jen Schefft on Tuesday, Feb. 13, at 7:00 p.m. at Anderson's Bookshop, 123 W. Jefferson, Naperville.