An Open Letter to the Future Mrs. Clooney: Congrats on Proving Princeton Mom Wrong
Dear Amal,

Well played, Ms. Alamuddin, well played. You are my new personal hero.

But not for the reason you might think. Sure, you’ve just landed the Moby Dick of celebrity bachelors, the elusive sparkle-eyed Clooney, 52, a man whose brief marriage (to Talia Balsam) and string of relationships with gorgeous women, many of them actresses or models, made him the talk of the tabloid town, a wild thing who could not be made to settle down. Like Matthew McConaughey, Clooney has always been one of a few celebrities who seem to be having a genuinely good time, confident in his own general awesomeness, pleased with his real estate in Lago Como, Italy, and sure of his status as America’s Silver Foxy-Foxalicious Boyfriend. He could have gone on like this indefinitely.

Instead, he decided to get engaged to you, a 36-year-old human rights lawyer who is an adviser to Kofi Annan and a scholar who has co-edited a book called “The Special Tribunal for Lebanon: Law and Practice.” Oh, and you’re fluent in French, Arabic and English, too.

Well, you’ll have to excuse me for getting sentimental for a minute here, but this news — your news, which has, admittedly, absolutely nothing to do with my own happily married life — made me proud. Proud because the engagement — his choice of this lovely, accomplished, 30-something, ambitious woman — is a vicarious triumph for all the single ladies out there, all the smart, accomplished, ambitious, single ladies who are a constant, convenient punching bag for pretty much every self-help book out there that’s eager to tell them how they’re doing it wrong, they’re putting their careers first, ruining their chances of finding a proper mate, ruining their chances of ever having children, should have gotten married at 23, just ruining everything, making a huge mess of it, very bad job, #FAIL.

You’re a direct, fantastic rebuke to everything “Princeton Mom” Susan Patton writes about in her book, “Marry Smart: Advice for Finding The One,” in which she counsels women to get plastic surgery in high school, “find a husband on campus before [they] graduate,” and not spend too much time focusing on their careers. On this particular point, Patton offers bleak words, a sort of Ghost of Christmas Future for any ambitious woman over 30: “You’ve been so invested in your professional super-stardom that you took your eye off the ball. You have no husband and no children, but the ship has already sailed! It’s too late. You don’t get to have everything.”

Unless, that is, YOU WANT TO MARRY GEORGE CLOONEY.

BOOM, Susan Patton!

BOOM, ridiculous conservative Phyllis Schlafly, who recently insisted that paying women the same as men would hurt the women’s chances of finding a mate!

I guess, Amal, that you didn’t see the memo about men not liking smart women. Oh, you didn’t see that? It’s the one that gets reinforced just about every other day in pop culture, encouraging women to dumb it down from the time they’re adolescents, in the hopes that staying perky, dim and silent will make him — any him — love you.

As the Clooney/Alamuddin nuptials near, the inevitable articles will appear, talking about the “fairy tale ending” of this glittery union, surely a dream come true for a non-famous, hard-working London woman.
The best part is, it will be horses - - t. I look at your accomplishments and I see a life that’s already full. Will marriage add a new, wonderful dimension to it? Yes, absolutely. But it won’t fill a void that doesn’t exist.
“London Human Rights Lawyer Amal Alamuddin Is Engaged,” read a hilarious Slate.com headline that went on to detail your many impressive accomplishments. “Her husband-to-be is an American actor and director who played ‘Kip Howard’ on the television mystery program ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ ” read the witty kicker.

There’s no greater aphrodisiac than a happy woman with a full life, who is passionate about something besides getting a ring on her finger. Just ask George Clooney.