Hey, how do we meet new people?
People who we would want to date, specifically.
We’re usually too concerned with learning and trying to stay awake in class to meet anyone there, and we try to avoid people at the gym because no one wants to be bothered when they’re wearing sweaty workout clothes.
We meet people at our workplaces, but that’s mostly because we see them every day, so it would behoove us to make nice with them.
It must be nice to be Tom Cruise, because the Church of Scientology will audition multiple women for your perusal.
Recent reports say that in 2004, women were brought through Cruise’s camp to see if they were marriage material.
One of those women was actress Nazanin Boniadi.
An article from Vanity Fair tells us: “Initially she was told only that she had been selected for a very important mission. In a month-long preparation in October 2004, she was audited every day, a process in which she told a high-ranking Scientology official her innermost secrets and every detail of her sex life. Boniadi allegedly was told to lose her braces, her red highlights and her boyfriend.”
Though the couple dated from November 2004 to January 2005, she was not found adequate enough to wed.
The magazine says Boniadi broke down after their relationship fell apart. When a friend “asked why she was crying all the time,” Boniadi broke down and told her about her relationship with Cruise, which she had been forbidden to do. According to the source, the friend reported her. Boniadi’s punishment was to scrub toilets with a toothbrush, clean bathroom tiles with acid and dig ditches in the middle of the night.”
Obviously the church denied any involvement.
A Scientology spokesperson said that the church “does not punish people, especially in [that] manner.”
But Paul Haggis, a longtime friend of Boniadi, confirmed that the rumors were true. “I would like to say that I don’t know how its members, many of them good and intelligent people, can remain so purposely blind when they are faced with evidence like this every day, but then I am no one to talk,” Haggis told Showbiz411, a gossip website. “I was happily blind for many years, so I know the shame that Naz feels.”
What kind of a world do we live in where celebrities follow the leaders and teachings of that treat people like this?
More important, why should we care what actors and actresses do with their spare time?
Because there may be cultures out there that approach dating differently than we do.
Because when role models are auditioning women to play the part of “Wife No. 3,” maybe we should take offense that women are simply fulfilling a placeholder ideal.
Because if the standards Hollywood couples hold themselves to, and expect us to follow, are not based on real feelings, then the rest of us don’t stand much of a chance until we realize that we are not the crazy and privileged. We have to actually work at this stuff.
