Walt Disney Shows Us the Right Time to Start Spouse Hunting

Mr. Walt Disney is something of a personal hero of mine (so much so that I’ve actually written a book about his films—find it here). He was far from perfect, as we all are, but his virtues and accomplishments are of the kind that I particularly admire. Here is a man who set out from home with a suitcase and a stack of drawings in the hopes of becoming a newspaper cartoonist. His father said this was stupid and that he needed to find a real job if he ever wanted to start a family. But, through a combination of great good luck and non-stop hard work, that hungry young artist rose to become one of the most illustrious names in entertainment.

Fascinating, but this is CatholicMatch, not Catholic Biographies of Rich and Famous Episcopalians—what does Walt Disney’s life have to do with dating? Well, I’d like to use him as an illustration of an important principle, not just for dating, but also for life in general.

It is this; you are never going to be ready.

All too often, we put off doing something we really want to do because we feel like the rest of our life is too hectic or too unsettled to allow for it. The trouble is, though, that most likely our lives are never going to be settled, at least not to our satisfaction. Rather than spending years trying to stabilize our situation, we ought to just go after whatever is important to us and deal with any problems as they come.

Mr. Disney's key to happiness

Mr. Disney did this when he left what seemed to be a safe, steady job working for his father in Chicago to try his luck at a horrendously uncertain profession (namely animation): a job that it took over a decade and several failed companies for him to turn into a reliable income.

Not only did Mr. Disney live on this unreliable, unsteady job, but he fell in love, married, and started a family on it. This was at a time when his income was dependent upon crude cartoon shorts, and his whole livelihood could be yanked out from under him at a moment’s notice if things went wrong (which happened more than once). He didn’t achieve anything like financial security until his early thirties...and then he gambled it all on Snow White.

Had Mr. Disney waited until he was financially secure with the time to dedicate to romance, he probably would never have married. For most of his life, his own and his company’s finances were in a very precarious state, and he was constantly working himself to near exhaustion. But he made the time to court and marry his wife, and he made the time to be with his children. For most of his career, in spite of his tremendous workload, he managed to come home for dinner almost every night, drive his girls to school every morning, and set aside at least one whole day a week to spend with his family.

In his family as with his films, Mr. Disney saw what he wanted and made the effort necessary to get it, even if it was a risk, even if it seemed impractical or imprudent. He didn’t wait around until he was ‘secure;’ he made himself secure by constantly going after what he wanted.

You're asking the wrong question

The question we should be asking ourselves is not whether we have the time or the money or the security to be dating, or anything else. The question we should be asking is “how important is this to me?” If it’s important enough, you will find the time for it.

If finding a spouse, falling in love, marrying, and raising a family is important to you, then you should go for it. Today. Right now. It doesn’t matter if you have no money, a brutalizing job, and are living on Ramen noodles—if you think marriage and family are important goals in your life, start working to make them a reality.

Because life is never secure. True, there are times that are more or less stable than others, but it will never seem quite set; there will always be something that needs to be done, or a crisis that needs to be dealt with. You will never feel like you’ve quite got all your ducks in a row, or all your bases covered, or all your clichés applied.

In science, the more we learn, the more we discover there is to learn. In life, the more we do the more we find there is to be done. It never ends.

Yes, you CAN have it all

We have two choices: we can either struggle to get everything exactly right, while we watch our lives slowly slipping by, or we can make the time to go after what we really want and to attend to what is really important and run the risk that maybe things won’t be perfect.

If you choose the former, know that such things are never as stable as they claim to be. That ‘safe, steady job’ the young Walt Disney abandoned to pursue his dreams? The company folded only a few years later. We can never achieve true security in this life, but we can find love and meaning...or we can find that we’ve sold the things we truly wanted for something that was never worth much to begin with.

Don’t forget the ending of Mary Poppins, where Mr. Banks discovers he’s been squandering his time with his children for the sake of a job that he’s now about to lose anyway.

As C.S. Lewis pointed out in his essay Learning in War-Time, the men who achieve are those who work in spite of the pressures, dangers, and alarms of the world around them (he himself wrote some of his best work during the war and its immediate aftermath, when the survival of his nation was very much in doubt). Those who wait for the time to be right or their lives to be settled never achieve anything.

On the other hand, if we choose to make the time to pursue the things we really want, whether falling in love and starting a family or anything else, then we will at least be secure against one danger: regret. We will need never fear that we might wake up one day to find that it’s too late and the chance to do the things we really wanted has passed us by.

So don’t wait either to pursue either your dreams or your dream girl. There will never be a better time to begin.