Deconfirmed Bachelor
This trope is that person in a story who not only isn't interested in getting married, but who will denounce it loudly and with caustic relish if anyone else should be so foolish as to say marriage isn't that bad in their presence. Expect them to condemn marriage as an action of the mentally unbalanced, to treat friends getting married as if they are going to their own funeral, and say things like 'Not me, I'll never let myself get ensnared by a woman, you mark my words!'
Of course the more definite they are, the more they are generally cementing their ultimate fate: to have the right woman come along and, be it through love at first sight, her feminine wiles, the plotting of all the confirmed bachelor's friends who would love to make him eat his words after all his lecturing or a combination of the above, the confirmed bachelor ends up tying the knot more or less of their own free will, and becoming a deconfirmed bachelor.
Live Action Film
- While he doesn't really have this attitude in the original play, Mortimer in the film of Arsenic and Old Lace is presented as being a railer against marriage, and consequently, takes pains to cover up his engagement, because he's embarrassed about being called out as a hypocrite.
- Bill Bellamy's character in spades if he's featured in any black romantic comedy. The Brothers, Love Jones, How to be a Player.
Literature
- Silk from The Belgariad has strong tendancies of this trope, especially in the Mallorean when he trades out his vaguely tragic Unrequited Love for Queen Porenn to catching the eye of wily up-and-coming Lady-Spy Liselle.
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Garion: "Is everybody getting married?" |
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- In The Tales of Beedle the Bard, friends of the warlock from "The Warlock's Hairy Heart" are convinced that he will eat his words about love when a nice girl catches his eye. They have no idea that he removed his own heart to prevent this from happening.
- Mat Cauthon in The Wheel of Time series. It was a prophecy and poor choice of words that got him married.
- Stephen Maturin in the Aubrey-Maturin series. As an odd, solitary physician over the age of thirty, no one expected him to get married. When he and his wife maintained separate residences, people actually thought it made a lot of sense.
Live Action TV
- Barney from How I Met Your Mother.
- Danny on CSI: NY
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Mac: "You know, it could happen to you." |
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- Of course, five seasons later, that all changed...
Mythology and Religion
- Older Than Feudalism: In Classical Mythology, Pygmalion generally disdained romance and sought to prove that he could make a statue more beautiful than any woman. Which he then fell in love with. The love-goddess Aphrodite, who generally tries to discourage that whole "celibacy" thing, brought the statue to life; Pygmalion named the new woman Galatea and married her. (He was lucky; if Aphrodite couldn't deconfirm a bachelor, like Theseus' son Hippolytus, she might arrange events to ensure the man's death.)
Theater
- Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing more or less embodies this trope. It's even lampshaded at the end.
- His love interest, Beatrice, is a rare female version of this trope.
- Guys and Dolls has Sky Masterson.
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Sky: "I suppose one of these days you'll be getting married." |
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- My Fair Lady has a man who embodies this trope in pretty much every way in Professor Henry Higgins, he even says out loud 'So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so.' the only hitch is that whether he actually does break down and end up in a relationship in the end. It's clear by the end of the movie he's grown quite fond of Eliza, and unlike the play, they even added a scene at the end where they reunite and, arguably reconcile, but even aside from the May December nature of any potential romance, he's treated her so badly for the whole movie, and even in this last little scene that it's questionable at best how they would ever work as a couple. At the least he learned to love a woman even if they didn't end up married.
- This was based on the play Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw, who added an afterword to the script railing against people who thought that the two main characters would even consider romantic entanglements with each other post-plot.
- In the musical Company, Robert ("Bobby") is a 35-year-old New York bachelor whose circle of non-romantic friends are all couples. In the song "Side By Side" he sings:
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Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open it up and look at all the crazy married people. |
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Real Life
- H.L. Mencken could be the poster child for this trope, until he fell madly in love with a chronically ill fellow writer.