The Marriage Mile Marker
Over at Bitch Magazine, Andi Zeisler takes to task an Atlantic Monthly article that suggests that women should just marry whoever is nearby while they still have the chance.
It’s entirely too late on a Friday afternoon to get all riled up about this article, but shit, it really went there. In a nutshell: Lori Gottlieb believes that women should settle for men they don’t really want to marry, because being married is better than not being married. The Atlantic Monthly, meanwhile, believes that this kind of crap is something that people actually want to read. Both of these things are, inherently, problematic.
Let’s start with Gottlieb. A 40-ish woman who opted for single motherhood because she hadn’t – oy, here comes the cliché – “met Mr. Right,” Gottlieb now believes that women like her former self are far too picky, and need to just marry someone – anyone – because the alternative is, you know, being alone. So what if you’ll eventually want to smother him with a pillow because you can’t stand the sound of his very breath? At least you’ll be married in the meantime, right? Here she goes:
To the outside world, of course, we still call ourselves feminists and insist—vehemently, even—that we’re independent and self-sufficient and don’t believe in any of that damsel-in-distress stuff, but in reality, we aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want a traditional family. And despite growing up in an era when the centuries-old mantra to get married young was finally (and, it seemed, refreshingly) replaced by encouragement to postpone that milestone in pursuit of high ideals (education! career! but also true love!), every woman I know—no matter how successful and ambitious, how financially and emotionally secure—feels panic, occasionally coupled with desperation, if she hits 30 and finds herself unmarried.Oh, I know—I’m guessing there are single 30-year-old women reading this right now who will be writing letters to the editor to say that the women I know aren’t widely representative, that I’ve been co-opted by the cult of the feminist backlash, and basically, that I have no idea what I’m talking about. And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried, either you’re in denial or you’re lying. In fact, take a good look in the mirror and try to convince yourself that you’re not worried, because you’ll see how silly your face looks when you’re being disingenuous.
Well, that’s a healthy bucket of presumption and condescension with a bullshit kicker. Zeisler swiftly punches holes in Gottlieb’s “all women are the same and desperate” argument- including the fact that she uses the characters of Rachel from Friends and Carrie from Sex and the City as cautionary tales to not hold out too long. In case you weren’t aware, those are hard hitting sociological documentaries.
I can’t say that I’m really surprised by anything that Gottlieb has said in her article. It’s a case that has been argued before. What I have been surprised by recently is the number of male friends that have professed their own Marriage Mile Markers.
The Marriage Mile Marker is, like Gottlieb suggests, an age at which you start to get all panicky if you aren’t married (or at least close to it). I’ve had no less than five platonic male friends tell me within the last year that they plan to be married by the age of (blank). They are mostly in their mid to late twenties, not currently in relationships and the blank is usually filled with a number in the low thirties.
“What are you going to do if you aren’t dating someone you want to marry when you’re thirty-one?” I asked one of these men.
He stared at me blankly for a few seconds and responded, “Oh, I will be.”
I am all for making long (or short) term goals like buying a house, getting a new job or finally traveling to Costa Rica. The Marriage Mile Marker leaves me a little uneasy because it’s like holding an audition without the other person knowing there’s a play going on. As these people- men or women- get closer to their goal age, the more hurried they get in their dating process. The idea of marriage becomes less a decided step in a mature relationship and more a dash towards the finish line.
I’m not against the idea of marriage if both people involved are on the same page on the subject. But the persistence of the Marriage Mile Marker suggests that the runners have some kind of expectation pinned to marriage (security, life affirming love, etc.) that is based less on reality and more on concept.
Tags: Bitch, Atlantic Monthly, Lori Gottlieb
February 12, 2008 at 8:06 am
If one’s life plan always included marriage, I can understand getting panicky about not being married at a certain age, just like I can understand getting panicky about not making manager, not having written the great American novel, not performing at Carnegie hall, not having visited Europe, etc., at a certain age.
That being said, I can never imagine anyone writing this:
February 12, 2008 at 9:44 am
I can understand it in theory but I think a marriage goal is different than those other goals because it so intimately involves another person. It would be like saying at twenty-two that you want to have twelve really close friends by the time you’re thirty. Is it possible? Sure- but that friend “gathering” process is going to become a little forced with that restriction hanging overhead.
That reworded example is hilarious.
February 12, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Oh. My. God. I just read that entire article, and it is much, much worse and more nausea/rage inducing than that snippet would have you believe. I just want to share some choice quotes and my comments here:
(After a discussion of a boring marriage being better than being single.)Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband.
Now, it’s been a while since I read that book. But if I remember correctly, (I do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Bovary) Madame Bovary was so miserable in her marriage that she had a few affairs, ended up getting herself horribly indebted to a blackmailer, more or less bankrupting her husband, and eventually kills herself in despair. So, no, I doubt that she could have been more depressed, even in a time when all of society viewed a woman as a failure if she wasn’t married. And it was just a tad unfair to her husband to be put through all that. Which, I believe, gets to your point, Brandy.
The couples my friend and I saw at the park that summer were enviable but not because they seemed so in love—they were enviable because the husbands played with the kids for 20 minutes so their wives could eat lunch. In practice, my married friends with kids don’t spend that much time with their husbands anyway (between work and child care), and in many cases, their biggest complaint seems to be that they never see each other. So if you rarely see your husband—but he’s a decent guy who takes out the trash and sets up the baby gear, and he provides a second income that allows you to spend time with your child instead of working 60 hours a week to support a family on your own—how much does it matter whether the guy you marry is The One?
If this is your main concern, might I suggest looking into non-traditional arrangements? For instance, I had friends in grad school who lived at a discounted rent with a family and would perform housework and certain child care duties in return. This brought in another source of income for the family, albeit a small one, and someone who would play with the kids for 20 minutes or take out the trash. I also know a family friend whose daughter became pregnant sooner than planned and ended up moving in with another friend in a similar situation so that they could share childcare duties and household expenses. The great advantage to these arrangements is that if one or both people don’t feel it’s working out you can end the arrangement without a lengthy court process, custody disputes, and broken hearts and depression.
And while I have a much higher tolerance for settling than I did back then, now I have my son to consider. It’s one thing to settle for a subpar mate; it’s quite another to settle for a subpar father figure for my child. So while there’s more incentive to settle now, there’s less willingness to settle too much, because that would be a disservice to my son.
Wait, but if the point is to marry and have kids, aren’t you doing a disservice to your future kids when you settle anyway? For instance, I can’t imagine that Berthe, Madame Bovary’s daughter, had what I would call a healthy, emotionally stable childhood.
Then there’s my friend Chris, a single 35-year-old marketing consultant who for three years dated someone he calls “the perfect woman”—a kind and beautiful surgeon. She broke off the relationship several times because, she told him with regret, she didn’t think she wanted to spend her life with him. Each time, Chris would persuade her to reconsider, until finally she called it off for good, saying that she just couldn’t marry somebody she wasn’t in love with. Chris was devastated, but now that his ex-girlfriend has reached 35, he’s suddenly hopeful about their future.
“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.”
Your friend Chris is an asshole.
February 12, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I’m not sure why, but the Atlantic seems to have a knack for hiring writers (Gottlieb, Caitlin Flanagan, Meagan McArdle) who possess the singular skill of standing in front of a mirror and consistently mistaking the image for every woman in America.
February 12, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Maybe their submissions guidelines include “exaggerated sense of self worth”.
February 14, 2008 at 6:05 am
“By the time she turns 37,” Chris said confidently, “she’ll come back. And I’ll bet she’ll marry me then. I know she wants to have kids.”
Your friend Chris is an asshole.
That cracked me up. I’m glad I didn’t read the whole article. The mentality behind that article and the Marriage Mile Marker phenomenon is unhealthy for the person who thinks like that but also the poor person they are going to inflict it on. I’m kind of touchy on this subject, though, since I seem to attract the male version of this writer.