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She’s 39, single, and FINE, JUST FINE

John Podhoretz tweets, accurately: Let me save you thousands of words and summarize the Atlantic cover story: “I’m single and I’M FINE, JUST FINE!!!!” JPod gets to the emotional truth of the story, which is that a woman who believed in the “you can have it all” promises of feminism finds out that she was […]
John Podhoretz tweets, accurately:
Let me save you thousands of words and summarize the Atlantic cover story: “I’m single and I’M FINE, JUST FINE!!!!”
JPod gets to the emotional truth of the story, which is that a woman who believed in the “you can have it all” promises of feminism finds out that she was conned, and now looks forward to a lonely old age with fear and guilt. Having said that, I commend the story to your attention for the reasons I brought up in my post about it — especially the part about how economic and sociological changes have affected the way we see marriage today. And I doubleplus commend this delicious comment Erin Manning (who blogs here) made in the combox thread:

Wow. I just waded through all five pages of Bolick’s…er, baloney (censoring a really appropriate near-rhyming Anglo-Saxon word here because the body part it refers to would be just too preciously ironic, all things considered). It’s perfectly evident to the least-aware student of human nature why Bolick has never married: she’s so deeply and permanently in love with herself that there’s no room for a mere mortal man in her inner emotional life. I feel like I need to take a shower to wash off the sickly emotionalism of the piece.

Is it really economics, a sense of a decline in male earning power or status driving these sorts of decisions? Considering that Bolick describes partner after partner who were more or less her socioeconomic and educational equals (but who either wanted her to be sexually available without commitment, or who were desperate for committment when she found such an idea scary beyond belief) it wouldn’t really seem so. This isn’t a story of Bolick dating plumbers and electricians (and I hasten to say that maybe she should!) or men whose idea of highbrow entertainment involved professional wrestling. It’s really a story of narcissistic extrapolation in the extreme.

I sometimes want to tell the women of my generation (and Bolick is not quite four years younger than I am) that there’s really no mystery at all (and certainly not a pervasive shift in socioeconomic realities) to any of this; I can sum it up in a handful of principles, as follows:

1. Not every woman who wishes to get married will ever do so–but every woman who, deep down, fears and avoids marriage and commitment as an end to her priceless freedom and autonomy will either not marry or will not remain married for long.

2. Long-term cohabitation is not marriage, does not prepare you for marriage, and does not make you more marriageable even in the eyes of the man you are living with.

3. Accepting serial sexual relationships as a substitute for marriage is a game that comes to an abrupt end at some point in a woman’s life (somewhere between 45 and 60, probably, for most). After that, she will enjoy, mainly, the company of much-younger men if she is willing to pay for that company in some way or other–and whether the man is her “protege” or the pool-boy of fiction or something else entirely, he’s still a paid companion, with all that that implies. This has been true for men for centuries, of course, but somehow people still look at the sixty-year-old businessman with the hot blond twenty-something gold digging girlfriend or mistress quite differently from the way they look at the sixty-year-old professional woman with a boy toy; the sexism and unfairness of this can be railed against, of course, but the situation endures nonetheless.

4. Real love, the kind that makes the committment of marriage seem like a natural, joyful step, is grounded in sacrifice. A philosophy course I took long ago described love something like this: most people divide the world into Self and Others, but love changes that equation; the Other becomes Another (as in Another Self) and then the Beloved, and the Self seeks to live in service to that Beloved Other, while the Beloved Other also sees him or herself as the Self in service to the Beloved. The Church tends to describe this mystery similarly, in saying that marriage, and the act at the heart of marriage, is the total gift of self to other. The selfish Self can’t make a total gift of Self in service to a Beloved Other who is Another Self, of course, because the selfish wishes to hold back some intrinsic part of himself or herself.

5. The sort of love that leads inevitably and joyfully to marriage is a choice, an act of the will. It is not a groundswell of emotion set to violins and flooded with the artistic light of cameras as seen in romantic comedies. But that choice is not merely the “yes” spoken in answer to the proposal, or the choice to propose in the first place; it is an act of will that is renewed daily in little acts of loving and joyful sacrifice. Failing to understand that up front is a recipe for disaster.

I realize that Bolick is trying to say that women these days don’t want to marry because they’d have to settle for the man with the mere B.A. or no degree at all, etc. But I think that what’s really happening is that women these days don’t want to marry because they’ve bought the lie that the sacrifices involved in committed love are too constricting for self-respecting feminists. Sadly, by turning their backs on the sacrifices, they’ve pretty much made love–and marriage–impossible.

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