But were we?
Here’s what actually happened: Empowerment somehow became synonymous with having impossible standards and disregarding the fact that in real life, you can’t get everything you want, when you want it, on your terms only. Which is exactly how many of us empowered ourselves out of a good mate.
I HAD IT ALL—AT 23
According to the most recent Census Bureau report, one-third of men and one-fourth of women between 30 and 34 have never been married. These numbers are four times higher than they were in 1970. At first, this might look like a positive trend—people are more mature at the age of marriage now. But many single women I talked to feel differently. It may seem liberating to look for love when it’s expected that we’ll date a lot of people (and have a lot of choices) before we find The One, but dating all these people ends up being exhausting and painful, not to mention confusing. The cultural pressure to marry later (but not too late!) often hurts us more than it helps us.
Jessica, a 29-year-old communications director for a museum, told me about the night, six years ago, when her college boyfriend, Dave, proposed to her. They were both almost 23 and living in Chicago. He was in medical school. She was applying for her first job. They’d been together for four years, and she was very much in love with Dave, but Jessica turned him down for one reason and one reason only: She thought she was too young to get married.
“I thought, what kind of independent woman gets married before she even has her first job? So I told him I had to grow on my own, and I worried that if we got married so young, I wouldn’t be able to do that. I also thought I shouldn’t marry the first serious boyfriend I ever had. I thought I should have other experiences with men.”
After their breakup, Dave was heartbroken and asked that they have no contact, and Jessica started doing everything she felt she needed to do to “grow as a person.” She moved to a new city, met new people, focused on her work, and went on lots of dates. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Dave.
Over the next two years, she often considered calling him up and telling him what a huge mistake she’d made, but her friends, who were also living the so-called empowered single girl life, would talk her out of it.
“Every time I considered calling him,” she said, “my friends made me doubt myself. ‘What, you’re going to settle down at twenty-four? What about your life?’ I started to wonder, is this life so wonderful? I liked my work, I liked my friends, and I hated dating. I had a couple of boyfriends that I got excited about at first, but I didn’t ultimately feel the way about them that I had about Dave. I didn’t have that comfort level. They didn’t ‘get me’ the way he did. Either I wasn’t into them or they weren’t into me, and I kept thinking, what am I looking for when I already found the guy I want to spend my life with?”
Secretly, Jessica would Google Dave at night, but she didn’t find much information, other than that he was still in medical school.
“I’d sit there on the computer at night, like a junkie, and I’d be thinking, this is pathetic,” she said. “This isn’t the exciting life I was supposed to be having as an empowered single woman in the big city! Dating other people and having more life experience didn’t enrich my life in any substantial way. I loved my work, but I could have gotten a similar job in Chicago. Instead of ordering takeout for myself or going out to dinner with a group of single friends, I wanted to make Dave dinner when he was on call.” But she hid all these feelings because she was embarrassed by them.
Finally, three years after Dave’s proposal, Jessica found his number through the medical school switchboard and got up the nerve to call him. Her heart was pounding when she heard his voice.
“The second he answered,” she said, “it felt like home again. I almost cried.” But then, as she told him why she called, Dave went silent. Now it was Jessica’s turn to have her heart broken. Dave had spent more than two years trying to get over Jessica, and finally, about eight months before, he’d met someone new. They were dating exclusively. She was a year older than Dave—a 27-year-old resident at the hospital—and was looking to meet the man she would marry.
Dave is now married to this woman and both are pediatricians. Jessica learned through a mutual college friend that they recently had a son.
Jessica’s voice cracked as she spoke. “I gave him up because it was drilled into me that first you establish your own life, then you share it with someone else. That first you go out and pursue your dreams. Well, here I am, still dreaming I’ll meet someone as great as Dave.”
I could relate to Jessica’s story. I also grew up believing that my early twenties were a time to experiment with different careers and different men and then suddenly, according my time table, The Guy would arrive on my doorstep. I didn’t even consider looking for a spouse in any serious way in my early or mid-twenties—when I was, in fact, most desirable in the dating pool. The goal was to go out and become “self-actualized” before marriage. I didn’t imagine that one day I’d be self-actualized but regretful.
Nor did Jessica. “I thought the message was, ‘You can have it all—but not at twenty-three,’ “ she said. “But now that I’m twenty-nine and I’m supposed to have it all, I don’t. I had it at twenty-three! The problem is that people judge you if you marry too early, but then if you end up single at thirty or thirty-five, they judge you for not being married.”
She was right: There’s a stigma for not waiting long enough, and there’s a stigma for waiting too long. People may have called me “brave” for having a baby on my own when my biological clock was ticking, but it was always said in the way you might call a cancer patient “brave.” I knew all too well that many people considered me a mildly tragic figure, if not a cautionary tale. For some, I was their biggest nightmare. They may not want to be tied to any old-fashioned rules, but they also want a traditional family. The women I spoke to in their late twenties and thirties seemed baffled by the way the feminist messages they grew up with don’t necessarily reflect what they might want personally. What they’re supposed to want and what they actually want seem at odds.
And that’s how a lot of us get screwed.
NO-STRINGS-ATTACHED DATING
Brooke is a 26-year-old in Boston who’s getting a graduate degree in women’s studies. I told her that I’m all for empowerment—sexual or otherwise—but I was surprised after a lot of young women told me that if you don’t get physically intimate with a guy by the third or fourth date, he’ll think you’re not interested and move on. Since when, I wanted to know, does not being physically intimate with someone you’ve known a total of, say, eight hours, indicate lack of interest?
More important, I wanted to know what’s in it for women, who often get emotionally attached to the men they sleep with, or who for the most part find casual sex unfulfilling. What’s so empowering about a sexual free-for-all?
Brooke sighed like I was an old fuddy-duddy. “It gives us the same choices men have,” she explained matter-of-factly.
“Okay,” I said. “But is casual sex what you want?”
“No,” she admitted. “But I’d want any woman who had that desire to have the freedom to pursue it.”
Meanwhile, Brooke has been living with her boyfriend for two years and confessed that she’s been wondering whether to move out when she turns 27 next month. “I’m ready for a serious relationship,” she said.
I wondered what she meant by a serious relationship. Wasn’t living together pretty serious?
“Everyone’s living together,” she replied. “It’s no big deal.” Indeed, thanks to the “freedom” we now have, half of women 25 to 29 have lived with a guy. What do marriage-minded women get out of spending their most desirable