Paul, who is 5’7” and starting to lose his hair, told me that when he was dating a shoe store sales clerk (they met when he was trying on loafers), his women friends complained that male lawyers don’t want to date their equals.
Paul says that’s not true. “I was dating her for two reasons: One, I genuinely liked her. And two, she would actually date me! Women say that their equals won’t date them, but they’re the ones who won’t date their equals. They think they’re so empowered or whatever but they just seem standoffish. And I don’t think they’re that happy.”
EMPOWERED OR ALONE?
Paul might be right. I grew up interpreting feminism to be about this idea of empowerment: We aren’t just supposed to be strong and independent—we’re also supposed to be happy about it. We’re supposed to focus on our own lives, and when a partner comes along, that’s gravy, not the main course. We can’t be happy in a relationship until we learn to be happy alone.
For many years, I went along with these notions, but deep down, I didn’t want to learn to be happy alone. No matter how full my life (career and good friends; later, delightful child, career and good friends) I always wanted to go through life with a partner. And while I wasn’t someone who tore out pictures of bridal dresses or dreamed of my wedding day in great detail, I took it for granted that it would happen. It never occurred to me that my life wouldn’t include the husband and the kids and the Little Tikes slide in the backyard. So I certainly wasn’t trying to be a “trailblazer” by having a kid on my own. I simply wanted to be a mother before it was too late.
But the mere fact that, at 40, I outed myself in the Atlantic article by saying that I craved a conventional family with a good enough guy put me in the category, in some people’s minds, of the kind of woman who wanted it too badly. According to some readers, I was nothing short of an affront to the entire women’s movement. Here’s what some said:
“Could you be any more desperate?”
“How sad that your son is not enough for you.”
“I am totally appalled by your need for a man.”
“You are positively tragic.”
“Get some self-esteem!”
“You have taken codependency to a whole new low.”
“I feel sorry for you that you had such an all-encompassing desire to reproduce. Now I feel sorry for you that have such an all-encompassing desire to be married.”
“Don’t you think you owe it to yourself to be a little more comfortable with yourself before you look for a mate?”
“Maybe if you change your outlook, and aren’t so needy, you might meet the right person.”
“If my daughter grows up to want a man half as much as you do, I will know that I’ve done something wrong in raising her.”
Somehow, post–Jane Austen, it’s become shameful for a woman to admit how lonely she is and how strongly she wants to be part of a traditional family. What kind of educated, sophisticated modern woman with an active social life has time to be lonely?
You’re lonely? Get a life! Get a promotion! Get a hobby! Get a haircut! You go, girl!
I remember seeing a group of women on a morning TV news show discussing the fact that they’d rather be alone than with Mr. Good Enough. Would they? Really? They’d rather be 40 years old and going to bars with a group of female friends who are all looking past them for Mr. Right to walk in the door? None of the women on the show was movie-star attractive, a fact that didn’t seem to shake their belief that they’d land Prince Charming. One even said she’d rather be alone because you never know when you might find true love—maybe you’d find it in the nursing home. The nursing home! Would she really like to be single until she’s 80? And even then, doesn’t she realize she’d have even more competition for the one single man (who probably has Alzheimer’s) in the entire retirement community than she has now?
My 29-year-old colleague Haley told me that while she’d like to go through life with a partner, she doesn’t want to have to change for anyone. But is that empowerment or inflexibility? Isn’t change integral to compromise and being in a mature relationship? Has “girl power” made us self-absorbed, poor partners?
It’s probably no accident that once women adopted this “I don’t need a man” attitude, many of us were left without men. In a 2007 Time magazine article entitled “Who Needs a Husband?” (um, me), Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker is quoted as saying that because women don’t have to rely on men for financial support anymore, “my friends are looking for a relationship as fulfilling, challenging, and fun as the one they have with their girlfriends.”
What an idiotic idea! No matter how much I enjoy my female friendships, I don’t want my marriage to be like the relationship I have with my girlfriends. I doubt very many of us would. Factor in your girlfriends’ emotional requirements and quirks and mood swings and imagine how “fulfilling, challenging, and fun” it would be to live with them 24/7 for the rest of your life. Your girlfriend may listen ad nauseam to the minutiae of your day, but is she really the person you want to raise kids and run a household with?
In that same Time article, one woman, a 32-year-old media producer, explains that she ended a seven-year relationship with her investment banker boyfriend because although she “totally adored him,” she felt like life with him would be “too limiting.” She wasn’t happy, she explained, because she didn’t think she could “retain her spirit.” Yet she “adored him” enough to stay with him for seven years. What’s going to happen to this woman ten years from now when she looks back on this decision?
She might want to listen to what a 49-year-old single woman said in the article: “There was a point where I had men coming out of my ears. I don’t think I was so nice to some of them. Every now and then I wonder if God is punishing me. Sometimes I look back and say, ‘I wish I had made a different decision there.’”
Another woman is quoted as saying that she can easily get her sexual needs taken care of without marriage. So what? In a Time/CNN poll cited in the article, 4 percent of women said what they wanted most from marriage was sex, while 75 percent said it was companionship. Can she get that need easily taken care of outside of marriage—on a daily basis, and for the rest of her life?
TEA FOR ONE
Whether we admit it or not, being single is often lonely, especially by the time we reach our mid-thirties and many of our friends are busy with families of their own. It’s not that women don’t feel complete without a man. It’s that if no man is an island, most women aren’t, either. How lonely it was, before I had my son, to wake up in an empty house every morning, eat breakfast alone, read the paper alone, do the dishes alone.
How tedious it was to do the post-date play-by-play each week, reassuring my friend that there’s nothing wrong with her, that the guy was lame, only to have her parrot back that same bland reassurance the next week, after my own dating escapade. How disappointing it was to waste my short time on this planet in a string of temporary encounters when I could be building a lifetime of shared experience with one committed person. How much longer could I spend my time analyzing phone or e-mail messages, wasting hours talking about a guy who would be out of the picture three days, three weeks, or three months later, only to be replaced by another, and another, and another?
How bleak it felt to move to a new apartment alone, to shop for groceries for only myself, to have nobody to talk to in those intimate moments before bed except for girlfriends on the phone, chatting about—what else?—men! It was so boring. If we ruled out guys because they were “too boring,” nothing could be as boring as the endless merry-go-round of single life.
Having a child in the