My friend M asked me recently, completely out of the blue, how I felt about marriage. Would I ever get married? Did I even believe in it? What's wrong with it today? I answered, somewhat unsatisfactorily, the best I could.
Interestingly, the very next day, I was getting caught up on the weekend's podcasts. The new episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge was called "After the Romance," and there were two interviewees who expressed some of the thoughts I had been trying, rather inelegantly, to get out. Disclaimer: I neither agree with everything these interviewees said, nor do they cover everything I was thinking; however, they're so much more articulate than me that I thought I would share a few choice quotations.
Psychologist, couples therapist, and author of Mating in Captivity Esther Perel, discussed the history of marriage, love, and desire (she's Belgian, so sometimes the sentence structure is a little strange, but she actually has a lovely accent; if you're interested I'd recommend listening to the audio of her interview). One segment of her interview explained in more detail my theory that it's unrealistic to expect to get everything you need in the world from a single person:
"Today we want the same person to give us security and adventure. 'I want to reconcile with you my needs for safety and security and stability and I want also to have with you mystery and transcendence and awe and novelty. I want you to bring me comfort and edge, excitement and familiarity.' It's a fantastic paradox that we are trying to manage. . . . We are asking today from one person to give us what once an entire village used to provide. We may not be more insecure today, but we definitely are bringing all our insecurity needs to one person.
And in our efforts to secure love, we often will trample the passion. If the verb that accompanies love is to have, the verb that accompanies desire is to want. Love doesn't want secrets; love wants to narrow the gap, to neutralize the threat, it wants closeness, but desire needs space to thrive. It likes the unknown, it likes the unexpected, it likes mystery.
If desire is fueled by the unknown, then faced with the unknown in our midst, we can have two primary responses: either I'm anxious [or] become curious. If I'm anxious, I'm going to close up, I'm going to create something that is fixed, reliable, and [doesn't] surprise me. And I'm going to complain of marital ennui and boredom. If I'm open, then I kind of am able to see you and to see the persistent mystery that is in my partner, and then I can actually play with this wonderful formula that passion is commensurate with the amount of uncertainty that we can tolerate.
. . . Desire needs a bridge to cross, a certain emotional distance that allows me to come and visit you. Sometimes people confuse intimacy with fusion, and there is not enough space anymore to go and visit or be visited by another person."
Later in the show, Anne Strainchamps interviewed Kate Bolick, author of a 2011 column in The Atlantic about the rise of the single woman called "All the Single Ladies." I read that article when it came out, but she says a few new things in this interview, specifically in terms of legitimating life for single people without simultaneously raining on the marriage parade, which really rang true.
". . . I kept thinking I would get married, it didn't occur to me that I wouldn't. I'd been in love before, I had had long-term relationships, it just--. It did surprise me in my early thirties that I hadn't done that yet, and then the big surprise was at thirty-five, realizing, oh, I'm not unmarried because something's wrong with me or because I'm making selfish decisions or I'm immature and can't settle down or because there are no men. I'm single at thirty-five because I haven't wanted to be married yet. And I've kept making that decision to not be married. I just have not had that desire. . . . I loved being alone in the world and accumulating many experiences.
. . . In the article, I never say that I'm actually against marriage, and I never say that I don't actually want to get married myself. What I am saying is that being single is a completely legitimate way to exist, and for me a very absorbing and interesting one. Once I made that realization, I was much happier inside of my life. And when I look back at the last fifteen, twenty years, I have been very satisfied with it.
The only thing that was making me unhappy was the idea that I should be doing something else that I wasn't doing.
If I've wanted anything to come out of this article, conversation, it's that I've wanted there to be a more positive conversation around what it means to be single. Single people aren't the lonely, pitiable souls that we have historically considered them to be. And my message is not 'stay single forever, down with marriage.' It's that, if you are single, there is so much potential in a life that's unfettered by another. Enjoy that time while you have it."
So, not that you asked, but those are some slightly more cogent (and one hundred percent borrowed) thoughts on the issue.
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